City Council - Regular Meeting

We have a lot of athletes training here, which is amazing. The infrastructure has to catch up because the frequency is outpacing, no pun intended, the infrastructure that's in place. The growth is faster pace than the political initiatives. That came out when we did this meeting a year ago, when we kicked this off. I would say just in the things I've seen with the comprehensive plan coming up and the efforts of the city council and the mayor and city manager and staff, and Parks and Rec, I can tell you I'm pretty confident it's on people's radar now. Political pivots and leadership changes. I wanted to make a statement on that one that this is very common. Whenever we go into a city, you have term limits, you have leadership limits, and some of these initiatives are multi-year, three years five years 10 years 20 years you have different team teammates and team players coming in and out so that's that's fairly normal uh the question is how do you leverage that and be and be intentional uh as as we change and then the county collaboration and logistics to promote claremont uh the county is handling obviously different cities so there's a lot of opportunity there with its strength but also to making sure that claremont remains the diamond and So those were a synopsis of the consistent messaging that we heard. Our overarching goal is to maximize quality of place, quality of life and economic impact to attract and retain talent. So we wanna make sure we keep the young up and comers here. We wanna make sure that as businesses grow and that as Claremont grows and you're looking at the comprehensive plan of university expansion, economic workforce attraction, you want to make sure that you're attracting, you're doing initiatives that are quality of place driven so that people want to move here, they want to stay here, and it's the right demographic and right talent pool that you're looking for. So we looked at three areas. Vision, which is identifying reimagined potential of your top assets in a nutshell without reading every one of those words. That means we are looking at the top three things that you have already in place that with some modifications and tweaking can really take you to the next level. Activation. We're following the people and we're following the money. Where are they going? When are they going? How are they going? Why are they going? And what does that mean for you? And does it align authentically with your ethos? There's that word again, right? And then parks and rec. Your parks and rec, I'll just say right now, is one of your most valuable tools. How do we quantify that? How do we make sure we can all communicate that? And what are some things now based on your inventory versus what you could potentially expand into that will really make a difference and elevate the city of Claremont? So really, with all those words, we're maximizing healthy connectivity. We're leveraging the ethos, the original culture of the city of Claremont as it's evolving, making sure that we're activating sports and gatherings in the right way, mobility and access, how do the people get around in a healthy way, and parks and rec. All right, we're gonna start with movement and gathering. So these are broken into different categories. These are your sports events, your existing sports, and festivals, and the potential of what you have. So you can see right now, obviously, baseball, softball, triathlon, track and field, wakeboard, water sports. You have a gigantic motocross contingency here. I don't know if you knew this, Ken Rockson, He just won the national championship, actually world championship in Supercross. One of the, probably in my opinion, if you haven't looked that up, you should. One of the best stories of resilience. He almost had his arm amputated and came back and amazing guy. So rowing and you also have a big, BMX contingency here. So Jaime, who's, I don't know if he's in the room, is one of the coaches and brings in foreign Olympians, but they can't train here because they're not a track. So they go somewhere else, but they live here. So again, it goes back to the relevance of what you have. Without going into too much detail on this, unless you need to, I want you to look at the chart in the beginning, that big square. And what we did was we plotted out every month of the year in 2025. We pulled the data from sports and tourism to see how many people showed up for what event, whether it was a festival or sport, and we ranked those. Then we took a look at what was the temperature and what was your weather like. So as you can see, as where we are right now, May, June, July, and that red line above, as your temperature rises, your events go down. So you are heavy in spring, fall, and in summer months, you kind of drop. Event-specific impact. So if you're not familiar with economic impact in the sports tourism world, they take your visitors, they can take a look at where they travel. The data we use, you're going to hear me use a term called AI placer. We do gigantic events and every city, we have to do a report to that city of how many people came, where did they come from? It's pretty amazing what the technology can do. So they can track income. They can't track specific names, but on the information on your phone, which is scary, they can track the economic impact of all the people who visited. How much did they spend in that amount of time? The other thing that we take a look at too, and this is something that I think would be great for you to dive into. A lot of times in a sports world, a city will say, okay, Shane, your cycling event was Friday through Sunday. And that's when we're looking at how many people are here. And I always challenge that. And I said, well, most of them arrived on Tuesday because they were warming up and practicing and some stayed. So I think your numbers are bigger than this. I can't prove it. So this is coming straight out of sports tourism. We took a look at the got some information from the National Training Center. So that team teams are in here. Thank you so much. That really helps. And then we took a look at arts and the arts and rec center, which had a huge amount of influx local. So lower spending, but bigger volume. So what you see on events, and I'll kind of go through them real quick, you have National Training Center, soccer, fast pitch, the weekends at the winery, big number there, triathlon, swimming, water polo, track and field, and that list goes on. Here's where it gets interesting. If you take a look at your top locations of where those activations happen, National Training Center, I think we probably all guessed that, right? Because it's built that way. 65,000 attendees. Waterfront Park. So economic impact, $7 million. Second highest in national training facility. And the attendees, and this attendee number is going to be different than the park attendee number you're going to see later because this is tied specifically to events. I'm gonna show a second metric for parks, Waterfront Park, and it's gonna be how many people visited, including events and just recreation. So all in all, you have Arts and Rec Center right after that, 193,000 visitors last year, Hancock Park, 30,000, Lake Ridge Winery, 39,000, Legends Way Ball Field, 8,000, and Lake Louisa, 2,000. And as you look at that, you can start seeing where certain locations drive a lot of activation, uh certain locations have low activation but high spend rate because of people being attractive have higher incomes so there's a lot of different ways you can manipulate this and take a look at this as you are looking at specific metrics and strategies moving forward one of the things that you also have the potential of are new festivals So these are aligned with your ethos. Water, action sports, cycling. It's all right here. So right off the bat, just in the world that I live in, I know Iowa has the RAGBRAI Festival, which is border to border. Huge festival. Guess what? You're right in the middle of Florida. You are the perfect location. I think you should brand it. I think you should buy the copyright to be the mile in the middle. Get creative. Arkansas, Bentonville. If you're familiar with mountain biking, they are called the mountain bike capital of the world. They trademarked that. That was a strategic marketing initiative. So you have something here that you can leverage. So you are naturally aligned for festivals. These are great, in my opinion, because you're not having to do big campaigns to build foundations and infrastructure and sewers.

These are things that are plug and play.

So that's something for you to consider. My world, this is a case study in Tulsa. We have the BMX headquarters there and the Grand Nationals. BMX in Oklahoma contributed half a billion dollars since the 80s into that state and economic impact. And just in the last four years, you can kind of see three to four years, we're at roughly $60,000 just with events. We have three USA national championships qualifiers. We have 1,245 athletes from around the world coming in to train. And again, I'm going to say this. I live there. I can say this. It's Tulsa. You guys are Claremont, Florida next to Orlando. So just process this. 5,300 new youth riders on bicycles out of schools. These aren't even racers. These are kids getting on bikes. We have a RISE program, resiliency, inclusion, social awareness, and education to serve underserved youth. Tulsa was the site of the largest race massacre against the black community, and this program is based out of there, and it is going very well. 20 regional schools, 130 community events because it's multipurpose, and STEM education. This was interesting. This is out of South Carolina. I put this case study up for you so you could see it. This was their world championship in 2024. That highlighted number, that's a $43 million economic impact. That was for nine days. So again, you're naturally aligned for things like this. Um, also too, with your foundations and your, your sports, one of the things I've found is that the foundations within the sport really can drive a sponsorship dollars. So as for all of these who are looking at sports, baseball, soccer, uh, everything else, uh, don't forget the foundation corporations are more likely in my opinion, for what I've seen to give, to get kids on bikes and get them learning and off their screens and outside, uh, they love racing. They love cycling, but most of the time I'm seeing higher, higher commitment letters or commitment numbers to the foundation so at as i finalize every little pocket you're going to see four boards up here which kind of are highlights of everything i said so this board board number one kind of reiterates and repeats some of that so you guys can take a look at this we're going to leave those here so you can soak those in Okay, onto the second area, healthy connectivity. So this is creating safe and accessible trail network for all. And I use the word for all, really important. Love cycling, it's not just about cycling, it's about pedestrians, it's about, talk about mobility golf carts, right? A lot of this, I think with the way things are going, especially electricity, mobility, We have to be thinking bigger. Case studies, a picture of New York, a picture of Copenhagen, of cities that obviously they've been doing a long time, but that infrastructure of separating cycling pedestrians from automobile traffic and using buffers, whether that's landscape or hard barriers as concrete, are huge opportunities. One of the things that you will see is here in the middle is the slide, and there's a bigger version of that. Right now, I think Claremont is very fortunate because you have two arteries that essentially divide the city into a quadrant. You have Hancock Road and the potential of what that could be. The South Lake Trail, which is already awesome. the potential to really kind of ramp that up and make that a big experience for the mile in the middle for Claremont. But Hancock Road being a huge opportunity of what can happen as you dive into that. When we took a look at the trails, there's different compartments. I won't get into acronyms. You've got NACTO, you've got AASHTO, these are national standards, engineers, civil engineers look at planning, bike lanes, traffic, and what that means. And again, we're talking about, this is something to keep an open mind about. A triathlete is very different than a three-year-old. So when we talk about safe trails, even though I deal with a lot of Olympians, I'm always asking myself when I send one of my kids to the grocery store on this trail. So as you see, you might have a bike lane, but if the bike lane is next to 50 mile an hour traffic, that it's a bike lane, but it's not a safe bike lane, right? So I'm going to have Chad come up and talk a little bit about some of the nerdy stuff in terms of the metrics, and I told them to keep it within five minutes. There's 140 pages of analysis if you want to dive into it. Before Chad starts, you can see the quadrants we're talking about. Those thick blue lines are South Lake Trail and Hancock Road. As we look at parks where those end and where those terminate depending on which direction you're going We really see wellness way down in the south as a huge opportunity gigantic opportunity for a future park and as a destination place We see up north by Sugarloaf Mountain roughly in that area another area for a park that could be used there and the yellow the yellow square or rectangles are the areas that are already highly activated based on the, the discussion we had before downtown Claremont, obviously in the, the Southlake trail and waterfront park being one of them. And then there are circles there because we can't forget the schools. So Chad's going to talk about two things, Hancock road, and why we focus on that. And then we're going to talk about the schools and why those are important now, but they're also important later as you finish the comprehensive plan and go backwards and try to pull this in. So, all right, Chad. Don't make him sleep.

Thank you for that, Shane. Big lead up. Let's see, what are we talking about here first? Highway standards. So, I don't know if Shane told you, like, AASHTO, it stands for American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, and NACTO is National Association of Community and Transportation Officials. They're different in the way they look at things, but they're complementary with one another because... They're both looking for safety for transportation, an intermixture of cycles, pedestrians, and cars. Let me see, I've got the thing right here. What we've done is looked at things in the perspective of engineering, but also how does that affect the safety of the users. And what Shane was saying, if you look at the, this is all in the appendix in the data, so you can just look at this. It breaks it down into what the commonalities are, what the differences are, and how those are impacted and how you apply them. This is another component we looked at when we did some grading on this, on the entire length of Hancock Road. This is LTS, and this is a function of AASHTO, and what it does is it gives you parameters to look at based on, I don't know if you can see that, desired width of lanes, constrained width so like minimums maximums and then you get to an area where the blue is what they consider to be a positive area the purple is a good area and then red that's where you don't want to live and so what we did was we created a formula and i don't know if it shows that or not but it gets into the grading of things and how we've done a blend between ashto nacto and lts come up the grading system that becomes a weighted average across all elements along Hancock Road. One of the parts that we need to look at is how are the lanes designed? If you look from left to right, you have A, which would be a full shared lane where bikes and cars are living as one, and that's probably your most dangerous condition. B would be a shared pathway, but it's divided by a painted line. C which is a conventional bike lane, but it's more clearly isolated. And then you have a condition on D what it's a buffered bike lane where you have cars, an actual divided section that's clearly marked for bicycles to drive on and then you have a park condition. And then the most extreme case would be probably more your urban conditions, where you have a full automotive lane, bollards, and then an isolated bike lane, which is probably your most safe condition. And then AASHTO goes into looking at how does this impact the way you design a, this would be like the one on the left is more of an urban condition where you have high levels of traffic, you have cross intersections where traffic's crossing one another, and that's giving you the parameters which you design by with what they call it boxed isolation or box cross traffic. And then the conditions down below on the left hand side of what we just talked about with clearly defined parking areas, bike paths and where the cars excuse me where the cars can go. And then it just kind of goes down a level of severity where you get into minor minor sections and then it's basically a driveways or alleys where the level of traffic is lower. Let's see, here's what we used to grade that. I don't know if you can see that or not, but each AASHTO, NACTO, and LTS kind of comprise eight core elements. And we each gave those kind of a numeric grade. And what we did was, if you can see the grid on the bottom, each one of those elements, if it, met the criteria, got a grade three, two, one, or zero. Same thing with LTS. It's kind of an inverse relationship between your LTS, LT1 through four, but LT1 would be, let's say, if you're comfortable with your child riding their bike as a three-year-old on the road. Level of four, you'd be like, no, I wouldn't be, I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm not really comfortable with that, so. And then NACTO is looking at things from a different perspective, but it's also weighted on a numeric component. And then the grades, And you can see that they're given a letter grade from A to F. And I'm happy to report I only think you had one area that was an F. But Hancock Road, we looked at things from north to south with Zone A through Zone E being areas that have been fully developed and have been in use for quite a while. Zone N and Zone S are areas that are in develop right now. primarily by Lennar, you have Sugarloaf Ridge and Wellness Ridge to the south. And then each of these zones are broken up into the major intersections within those. And those are your scores. So I don't know if you can see that, but zone A went from C's to B's. Zone B went primarily C's and B's. C, primarily B's and C's.

And then when you start getting into zone, I can see that zone D here, that's where you get into some of the older neighborhoods and things get squeezed down from

multi-lane roads to one lone one road where you have a tighter right of way that's when things started to get really challenging because you have cars battling with bicycles or pedestrians you have challenges with um sight lines utilities things that could become a challenge and those typically scored lower and when f's and d's and then when you get down to zone e that's an area where it's not really fully developed yet i can see this but

So it's in the process of being developed.

Schools. I know schools well. I worked inside of a public school district in San Diego County for 10 years as a program manager and a project manager. And Safe Routes to School was a big component of what we did. So we looked at this from the perspective of a protocol called a N B, which is access network safety and behaviors. And so what that means is access to a site. Would you be willing to let your child ride their bike or walk to the school? network safety does the roadway facilitate easy access for those kids to get to school or behaviors behaviors more challenging? Because is the kid going to behave on his way to school or the people driving around the school? Are their behaviors going to become complimentary to a kid getting to school on, you know, safely? those were graded as well so it was an a it was a excuse me a and B and so we had specific criteria under each of those elements and we gave those another weighted score as a way to kind of put some kind of numerics together where you're not just making it very opinionated let's say Let's see, so your schools, based on analysis, and all the scores, how we got to those scores is in the appendices in the analysis. So your best schools are basically your neighborhood schools, Aurelia M. Cole, Cypress Ridge Elementary, and Wesley Christian Academy. Aurelia M. Cole, I know, is the new K-8, which was built just recently, correct? Cypress Ridge is across the state, and those are both supported by a strong network around there. You have low traffic volume, lower traffic volume, lower speeds. Tier B would be moderate conditions where you have conditions where it's supportive of the campus, but you still have maybe some things to work on. And then you get into Tier C, Tier D, and the final distribution of grades. You have one in the A range, the majority are in the B range, and then you have some that are still good, but they show some areas where they could be using some work.

Totally a lot of numbers. So one of the things that I think it's important to see when you, you're going to see this on Hancock Road and the schools too, as soon as you have high speed adjacent, those drive those grades down. So one of the things I know that are on a big conversation here in Claremont is how do you get across some of these highways? I want to encourage, as you think about pedestrian overpasses and cycling, they do not have to be stairs. You can get really creative with those. So these are just some examples from around the world that go not only water, they go over some of the freeways. So I do on our connectivity map, which you'll see here, we identify some of the bigger red dots are areas that are high priority of areas that we think We need one obviously down in Wellness Way linking Lake Louisa. There's a lot of activity there with the cycling network. That's a very strong potential. And you can see some others spread around the city as well. Again, on this, we have those grades and data up here. We also have it broken down extremely detailed in the report. All right, the fun stuff, the middle mile. Okay, so one of the things as I go through this, it is we are looking at really that southeast corner to the northwest corner, all the way down, so from Lake Hiawatha Park uh all the way down over to where the trail south lake trails juts back into the neighborhood so one of the things that we did was take a look at the the different proponents of what what could be here and why so i'm going to start with that's a kind of that north northwest corner. The West Bank, it needs a sense of arrival. If this is going to be the mile in the middle, the South Lake Trail, if you guys are going to have a statewide bicycle festival when people are coming heading east, when they hit that road, they want to know that they've arrived somewhere special. So there are a lot of amusement parks around here. Museums, amusement parks, they do experiential plans. They want to know what do their people and visitors feel the minute they arrive from the parking lot all the way through the park. So you want them to know they've arrived somewhere special. There's a lot of lawn space there. I know it's swaled for water mitigation and stormwater. There are very creative ways you can do that. I'm going to talk about this again a little bit with culverts and infilling those and developing on top, but leaving the culverts below does the same thing, but then you can access that. That West Bank can really be mixed use as a flex space, commission local and national art. Put those in the water. Again, don't think just on the banks and try to break out. Those pictures are from Lake Geneva. Some of the best places in the world are just doing things a little bit different that set off the vibe and the ethos. I know there's a dog park in Hiawatha Park. I like another dog park here. And the reason is for flex space. So if you have a big event and you need to move there, you can move into that space pretty easily. Another thing too, which goes on to the NRPA, the Parks and Recreation Assessment. One of the things that Claremont needs more of is ADA accessible fitness equipment. They're very specific, not playground, ADA fitness equipment. So that's something that's what we recommend here. And I know you've got some docs. We're going to talk a little bit about more of that, but I am really pushing for things we're seeing in Europe, which are multi-purpose docs that are mixed use with pods and things like that. And you're going to see a photo of those here in a second. Victory Point. I think it really needs some shade. You have a spillway that goes from the lake down into that water treatment plant. That's beautiful. I've seen other cities use that and turn those into like lazy river for kids. So that whole area right there, a retail public private partnership for pods, small retail stand at paddle boards, things like that would be amazing. And it would be awesome. You've got a lawn tramp there. I wanted to get into water and said I couldn't. But it would be amazing. I think there's a lot of potential there for revitalizing that area. Um, a string of pearls trail. You have a lot of beautiful things, um, within the city of Claremont and downtown. We talked about that experiential plan. So when somebody comes to visit, not all of them are going to be cyclists going across Florida. Not all of them are going to be training for triathlons like me. I used to travel with four kids, right? And one's on a balanced bike. I've got my bike and we are going one mile an hour maybe. Um, I think you have a great opportunity. You have two wonderful anchors and a string of ponds in history that link those two where we mapped out and did a topo of a family bike trail that you could activate, and you could make that a placemaking thing. You could bring it through down, like different spots could be sponsored by different locations, or if they're able to climb, there's one hill here. You're not getting rid of that one, right? But if you can climb that one and they get on video, they get a free beer somewhere. City of Greenville, South Carolina does an amazing thing of place branding and kind of geocaching within their city. I really think this is something where you can not only educate people on the history of what makes Claremont unique, but it'll be a memory they'll take back with them because not all of them are going to jump on that trail and leave downtown. we talked a little bit about access and equity really um uh activating lincoln park you got mckinney park there i was going off my memory i think it had 7 000 uh visitors just within the boundary of that park uh there's a mixed use op potential there on the corner which you'll see here in a second bishop field which i'm going to address really quickly and i know some other people are going to address that a lot more detail but i'll share what i see And then Sparkling Lake up there on the top. But Lincoln Park is rich with history, and we just want to make sure that when we talk about access, it's accessible for all. The winery, you saw that. It was like in the top three activation points. I think you could make a pretty cool wine experience, cycling experience, linking that and tie that in with the festival. Make it bigger. We talked about strategic swells. You could use on this one area right now, it's a swell. You can alternate and protect the views of those residences there by doing one story with grass roof developments. And areas where they're not impeding views, pop those up to two stories. And you can develop kind of a... restaurant retail vibe right there right on the trail front and closer to the water that's going to be important we're going to talk a little bit about funding and how do you do all this there's a lot of opportunities this is one of the big ones i think of developing new revenue for the parks and rec the parks and rec department with property that they already have through public private partnerships this money can then be reinvested into things like hancock road and other things Here's an example of those docks I was mentioning. This is in Copenhagen. They've got coffee shops, stand-up paddleboard rentals. They've got small offices, work centers, skateboard ramps built into the dock. I don't know if our code will let us do that. They do there. It's pretty cool. activate the water. So instead of putting the stages, if you can, on the grass and taking up that realty where pedestrians and vendors can be, don't be afraid of the water. Get that in there. All right. All you baseball, softball fans in here, Bishop Legacy Field. So I love the history of this and what that meant. So I I know there's experts in here that are going to be talked about that, but really it's to celebrate the grassroots history of baseball, preservation of the building and ethos of the era. So I know there's an existing building there. It'd be really cool to keep that flavor. Nurture their future champions. So that's either through connections of heroes with the sport or scouting, economic development through training, tournaments, and then educate and elevate. You can make this a case study. of not only a downtown development, but also if you're using the technology of how that worked and how it then trained the legacy of up and comers. And then this is that created mixed use destination at McKinney Park. So just creating a community gathering places that eat, shop, sing, play, rest. This is probably one of my favorite, oh, and I've got a label in there. One of my favorite pond or lakes right there. So I think with the double reflection of sparkling, sparkling lake, did I say that right? And adding a fountain in there, this could be a destination's point because you've already have, that's one of the highest numbers of concentration you have when we took a look at our AI placer data of people going on and off that boat dock. Triathlon celebration art. This was something that I think Fred Sumner's group had. They've been saving the medals from all the different triathlons that have been here in Claremont. There'd be a really cool place right there by Sparkling Water Lake. So I think that would be one of those opportunities. You could, again, put that there or put it in the water. And then mixed-use parking. So I think you all need a parking garage. I think it should be mixed-use. They don't have to be bland parking garages. And I also think the roof should be a green roof where you can activate it for other things like events and rent that out. And this is the entry to the Olympic training facility in San Diego, Chula Vista. You have a whole list of champions. You could do something similar. I think this should be on the east side as traffic is coming in or bike traffic is coming in on South Lake Trail, entering that park right there across that intersection. Sense of arrival, you've arrived at the middle mile.

Okay.

I'm going to hit Parks and Rec real quick. This is some more data-driven, but I'm going to keep it really fast. So we're working with NRPA, which is the National Recreation and Park Association, and they rank parks based on two criteria. They have the seven dimensions of well-being, so they break that into cultural, economic, emotional, environment, intellectual, physical, and social. Each one of those have... very specific areas and some of those you can measure, some are harder to measure. This is something that's important that they want parks to make sure they're using as their guiding principles. They also have a document in terms of how do you evaluate your park, your use and the quality. What was interesting when I dove into that is that those two forms don't align. So you have seven dimensions of wellbeing, but then the evaluation tool to how you evaluate a part doesn't necessarily mesh. So what we did was working with the leadership team at NRPA directly, and it's pretty cool. Claremont is actually the first project to go through this, and they're pretty excited. I met with them last week, and they were asking if they could get a copy of this, and I said, no, not yet. I want to make sure you guys see this. But it's something that their demographics team have not been considering. I think you-all are going to be a case study here in the next few months. without me going through all of every single one of these things, we created a matrix and we use, and thanks to Brian and his team, they've been very patient. We've been digging into every park. How big are they? The activation number that I referenced earlier. Do they have picnic tables? Do they have an amphitheater? Do they have food? Do they have programs? What kind of programs? Where are they held? Is the park just on a piece of grass with or does it have a peer? Does it have nature trails? So we went through and created this ranking system. And then we took a look at other national studies and put a priority multiplier on top of these and identified how your parks stack on a quarter using this kind of hybrid matrix for NRPA. So good news, you guys, parks are amazing. So I'll show you a quick synopsis of all those numbers. When you look at activation right now, the leading activation economic driver for all healthy gatherings, events, programs, festivals, and accessible quality of life initiatives for all members of the community are your parks. So NRPA, their national kind of guideline is like 10 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents. That's about 530 based on 53,000. We're at around 360 acres. However, I put a note on here because you have so much water in terms of lakes and those parks above the lake with water access, I think you've hit the spot. They don't address that, and I'm going to address it. But I think you guys are heading in the right direction. In terms of your six most active parts, in terms of the grade scale you saw earlier, Waterfront, Arts and Rec Center, Hiawatha, Park Pal, I've learned to say that. Hancock Park and Lake Felter, those are your top six. Now, here's what's interesting. You have a score of Bs, you have a couple of scores of Cs. I wanna make sure you understand what the difference is. When I looked at NRPA's requirements, If you had a conservation and sustainability internal document that you practiced and that you taught, your score would go up. That's one of their big ones, right? And then nature access, that's another one. So you could have a park that's heavily active with sports and gets used a lot, but you might have a park that has the same thing, but they have access to water and fishing and a canoe. So they get the higher score. So really the way, an easy way to quick opportunity to jump these up is that conservation sustainability protocol internal. And then I kind of broke down arts and recreation center. We'll see here in a bit access to nature. You guys have a lot of property over there to talk about that. Uh, Hiawatha preserve. This was interesting food. Now you might have food trucks, uh, but they talk about food. So if you had a document that said, this is how often food trucks are there and here's what they serve. And one of them is healthy. They look at things like that.

So again, very different type of ranking.

Here's your top 15 survey responses. So one of the things that our pay requires is that a survey goes out. So Brian and the team were awesome. They put this together and went out. So More pickleball, racquetball type facilities with shade and lighting. Improve athletic fields and increase sports facilities overall. Increase shade. You're gonna hear the word shade a lot. Remember those summer months we saw? Trees and green space. Upgrade waterfront and lakefront amenities. Expand trails, walking paths and bike connectivity, which we've talked about. Improve park maintenance and infrastructure. Add more recreational programming and community activities. Build additional indoor multipurpose recreation facilities or field houses where you have different sports and you can use it. Improve accessibility and convenience. Address recreation center and aquatic center costs. I looked at that one. A lot of those came in from non-residents, so I just want to make sure I qualified what that was. Improve natural area preservation, increase outdoor fitness opportunities, parking management, improve safety and enforcement. I looked into that one as well. This was specific to the speed of e-bikes on the trail. And then there was a comment about disruptive activity. I think those are your teenagers, I'm guessing, right? And then add food and beverage options. So pretty similar to some of the things you've seen, what we talked about in parks and with Waterfront Park. Arts and Recreation Center, I think in terms of generating new revenue for the city, a huge public-private partnership potential here. This is the existing site. I met with the team and we walked through there and they kind of talked a little bit about the vision of what this could be. There's a lot of opportunity here where you can check off a lot of boxes, not just with revenue, but drive your overall Parks and Rec scores up. So mixed-use retail and lodging down on that embankment. um indoor pickleball or a similar use there are people out there who specialize in that that big purple rectangle off to the west is your indoor field house um an olympic pool that one came up also in in the um in the survey but we talked about parking garages you could do an olympic pool with a raised parking garage that had some offices parking and a green roof on top um and um an indoor uh field house which which i mentioned there so um and then expansion of some of the program spaces uh on the on the back side of that so um parks and rec area this at the arc center i think is a huge opportunity for you all okay so i threw a lot at you we're trying to keep it basic here maximum quality of place quality of life and economic impact to attract and retain talent I think these are your overarching priorities. And I'm just reminding you what we're seeing in terms of the importance of Claremont Parks and Recreation. And it's when you combine, that's a creative $21 million of economic impact in 2025. So phase one, fast track strategies. These are those festivals I was talking about. These are low cost, fast, that's economic impact you can drive into some that's aligned with you that you already have. Those are your Feast Red Bull action sports events. Become the hub for the statewide Coast to Coast Bicycle Festival. Continued investment in national bids, rowing, huge potential there. Mark's team gave us a great breakdown of some of the events that they want to go after. Soccer, track and field, triathlon, baseball, softball, water polo, and future cycling events. So events and festivals phase two, generate new municipal revenue through capital improvements, develop mixed use opportunities in existing parts, that's your arcs and rec center, which we just talked about, waterfront mixed use development, your docks, that trail front, wine or dining and retail, MIXED USE PARKING GARAGE AND THEN CREATE NEW WORLD CLASS MIXED USE PARKS WITH MAJOR FOCUS ON WELLNESS WAY AREA. SO CREATE PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES. ONE OF THE THINGS WE HEARD A LOT A HIGH PERFORMANCE LAB. SO I KNOW THAT'S BEEN IN DISCUSSION. I BELIEVE IT'S A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE THINKING ABOUT IT BUT THAT CAME UP FROM I WOULD SAY PROBABLY OVER 60 PERCENT OF THE CONVERSATIONS WE HAD OF And you kind of ties into saying we want access to the national training center. Since we can't have that, we want a high performance training lab. I really think if you went down on wellness way in terms of putting on that parks and rec hat, urban planning activation, that area would be perfect for a hub where you have a national cycling hub, a high performance training center, and you link everything together as an anchor. Phase three, use increased revenue to bolster infrastructure necessary for the safe world-class connectivity, Hancock Road, Wellness Way, and then strategic pedestrian overpasses. Create and leverage a sustainable young professional organization. What I mean by that is making sure that you have young professionals. This goes back to the dynamics of government. We have leaders rotating in and out. If you have young professionals that you want to keep and attract, you have to make sure they feel like they're making a difference. Just having them engage is not going to do it. They need to be on executive committees for your chamber, sports and tourism, placemaking, branding, everything like that. So get them engaged, but then get them in leadership roles where they can voice and vote. And last one, leverage your champion and influencers and branding campaigns to attract target audiences. You have a lot of champions here with a lot of followers, a lot of heroes. Utilize them. Utilize that. Make Claremont have a vibe and a community that is like no other. These are smaller recommendations. And I think as I thought about this on the final report, I'll take all the recommendations within the report and just make a comprehensive list so somebody can just go straight to this. But just top one, consistent investment in parks and rec. So Brian's team, let's keep digging into it. Let's put that survey. I'd leave that survey out for... another year i want to try to get to a thousand responses that'd be great and kind of circle back see where that is shading strategies internal protocols for conservation and sustainability it'll drive those scores up implement cultural and mentor based programming and parks so parks that are heavy in sports just make sure you can check the box and say hey we have these type of festivals or classes and things like that make sure it's diverse We'll update the seven dimensions of well-being with the NRPA matrix. And then I really think, and I put this on the radar for NRPA's national conference in 2027. I think this would be a really cool panel to have up there in front of a bunch of people to talk about the success that you all have. Trails and connectivity. Once the comprehensive plan is done, we've identified the arteries. Those, in my opinion, have to be done realistically before, or a portion of those have to be done. And then you have to figure out how to get all the neighborhoods that we've identified on our map that don't connect to those connected to them. Implement safe routes to school protocols and all new educational design initiatives. So you guys, any new schools coming up, make sure that that is a requirement, that they have to follow that. Safety work with law. I would work with law enforcement. Just as you talk about e-bike on trails and just have that conversation of how that works. I see this everywhere. Even at the National Olympic Training Facility in San Diego, they got kids on e-bikes come breaking in. Easy one, separate lanes between cyclists and pedestrians. You consider widening the trails too, if possible, especially with the flow that you have. Infrastructure. There are flexible traffic stanchions. If you don't know what those are, it's kind of those things you see on the highway. If you hit it, they don't break, but they, they make a noise. Dan had sent me something from Florida on a conference he went to. So thank you for saying that, but those greatly reduce fatalities on your high speed highways. So they're not attractive. You can make them different colors or something, but at the same time too easily to put up and it could save a life. Anticipate weekly endurance training routines and all future road expansion strategies and comprehensive plans. A lot of runners, a lot of cyclists. They're not just on the trail. They're getting on the roads. And again, leverage the local champions and heroes. All right, I'm gonna stop talking. That's a lot, we have a lot more data if you need it. There are boards here, we're gonna leave these boards here, and if you wanna take pens or markers or whatever, you can write on them, any ideas, and then Brian, I'll circle back to you here in a week or so, we'll take photos of it and make sure we implement it. But those are kind of a summary, now that I've spewed everything we talked about at the highlights. Any questions? Sponsored by Red Bull. All right. Mayor, I'll go ahead and unplug. Yeah, so right now you have a copy of this. I said like this is about 99%. I want to clean this up. But yeah, I think by Friday of next week, I'll have all. I also want to see if there's any comments on that. Brian, you'll get the full copy of that. But you do have the PDF of this now. Yes.

So my name is Michael Hoxton. I'm a local physical therapist and a trainer, small business owner. My office is actually downtown right here on 4th Street.

Oh, sorry. Is that better?

Yeah. Okay. So I moved here from New York five years ago. Fell in love with Claremont. Choice of champions. One thing I noticed, because this is what I do for a living, I help people create the best version of themselves. So through movement and through health. So one thing I noticed was an elephant in the room is that we have some of the fastest human beings who reside and train here in Claremont. And although we do have Olympic size tracks. It's exclusive for the elite. And although not everybody has access to NTC or Marne Verde or even some of the high schools, because that's really for our students. I would like to plant the seed, if possible, what if there was a Olympic-sized public track, public meaning free access, to those aspiring heroes that want to train like the Olympians that train and reside here, that maybe want to blow off some steam, they work nine to five, and they want a safe path in which they run instead of trying to run in the typical areas, a place where everybody, all economic statuses, walks of life they can just go it at whatever given times rather than having to worry about access time membership etc so one last thing I'd like to say is because I deal with people improving their health is that if you have a healthy body it helps with a healthy healthy mind people think clearer if you have more people who have healthy bodies healthy minds healthy community and not just our community, our great state of Florida, as well as the United States. So one little trickle effect can happen, and it starts with each individual. If there is somewhat of a more accessible, like if I was a trillionaire, If I was the trillionaire, honestly, God knows the truth, I would open up not just one, several Olympic-sized tracks or track and fields, parks that have access so that anybody could do what they feel they're called to do. Thank you. No, I think it's one of the most freely accessible because there's a lot of runners and it would be more safe and they would be able to have metrics to measure themselves, engage themselves. And as far as other track and field events, there might be other athletes that could be able to train within these public parks. Because I know in New York, there's quite a few that are free, and it was the greatest part of growing up to have these type of parks. And a lot of them were city parks, or they were donated by rich people to give back to neighborhoods. But one of the things I noticed was it just brought everybody together. And some of these type of parks would actually be able to – um address a lot of the things that shane was talking about okay thank you yes sir hi

My name is Aaron Blevins. I've been in the immediate area, a little bit in Groveland, a little bit in Claremont for the last probably 12 to 15 years. The most appealing part of that presentation to me was the expansion of the recreational buildings and public access buildings that I think around the Claremont Arc right now would be by far the best expansion of Claremont, I think, because we are clearly expanding homes by tenfold with the developments that are going on kind of all over the city. those facilities are absolutely needed for the claremont residents i think as we if you guys look to expand and adopt this idea of running this building expansion that the focus is on the claremont residents that need the facilities i love the idea of appealing to people to come in to our city and enjoy it for a for an event but i think that the core focus of the expansion needs to be about the immediate Claremont residents. And I know that we draw lines of the city limits and the county limits. My address says Claremont, Florida. I understand that I may not live directly in the city limits, but my address says Claremont. I represent Claremont. I wanna be in Claremont. I moved here for a reason. The house that we particularly wanted ended up just outside of the city limits, but I consider myself as a member of Claremont. So I think it's very important that if we expand and we continue to grow, that actually the point you made about the track and field, Go to one of these major universities and copy what they're doing in their field houses. They have professional tracks that are banked. They have an indoor turf facility where athletes can work. We experience rain like if your kids play travel sports or they play any kind of outdoor sport, you know what it's like in the summer. It's a bit of a... coin toss going to practice you don't know if you're running into four inches of rain or if it's going to be a thousand degrees so an indoor facility that's focused on claremont residents would be i think a no-brainer for the city it would print money um as long as it's reasonable for the claremont residents eventually when they will be utilized 100 of the time and i think that's probably the goal for the council is to create facilities and utilities that are being 100% utilized, right? That gives everybody the best use of the tax money that's coming in. So I think it's kind of a spot on the expansion of facilities and things available to Claremont residents. I just want to make sure that Claremont, the people in Claremont and the residents in Claremont, like I know Southlake High School can't be on this map because it's not in Claremont, but you have so many residents of Claremont that go to Southlake High School, right? So all of these facilities kind of come into the whole community. I think that that's the direction of the focus here is the bike trails are great. We have a really nice bike trail, though, right? And we do a pretty good job in this town of sharing the bike lane. I don't know if the chief of police is here and would agree to that, but we do a pretty good job of sharing the roadways already with bikes. The parks and facilities growth, I think, is the number one thing that I hear from people in the area that they'd like to see more of. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Ana Sinclair, 575 West Mineola. It's been a while. I just wanted to thank the team real quick. This is very exciting. Thank the council. Thank the staff. And I know you mentioned the report was going to be like 90 pages, so I just wanted to make sure that the nerdier side of the public can access that. That would be me. Again, thank you very much for this. I'm particularly excited about the expansion of our greenways, especially about safe routes to school. I firmly believe that when children have the opportunity to start their day with a little bit of exercise, just a 10-minute walk or bike ride, they arrive ready to learn. They have lower rates of depression, anxiety. Research shows this. So I'm very excited that we as Claremont, the choice of champions, are going to be investing into this. And again, thank you very much for all the effort.

Yeah, I'll just say a couple things that I loved in this presentation. The mixed-use development opportunity at the ARC. You know, when I think about how Claremont's going to grow, you know, I know there are some people that have a lot of big feelings about that. We're going to grow, and how we grow is what we can control better. And I think that's a huge opportunity site for accommodating growth in a way that enhances quality of life for the people around and the people that would live there. in a development like that. So I love all the activation being proposed there, including infilling with residences there as well. I love the middle mile concept. I think that just expands the story that we have with the Coast to Coast Trail. And it provides a lot of opportunities for a lot of different kinds of things, as opposed to everything all in one thing. expanding that out over our waterfront and bringing a lot more activation I think would be very high impact and enjoyable and then of course the greenways the trails the expansion of that that's a contributor to the health of our community the safety of our community to transportation for our community and the proof is in the pudding economic development almost always follows great investment and in trail systems and networks. So I love that, support that. I think just on a big picture, there's art and science in this presentation. There's a lot of data and a lot of science behind it, but there's a lot of whimsy to it, and these are great. I appreciate the outside perspective and the creativity, um you know obviously we're not gonna be able to execute all of these things but to think outside of the box a little bit more about what is unique to claremont what fits our ethos and our vibe and what makes us so distinct we have some really really remarkable things and so i appreciate the whimsy and i want to see us embrace some of that creative thinking and creative solutions, not shutting down ideas before we know what's really available. There's unique funding opportunities out there. There could be a private-public partnership that unlocks something. But sometimes I think we shut down creativity before it really even gets a chance to get started. And so that would be my request as we look at some of these and we kind of see what we want to chase first. Let's have an open mind and approach things creatively.

My name is Brian Davis. I'm a resident of Claremont. I've been here for 25 years.

I live over on Hancock Road.

About 15 years ago, we sat in this very same room with the League of American Bicyclists and worked on an application to be recognized as a bicycle-friendly community. And in that time, we've discussed a lot of what that gentleman just mentioned up here pertaining to bike lanes. And I do own a business here in the city. I'm the Trek bicycle store over off Hancock. We've been in business now 21 years. Moved out here, like I said, about 24 years ago. And I think there should be some importance placed on connecting these trails with other areas of interest within the city and county. whether they're used for individuals to commute to a bus stop or to, say, the Lynx car park area down on 27, just south there a little bit of Hook Street. And there was a lot of discussion at the time, and when the League came back with their findings and the grade rating that we got and everything, that it took us to be recognized as a bicycle-friendly community, which we were. But a lot that came out of that was the fact that we lack that infrastructure that allows people to go from one place on a bike trail to another place on a bike trail. And a lot of that has to do with the bike lanes on our highways. I can tell you, I'm a cyclist. There's several other cyclists in the room here. Our bike lanes are scary. So those buffeted or those protected bike lanes are something that I really think we have to address as we see more and more development in the community. And why not put the burden of that on the developers? Let them pay for that. My understanding is, and the county is not here today, but my understanding is like North Hancock, when it started to progress north, that All those communities that are being built in there, they applied for a cut in the trail so that they could create an entrance to that community in the trail. And if you go out there and look at those entrances to those communities, excuse me, my voice is fading a little bit. They did just that. They put a cut and created an entrance into the community, and they put a concrete barrier in the middle of it so you stay to one side or the other of it. But there's really no other way to get to that community. The bike lanes on the roadways are what are required by DOT at best. And then you've now mixed the trail into all of these – neighborhood access points and the crossings themselves are kind of dangerous. One in particular, oops, sorry, just real quick. One in particular on North Hancock is right there where the new Publix is. When they developed the Publix, they put a retaining wall in that completely obstructs the trail and the bike lane. So cars coming out of that Publix can't see you. So there's got to be a little more interaction with the developers of what that kind of stuff's going to look like. I mean, it's a dangerous intersection. It really is. I implore you to maybe get in the car and drive out there someday, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. But it's the entrance to the new Publix off of North Hancock that I'm addressing. Yeah, Maniola. Yes, sir. And then we've got a great venue that's getting ready to open up there called Crooked Can. And man, that thing is going to blow up. I'm telling you right now, it's going to become a destination for a lot of people. So we have to make it easier for those individuals to get there, whether it's on a bike lane or on a trail. So a lot of great information. I know council has a lot in front of them that they have to consider. I know the county is a very big part of that. And we have to go through them sometimes to get what we want. So I understand that. But yeah, just some considerations. He had a lot of great information in the presentation. I mean, we do. We have a lot of great things in Claremont. We are rich in things to do in Claremont. We just need to expand those and make them more accessible for everybody. And I think that was his point in that presentation is that we lack some accessibility in a lot of areas in the city when we're trying to get to those venues that we all love and cherish so much. So thank you.

Anyone else?

Hi there. I'm David Santiago. I'm owner of a double play training for baseball and softball here in Claremont. Miss Allison here came up to us a couple of weeks ago about, you know, revitalizing Bishop field. And I just fell in love with the idea. I'm passing around some renderings. Okay. You sure? All right. You're going to, okay. Okay.

I actually do.

I actually do. I actually do. With these bikes and trails, these kids on these e-bikes, safety, safety, safety. I lost four players this season because exceeding speeds and all that.

So safety.

Hey, everyone.

My name is Herman Vanden Bogart. I'm with Southlake Little League. We rent out pretty much year-round the Park Pals baseball fields, West Park, and partially Bishop Field. Some of the things that the board and a lot of the parents from the league just kind of want us to address is kind of the condition of the fields. We have great communications with the Parks and Rec Department. It just seems like things kind of move slowly sometimes when You know, it can be things like, hey, a home plate's just sticking up too much or it's broken. And then, hey, we still have games going. We've got to do something quickly so kids don't get injured, which has happened, right, because of these things. So, yeah, I don't know how we can speed up that process to help repair the fields and get them to the condition that they need to be and even to upgrade them. And I think even South Lake Little League and just Little League in general with all the grants that they have, we're willing to even split that cost with you guys to help accelerate those improvements and to the aesthetic that you guys want and that he's talking about, right, to upgrade those facilities. So, like she was saying earlier, like, hey, be open, I think, to letting us help you guys. I think sometimes you guys feel like, hey, you're going to have to take all the burden. Where's the money coming from? We're willing to help, and Little League's willing to help as well. So, don't forget about us. Hey, we love you guys. Hey, the fields look great most of the time. Hey, but when those things do occur, we need them quick fixes so the kids don't get hurt. Yeah. We have 425 families that, yeah, families. So probably kid-wise, you know, who knows? I mean, it's probably 450, 475, right? A lot of them have two kids per family, you know, whatever. So, yeah, he's... Yeah, so there's a lot of families out there. We've even had to split our opening day because there's not enough parking spaces, right? So our league's grown from 250 or so families to 425, and we're bursting at the seams. So any other facilities you guys can add? We've tried Groveland. Right. you know many all we just they don't have space either right so that's a struggle with us and then you know you try to double double schedule a field you know you can't have t-ball kids going home at 10 o'clock at night it's just not it's not an option Claremont baseball definitely I mean more facilities there's got to be more space there's more people Where would I put them? I haven't thought that far ahead. I mean, yeah, I mean, but oh, for our for our leagues, we're getting people from all of Southlake County, Mascot, Groveland, Claremont, Mineola. Yeah, yeah, Winter Garden, almost Davenport area. They're all coming to that field and that area. And then we play interleague games versus Winter Garden, Apopka, Windermere, Dr. Phillips. They all come to play our older kids and older divisions. So we're getting people from all over. And just, like I said, just a more steadily maintained facility, right? I think that that's the biggest thing for us, yeah. The mounds, that's one of the things that I'm talking about. Yeah, the mounds are bad. I mean, they're really bad. I mean, exposed rubber. I mean, we're trying to fill them in all the time. But at the same time, we try to do what we can do, but then we kind of get some kickback from you guys. Hey, don't touch the fields. You know, you're going to cause another problem. So we, you know, we're in between, we don't know what to do. Should we help you fix it or not help you fix it? Like, and then we can't let it drag out where, like I said, safety becomes a problem, right? So we're kind of in the middle and we don't know where to go. So if you guys, like I said, a more prompt repair would help just kind of even all of that out, I think. We're just on a texting type of thing with Paige and Taylor sometimes, and we have meetings twice a year with them as well for our contracts or year-round contracts and whatnot. But yeah, so quite a bit.

So just to let you know, because Paige is watching, so she sent me a text. Hi, Paige. Here's fun. questions so listen the mound's not gonna now it's not gonna stay perfect though and if you're gonna fix the mound and then you're gonna play on it yeah but we don't want you guys touching the field yeah exactly but that's good we don't want them touching the field but that's what they uh the safety of our kids is very important out there and i can't get that counseling when i can't

Yeah. Because it was very unsafe.

Right. The reality is the crew does go out. So it doesn't stay perfect. They have 600 kids in a league. It's played

I understand that you should take care of fields as part of the areas of intermilitary take care of fields, but what I saw out there was a lack of maintenance and care. When I got a pitching mound rubber that's almost six feet and everything, that's very unsafe. And when they sit in the batter's box, they're sitting in a hole. Plates sit down here and they're sitting in a hole. That's kind of unsafe. So that's why I ask the council meeting that we go out and take a look at the measures. These kind of things are safety measures. Anytime safety is involved, we want to see that studied. I went to Viniola one year, watched the softball team, and one of the first things that I noticed was that something had changed in the infield to the outfield. They had a big hump there. First thing I said, is somebody going to get hurt? Sure enough, I think our chief of police got hurt that day. Well, he's definitely chief of that day. He slid and went across and then got hurt. Because these kind of things on the field, they're going to say, you've got to keep them up. You've got to keep the bases, the belt in the ground, and the batting blocks, and the pitching on the ground.

I love it. And I think a lot of it. I don't want to hope.

Yeah, I don't want this to drag out. I'm just saying I think a lot of it has to do with the material being used as well. If you have light, light clay that's very loose and you just put it in front of a rubber, it's going to disintegrate after one kid goes up there and shakes his cleat. I mean, you have to put the right material in.

I don't want to go back and forth. I'm willing. I'm also a Southlake. I understand what you're saying. I live five minutes away from the park. I go to that park almost every day after they fix the field. It hasn't been one time they reclayed it. That happened that that six feet that we have that has nothing to do with one game overnight That's a process that's been going on. We got faces that come off over time That's not one day those fields have not been maintained holes in the outfield have not been maintained So if they're telling you they're fixing it you might want to come out and check it. I

scheduled to maybe go out there and take a look at it because, like I said, when I came back, I was hoping to pitch out there in March. I think I let you all know that I'm safe out there. I mean, as soon as I walked up and looked at the condition, I didn't have to walk on the field to see it.

and what both of you were saying, because, you know, the spring games will run anywhere from four to six games a play on the ball field. And it's just, you can put the mound play in, that's what they're referring to, the mound play versus the 80-20 mixture. You can put the mound play in, you can water it, you can tamp it, and the next morning, the first person goes out and plays, and now you're stuck with a six-inch hole all day long until you have the mound play again. And again, it has to stay overnight. And it's a whole process. But I wonder if, as we go through looking at this year's budget, I would be very interested. I saw that on my filter, we have an organic turf material, which makes me happy. There's NIH studies about turf that have always made me anti-turf. But now there's organic material that might help with some of these maintenance issues. And given our certain condition with some funds and reserves, there's some, you know, we have some opportunity to maybe implement some long term strategies that reduce maintenance, don't increase cancer in our children, and allow for easier fixes, annual replacement of the pitching rubber, things like that. So I think that You're right, and I think that you're right, and I think that they're right. And the problem is the material, the system, and the process. But if you're trying to handle, I've been out and my kids play now. And they play six days a week. Like, you just can't keep up with that for, what, three months is it? It's two months. Two months and then three years. It's technically like the end of January through... May, but then we host all stars from May to the beginning of June. So really it's the end of June, all of July, and the first maybe week of August that there's nothing. And then we start over in August. So I think maybe a workshop would be to talk about what they can help with, what we can do. There might be some material changes. Oh, I speak your language. I know what you're doing. Yes, ma'am Oh

Council, how you doing? Mayor? Josh Castleman. I appreciate all you're doing. This is something that's, this topic's very important to me. I'm involved in Claremont Tri Club, also coach soccer with Southlake High School and Claremont Football Club. So just a couple things I want to bring up. One is we talk about designated bike lanes for commuting. But I was going to mention Gabby. I think she just stepped out.

Did Gabby just leave?

So Gabby's been here for the meeting, and she recently almost died in a hit and run. And one of the topics that we don't talk about much is we talk about how important triathlon is to the community, endurance athletes. And if you notice, one of the most contentious topics on social media, obviously, is cyclists on the roads. And I think that's something that needs... attention more than just the road, the cyclists that are on the roads aren't just commuting to like the grocery store and stuff like that. There's a huge amount of cyclists that are training and you can't, you can't train on some of the mixed use trails that we have here. That's more of a, like a recreation commuting type of thing. So I think we need to at least consider A designated bike lane that's more like 10, 15 mile loop, maybe say leaving from Waterfront Park, going out, using some of the roadways that cyclists come here for. People come from Miami, South Florida. Cyclists are coming here every weekend to ride these hills. And you're getting all this confrontation between the local motorists and these people that are out here riding. So I think if we can think about a designated bike lane that's intended for training, not just commuting, I think that's something that would be worthwhile and save lives too. And that would take a little creativity, I think maybe tying into maybe from Waterfront Park, going up Hancock, hit a couple of hills. Because right now, if you want to ride, in the triathlon community, that's the main topic is how do we train safely? And right now we're basically reduced to Lake Louisa State Park. That's really it, if you want to ride outside safely. And it's kind of like, you can only do that It's a 10-mile loop, and it's full, and we're doing that every day, and even parts of that, the road condition isn't great. So just something to think about. The other thing is we talked about the parks, like soccer fields. I coach my club team at Park Pals, Palat-La Caja, and this past season, it was so uneven. The ground is so uneven. it's, you can't, you can't play quality ball and you talk in your, in your presentation, you mentioned the NTC brought in $6 million from tournaments and stuff like that. And I mean, that part of the reason is because that playing service is so good. Um, if we, if we could have more fields, higher quality fields taken care of where you can practice safely and host tournaments, I think you could start doing a lot more of that. But anyway, I just wanna say, thank you. This is great. I'm excited about it. And if there's anything, you know, we can do to help. I mean all this, it sounds great, it's a big, it sounds like a big project, but I like the idea.

No, I think so, I haven't studied the maps.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't I don't ride on Hancock much. So I mean, I'm downtown and then I train Lake Louisa. I haven't felt safe riding anywhere else. To be honest, so I haven't spent much time on Hancock. But um, yeah. All right. Thank you, everyone.

Good afternoon, thanks for being here. My name is Brendan Curl, I'm a Claremont resident. I know Josh, I'm glad he came up and said something and I don't want to be up here too long. I just wanted to tag on to what he said because I'm a long time triathlete. I used to come out here and ride 50, 60, 70, 80 miles on a Saturday. the team USA for a number of world championships, uh, at the age group level. Um, one thing that he said about training with a dedicated loop, the people that come out here to train need to be able to ride 20 to 30 miles an hour on an average. So they're looking at doing that. You know, if you want to bring in the elites, they're riding 28, 30 plus miles an hour for a hundred miles, um, in a race. And they need to be able to do that. So, The connecting trails that we have around here, some spaces are good for that speed, that distance. Other places are not. The more recreational cyclists are worried about pets, children running out in front of them, just all of that stuff. So if that's going to be a thought that I just wanted to add on to what he said, is that you need to be able to plan for a 25 mile an hour average on that. So it's not just a local recreational commute of five, 10 miles an hour. They're really trying to move as far as being able to train goes. So I just wanted to add that. I thought that was important.

At that speed with local roads, why do you think there's so much conflict between the people in cars and the people on bikes? You're going 30 miles an hour. A lot of our roads, cars should be going at the same speed.

So what do you think is the cause of this?

Some of those roads that cyclists are going to use and ride 25, 30 miles, I'll hit 40 or even 50 miles an hour coming down Sugarloaf. Maybe that's an excess of the speed. But to answer your question, some of those roads where cyclists are going to be averaging 25, 30 miles an hour, speed limit's 40 or 45. So they're going to get angry. Everybody's in a hurry to go where they want to go. legally by the law if there's not a bike lane or a shoulder or if it's obstructed or if there's gravel or sand in it cyclists can't ride in that and legally they can take the whole lane and sometimes you get large groups of cyclists who will do that because it's safer to take the whole lane than it is to try and ride through those obstructions through that dangerous you know and nobody wants to hit the road going 10 miles an hour much less 20 miles an hour And so they do that and that upsets people. And some people just don't like the cyclists. So we all got to kind of try and learn to live together. But if you really wanted to be forward thinking as far as embracing the cyclist community, and I have Team USA friends that come from Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, to ride here and train here during the summers. So it's, yeah, in the summers. So if you you look at the the I'm sorry, I don't want to be up here longer than time. But if you look at the last Olympics that was in Brazil, a lot of the Olympians came here to heat train in the summer before going down there. um so uh there's a lot to what he said about temperatures and stuff like that your your average person doesn't want to be out there um in that type of weather really extending themselves but there's people who will specifically come here to train just for the heat in the summer do you think that addressing training bicyclists is something that claremont city reasonably can do or do you think this is more a county issue like do we have enough space and roads in your experience Absolutely. I mean, I would go and do eight miles of intervals on a 400 meter track. So while a 10 or 15 mile loop would be something that would be absolutely amazing. If you go over and look in Tampa, there's a Nathan Benderson park and it's, it's closed off. There's no traffic in there. It's like a 1.5, maybe a 2.2 something mile loop around it. mm-hmm so even if it's if if it were just something that were smaller I think it would get a whole lot of use if it was safe and like I said I mean I started coming out here in 2006 2007 doing those extended bike rides and I haven't felt safe riding on these roads probably since 2014 2015 to be honest If it's, I know that he said something in his presentation about physically separating it, having some kind of physical barrier separating the traffic from the bike lanes, I think that makes everybody feel safer. Because whether or not it's somebody who, you know, buzz you or throw water bottles at you or honk at you or, you know, do something like that on purpose, even if there's something there, they're not going to do that. If it's somebody who's not paying attention, because they're on their cell phone or eating or changing the radio station or something like that, that a physical barrier is going to make them be like, Okay, I'm not going to do that right now. Something to pay attention if it saves one life, that's enough.

Yes, sir.

My name is Adam Narvaez.

I am a Claremont City resident business owner and currently serving as the president of the Claremont Girls Fast Pitch Softball League. We also, to the point of the gentleman that was representing um, little league have a lot of, uh, field maintenance. I do not want to harp on, uh, Brian page or Taylor. I really feel like they do a great job. I feel like it's maybe the next level in the step above and miss strange to your point. Uh, when we talk about, you know, budgeting, um, I do feel like it does make a whole lot of sense when Brian and page explain that, Hey, we're doing everything we can do in the limits of our, our, our budget and what our, uh, contract with the field crew allows us. Right. Um, we could probably complain enough. Brian would probably have no problem grabbing a rake and helping us out. But, um, uh, we try not to, um, obviously at Hancock park, we have five fields. We have, uh, there are, uh, Three bullpens and they just get to beat to heck and back. I've got pictures actually on my phone that I was going to email to Paige. She's more than willing to receive those and try to work those out. But I do think that might be the next level of... you know, something where they're handcuffed, right, if they're trying to work inside of their budget and make sure that they, you know, they're contractually. I know the gentleman who, you know, who does the fields too, and he's kind of very by the book as well. So I get it. Nobody wants to work for free. I think other than that, I'll be super brief because there was one other issue that I just wanted to address, and I think it goes to kind of the same thing. Allison, I think you and Chris Lindsey had spoke about our spring season and how can we work together with spring games being there, but not starting the Claremont Girls Fast Pitch Softball League at a later date. The problem is if we keep pushing our date out, we become ineligible to participate in Babe Ruth All-Stars because they're wanting us to have so many games in before we can go play. So the problem is even though Allison and Chris kind of had that worked out, Brian, I know you're still handcuffed by the resources of what our field crew can do based on their contract, right? Again, they're not going to go out there and they're not going to work for free. kind of step away from Babe Ruth, sadly, and do an alternate all-star experience, if you will, just because we, you know, our spring season can't start, you know, soon enough to get the games that we need in. But other than that, like I said, that's just, you know, hopefully what would be a small request or something that maybe you guys could look into. Other than that, Taylor's great. Paige is great. I don't talk too much with Brian, but when I do, he's always pleasant. And that's pretty much it. We love the, love the park. We love the field. We love to take pride. We too are willing to help. Obviously we understand the liability. I get it. Somebody goes out there and trips on a rake or, you know, I totally get it. I've even offered to say, I don't know if there's an additional insurance that we can, you know, purchase as a league that, you know, maybe covers us, you know, just, you know, just to try to help out. Cause we, we obviously don't want to put that burden on the city, but we're more than willing to, you know, rake out a bullpen or something like that. But quite honestly, that's, That's kind of the maintenance it needs almost after every, you know, every use. Right now it's a little worse where there's, you know, there's holes and divots and, you know, if a girl rolls an ankle or something like that, we don't, you know, we don't want that to happen. But again, very attentive to it. They're great. I think the next step is just being bound contractually with, you know, what's inside that budget for us to work with. If it's needing more than what we're thinking, you know, maybe, I don't know, it's hard. I know everybody comes up here and asks for money. Right? There's only so much to go around. So we're trying to do what we can. I think another thing real quick was obviously I know that I think the city is looking into going with a separate kind of concessions vendor. And that may be a completely different topic. And while that's great, obviously the league did make some income and make some money from that. And so, you know, I think an issue that we're going to be facing is if we have to continue to increase dues, you know, we're going to have some, you know, players are ineligible. And with that lost revenue, we are unable to offer scholarships or anything like that, much less be able to chip in or help like the Little League may be able to. Unfortunately, we're getting to a point where we would be totally reliant on the city and the resources of the state. you know, city staff to help us with the fields and stuff like that.

Yeah. So first part of the start of the season issue isn't a budgetary issue. It's a logistical issue is we have, you know, we have spring games going up all day. And then remember right after that following week is KSA all week. So there needs to be, there still needs to be time. It's not a, it's not a money thing. It's a time thing. okay where they have to be able to still maintain the field yeah and then the second thing which we haven't gotten to be during the process of evaluating concession vendors and we've spoken sure spoken requests um and so he knows that our intention is to present to council that We would you know how much money that you guys brought in? Yes, sir. We would still try to make you home.

Understood. No. And that to your point, Brian, that is that is extremely fair. You're right. I was I was a part of that conversation, at least the one that we had. I think you had asked if we had a budget amount of what we would do. And so that's wonderful because we'd love to extend Listen, if we have a surplus of money, what can we do with it, right? If we can't improve the cages, if we're not supposed to touch the bullpens, if we can't do anything, the only thing we can do is put it back into the kids by offering scholarships, you know, maybe some better tees and catcher's equipment, different things like that.

But, you know, a pile of money, that's a small portion of it.

And I guess I misunderstood. My understanding was that because of the hours needed for the field crew in order to flip the fields for spring games, that they were contractually working over the amount of hours that they had allotted or budgeted for. Because in order to start our season, we don't necessarily need the fields prepped, lined, drugged. we're just willing to get out there on the clay. So the same hour that they would prep it, if it's possible for them to do it maybe after us in the morning. And I know that's, I get what I'm asking for. Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. Well, I just feel like, I don't know. I mean, I get what you're saying, but I've driven by Hancock Road at midnight and they're out there dragging. So it's like sleep's very convenient for them when and if they can get it, right? But, you know, I'm sure people in Kings Ridge probably have no problem with you turning the lights off at midnight, but they're out there dragging the field. So I completely get that. I completely understand that. That's just our whole, you know, kind of conflict.

other than that we are happy you guys are doing an amazing job and we appreciate it so if we can fix that we're great thank you thank you anyone else no one else for the comment um i think we all very well aware of the fact that we don't have enough parks and fields and everything here here in the city of other minor fields because And people like to get outside playing baseball and all these things, like I was when I grew up here. And I think that's one of the reasons we, two, three years, about three years ago, or maybe four years ago, we sat down and started talking about trying to flip our fields to look after the turf. I know there's a big concern right now about artificial turf causing cancer and everything, but I think if some of it out there we can get away with within all of them. After all a lot of our pro athletes play on synthetic turf a lot of times these days. So what we did looking at that is just trying to save the city some money even though it's going to cost us some a little capital upfront to put them in but we can use the fields year round. That's one of the biggest problems we have with all our parks and for maintenance purposes. Okay, so every time we shut down a field, that means somebody's inconvenience. And so by going to synthetic turf, we can probably utilize the field year round. That'll help us in one aspect, but still, we still need more fields. So where do we go and put these fields? Where is the land to put these fields in? That's one of the reasons I've always advocated for the city But right now, when I first came here, we had no, had no property out here to do a lot of things. So we acquired some things and we're trying to do those pieces with them. So that on the ball field, I'm just saying, I would like you to just, one of the things I noticed in your presentation, most of your slides and pictures and maps are very at the Arts and Recreation Center. Okay. I didn't understand what you were talking about, the Olympic pool? Yeah, I think yeah the police department is on the north side of that Southside The police department is covered with the legend so the police department is a Yeah, the police department ended up here. We're talking about it. We've done parking here, which I would like to see parking in there, but also let's take into consideration we've got pickleball courts in there and everything, too. Which they also had asked, well, we need to put our parking, and when we put them in there, I was hour for putting parking in there, spending the next money to put the parking and putting the restrooms and everything out there, which is one of the things they come into and ask them for right now is restrooms. When they're out there, they have to run over to the Arts and Recreation Center to try to use the restroom, but when the Arts and Recreation Center comes, they have no restrooms. So we need to maybe look at putting the restrooms out there as well for the pickleball court. Of course, I'm also getting the complaints, I think, I've had Mr. Van Wagner go up and talk with the residents and legends It's complaining about And I love the presentation. I like all these things. I like to connect walkability and all this here. And one of the things that keep popping out to me in all these presentations I'm seeing, are all the areas of Clemmout. Of course, I've been here a long time. All the areas of Clemmout, the most walkable portion of Clemmout is this northwest part right here from Highway 27 west. You know, as I drive around the city of Claremont every day, in different parts of the city of Claremont, I don't see anybody walking as much as I see them walking out here in this area. I come downtown a lot of times and see some of the people that live in the area, and I ask them how they get up. They tell me they walk down here. So we have the people out here walking. And I think that can contribute to the fact that a few years ago, a couple years ago, we started making sure we had sidewalks. So a lot of people are utilizing, but the back trail, there's no back trails on down the road. Of course, they said, okay, but that doesn't bother me because I grew up running these same streets. Just having to run all these streets and training every year for track and And football, it's that run from McKinney Park, Bloxham Avenue, Pitt Street, East Avenue, back up to Soto Street, three, four times a day, and coaches would make us run. We didn't have to make the run. Of course, there wasn't as much track, either. I guess I brought it back to a little bit longer to have the sidewalks out there. I am very concerned, as I was preaching, counseling, I'm very concerned with EVACs and the speed of EVACs. I think that's the... Mr. Waller worked on policy and everything to try to control some of the bikes. I heard one comment about speed on the trail for the e-bikes as well. That's very concerning to me. If there's any way we can separate and have a special lane for e-bikes to do the speed, I would love to have it. But right now, it's very dangerous on our trails and everything, because these speed, I know those trails have a 15 mile an hour speed limit on them. And when you got people out there walking, I see people out there, wheelchairs and all these walkers and everything, that get to be very dangerous. That's a concern, and that's why I have a lawyer and police department are trying to work on what we can do to keep it safe. So I appreciate you looking into all that. And I would love to have designated by anybody else And you're right. We have the fastest zip code in the world. Fastest man in the world. Actually, we no longer have that. We can no longer claim that because Mr. Noah Lyle actually moved out and moved over into Mount Vernon, if I'm not mistaken. So now Mount Vernon has the fastest zip code in the world.

Why is that?

We used to be the home of the last four fastest in the world. Why aren't we anymore?

Because they moved out. Hey, they found a new home and decided, well, you know what, Mylon got married recently, and I think he just purchased a new home, and my understanding, he moved to Mount Vernon. I thought that he told me he was moving up into Highland Hills, and then later they came to get him to Mount Vernon. I think we still have a couple of Olympics stars that are still living here, but the fastest man, my understanding, he moved, I can't tell you why he moved. Maybe he had something to do with marriage.

I think it's important we know why. move here and then why they leave, because I think that helps us to make informed decisions. Maybe it's a personal choice, but it has something to do with the environment that exists here.

Maybe not. Another question. You just noted that it drops in activity in July and August. Could that be due to the fact that the school's out, most of the kids and their parents are out of town on vacation?

It could be. I was correlating it more towards, yeah, that's a good point. The feedback I got was mainly weather. However, he's got a good point. You do have elite athletes. That's a smaller group that come here and train purposely for that. Yeah, a lot of our sport, too, did that as well in BMX. But, yeah, it was more so the feedback of weather, heat, and then lack of shape in some ways. Those three.

Yeah. Being a native already, you know, that don't bother me. I hear other things about shade, and yeah, shade is just good sometimes, but we trained outside of shade. They wouldn't allow us to be in shade. But I know times have changed, and everybody moved here, and this is what they call what the sunshine state. So when you come, they expect a lot of sun and everything, but it is that good, and now they rule change and everything to have some shade available, but I guess I can say I'm

I think though I predict there's going to be some kind of app here in the future where we can sit there and pop a pin and populate this area and it'll tell you where everybody goes during those months.

I'm sorry, I can't change it. We can put more trees up. But I think Mr. Mayor, the point is

on vacation. So tourists aren't the citizens of Claremont ever. So whether we leave on vacation is irrelevant. It's why do we have so many people coming in the spring and the fall, and then we don't have people coming in the summer. And then in the tourism office, I don't know if Brian talked to you about this, but one of the things that we've really never as a county been able to track is the impact of triathlon and endurance sports training on our economy, because they're not coming and staying in hotels. I mean, that's something, it's just been kind of a, we know it's here, we know it's been here, but we don't really know where they're going, where they're staying. And that's why the survey technology that you were using is helpful to be able to kind of track that. As the mayor was talking, I thought, is there a scenario, and this is coming from a place of ignorance, is there a scenario where e-bikes and road bikes for training could share a lane?

Oh, sure. I mean, and there's, you know, and for at least in my world, Personally, I categorize e-bikes into very different buckets. You have e-bikes that commute, mountain bike e-bikes. Those, based on all the other cities I work with, that's not the group necessarily they are focusing on. It's more so your younger kids who have access to these e-bikes, then they soup them up. and then they're using the bike trails, right? So...

So... Stay on that. So we're not talking about e-bikes. We're talking about people who are making the bikes faster and then using them on trails where other e-bike users are okay.

And I would say that, obviously, there is some overlap. You're going to have some of these e-bikes moving pretty quickly. That is a commuter, right? For sure. The complaints, in fact, I got one after our Parks and Rec forum here. that I typically hear are the younger kids unsupervised on e-bikes hanging out late at night and they're in a pack and they're going down a trail, right? So you have both. But back to your question, yes, I think if you have kind of a long distance trail that's more specialized for high speed training, that lives in a perfect world there.

with the event because i'm also hearing and i don't know if you all are hearing the same but i'm hearing a lot of elderly people who are finding freedom with e-bikes that they're able to correct without having to feel like maybe they feel like they're not comfortable driving the car but buying or the golf cart seems to be comfortable too that's what i'm hearing

it's funny that you brought this up there was a whole big survey done about what's the biggest population that are buying teslas now it's the over 80 people because of their ability not to have to drive at night because if it's full self drive it's a phenomenal thing but i don't think uh 80 year olds or 70 are driving e-bikes yeah i would say they're driving they're driving like golf carts and you know one of the things that we really need to address is But I mean, you have to have an infrastructure for golf carts to utilize efficiently. I know we passed the ordinance about allowing in the town, but we need to have, how do they get into the town? And if you don't have a way to do that, I mean, we talked about getting over 50, but even if you just have it in that quadrant, you need to address these stuff.

How do golf carts fit into the conversation?

I think e-mobility, I call that e-mobility because golf carts are certainly part of that. Scooters are part of that. They have the unicycles now that are a part of that. Yeah. So I think, yeah, I think that we are going to see a breakthrough of definitely in the trails, but then really a separation of speed and then use group. So like before you had pedestrian and you had cycling, he had a great point. You've got, cycling that's high-speed training in groups. That could also be now your e-bikes and these other vehicles. The golf cart might fall into that. it's also a compromise because now all of a sudden you're having all these separate lanes for the same use. So, yeah. So I almost think you have, you, you sexualize pedestrian and then you have your high speed or whether that's e-mobility or it's wider, you've got a golf cart and you have passing for people because people at the higher speed are going to be either training or What's the speed limit on your? About 25 miles. About 25, which is the average of what he's saying. Average, right? On elite, right? So that mile per hour speed range, they live together.

So we tested it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it gets wider and wider. The thing that we would have, you know, and as you say, we individualize it. We have a walking trail. We have a cycling trail. We have a golf course trail. We have a two-bike trail. I mean, I think we have to define, we can't go all over the place. So you can do one thing at a time. And I mean, I think it's important that we get the trails done first, at least we get that accomplished. And then we have to also establish what we're gonna do with e-bike. Somebody said there was a fatality with e-bike already. So I mean, everybody was a child at one time and everybody likes to fool around jump over things and do crazy things. But I think we're giving children now the ability to really not only damage themselves, but damage others. So we really have to get some kind of ordinance on this that we can control the situation before it gets out of hand.

encouraging people to embrace freedom, freedom of choice, freedom of financial, freedom of lifestyle. And so it sounds like rather than framing this as a tool conversation, perhaps we should be framing it as a speed conversation. And I'm thinking of Fort Wilderness, I don't know if you've been There's no problem with that for a wilderness. The buses and the golf carts and the bikes, they all live on the same roads. There's just no problem. And why is that? It's because of the speed limit.

Well, not so much the speed limit, but they also educated and trained in that area and respected each other. And that's why I think we got Brian working with one of our e-board staffs, entrepreneur who's out here to do a training class. And we're looking to try to do it. I don't know how far along. safety with it because we have our young kids out here just running up and down the road. Yesterday, for example, I'm going down, what's that, Osceola. I get to about 4th Street there, and I go through 4th Street, another car hit on me. It was a kid. This kid looked like to me, he may have been maybe 10, 12 years old or so. Never stopped at the stop sign. There's just a right across the road from the car. You know, he had a helmet on. Good. And, of course, by the time I got to 3rd Street, I looked at it now, and it had Carol, it stopped at Carol and 3rd, never stopped there. And I'm like, wait a minute, we can't have kids here, and I know I've had Mr. Van Weyden check on some kids, like, sitting up and down the sidewalk here, and I mean, it's all about training and education.

Well, and you're also talking, you mentioned downtown, and we have to keep in mind, I think, and I think it's easy for us to forget is that historic downtown was a grid pattern community. It was designed so that roads were slow and you could get about and you could walk places and in theory, you could bike and golf cart places. Obviously, back then, we didn't have golf carts, but the rest of the city was not built in a traditional grid pattern. And so I think as we're finishing our comprehensive plan and we're incorporating these concepts, creating space that emulates that grid pattern, slow traffic, environment where you know when you enter that space i need to drive i'm coming into port willis i need to drive slow some kid on the golf cart you might fall off the back like it just might happen and if we're looking out for each other in those spaces not forgetting this is a u.s highway and a state highway like you know 1527 you know that's why i like that you picked hancock because i think hancock at least it's a county road that we're talking about encouraging people to be on rather than the state road and the highway. I think that's all you've given us a lot.

I'm sure I'll have questions. Yes, sir.

Thank you. Thank you. I guess my question is more for staff. Because I wasn't real clear on what what outside of the presentation where this was going to be and i kept hearing we're at kind of a 30 000 view for the presentation today and i appreciate that especially as the first time seeing it um what is our process moving forward how does this tie into the actual conference Are we going to do community workshops like we're doing with the comprehensive plan to roll this out? Is this going to be a separate document that we approve as a parks and recreation plan? Is it going to be incorporated into the comprehensive plan? Because we've invested quite a bit of time, energy, and resources, money, into this. What are we doing with it starting from this point moving forward? Thank you. Thank you. I'm asking staff. So I, I, I, I super I co supervise the city manager. So the question goes to the city manager, and I'll let him decide who he wants to answer that question.

Well, I don't know the full answer. I can tell you that a lot of comprehensive plans do have a parks and recreation element, right? But we haven't discussed entirely. That's probably whether it's gonna be a zone within that element, or if it's gonna be so yeah,

I can say this when it comes to the ball field in the park a lot of the parks

uh before you belong staff and prior administration we recognize the problem with our fields and everything so basically if you look at the budgets and everything we've been uh setting our budgets to implement some of the same things we talked about with our partner practice And I appreciate that.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Going back to my question, though, with regard to process and moving forward and tying together the conference.

We talked about we brought Shane on providing all this information and data to DPC because he's a special person.

So if I'm wrong, I'm hearing that something will be incorporated from this into the comprehensive plan so that it is a comprehensive, comprehensive plan.

That was my understanding when we brought him on, their understanding.

And then, I'm sorry. Yeah, please. I think we still need to have a little bit more conversation about that because this level of detail, way more detail than a typical comprehensive plan.

Well, I feel, I guess I would want my colleagues to weigh in on this, but I feel like if we're going to call it a master plan, that that should be something that gets approved by the council as a master plan, or it's a report. that's a reference report. And we've taken no action to approve to say we will or we endorse or we support, whatever you want to call it. And it's a reference document for the comprehensive plan. Whichever direction. Yeah. I just want to make sure we're clear on what we're going to do with that. Because what I don't want to see happen, and I think the gentleman from the truck business mentioned you know we were the city was sitting here 11 years ago having conversations about this and i i didn't know that that report existed um and i don't know that i can probably find it relatively easily on our website to even reference as a reference point to start this conversation and so the last thing i want to see happen is we have this fantastic work that's done and then it just be kind of goes over here and it's not really addressed or looked at and that's why i want to make sure if if we're doing this we're intentional with then how we incorporate it into what we approve as a plan whether it's separate or together and how that gets incorporated into a capital improvements program a project management plan program um a parks and rec department plan and those we have that accountability to track that through uh is really it is really kind of a guide there and what i'm thinking about the other thing i wanted to just confirm if i can is that it sounds like the report is still being polished and the presentation is still being polished but that report and presentation will be turned over to city administration that council will get those and to i think some of the speakers points that that will be available for public on the website

145.

I think digging, being able to reference back and go back and, you know, how do you eat an elk? You know, how do you eat an elk up one bite at a time? And so if you're able to look at five slides and then go back and look at five more, it just allows you to kind of absorb it and incorporate it as we go through rather than here it is approved on Wednesday, approve it on Tuesday. as well.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Let me just say, I just noticed one other thing that you mentioned that I think we're already working on is the youth council. Awesome. I think last report I got, we'll be trying to bring that on in July. It starts in September. Yeah, there you go. Well, we're not ready to do that. They've been working on it, and I appreciate it.

amazing mr mayor if i could add one thing to mr bain's point so that this doesn't become something of the past like the last 11 years i would suggest to the council that we consider taking mr shane's company and put them in a continuous consulting role with us in some capacity to help us just continue to have these conversations and invite his input i think he for some of the consideration.

This report is so much more in-depth than what we did back 15 years ago. We were only focusing on, I think we were only focusing on bikes because bikes were becoming a big thing at the time. e-bikes and of course golf cars. I think I've shared with the council before. I sit at home and I see golf carts, I see e-bikes, I see scooters. I mean some of the things I don't know what they are. They just pass me by right there where I live. I mean I see them all at golf carts and everything.

Mr. Connors, how much work would it take at this point to make Let's just presume we adopted everything. And I don't know that we would, but let's presume we did. How much would it take to make this a master plan? So full trail connectivity, focusing on... Yeah, how far are we from having a master plan for all the different elements that you've got?

I think we're kind of going back to Rick's point. There's two things we need. So we have hyper-focus on the priorities, right? Hancock, Southlake Trail. you have a comprehensive plan that's going parallel with us and they're identifying new uses and perhaps rezoning and infill projects. We would have to, we can develop this, but then we would also have to do a phase two, which I'd call, because we would have to implement all the neighborhoods that then link the arteries to the new uses that are being identified.

Okay, so a trail system master plan is a little farther off. It's another phase.

It's another phase.

But on the, there are other elements that you've suggested in your setup. The additional ball fields, there were things you said to go from B and C to A's. Like those are things we can do without. It seemed like those are things that we could do tomorrow if we wanted to. So how about that kind of part, the NRPA assessment, that piece of it, how far is that from having a master plan?

So NRPA, I think there's two things. If we did it independent of NRPA, because we've been trying to make this a case study on a national level for them to say, hey, look at the way this city did this. I think that's another year because we have to get more surveys. And Brian, I don't want to, I want to get your opinion too. We need to get more feedback based on our timing. We got some feedback, but I really want to get to 1000. so that's 1 and then implementing and part of that process. So, I think that's probably a year plus or minus with everything again. We'd also have to look at the comprehensive plan as as that's evolving because we're going to see new things coming out of that, especially in that South wellness way area and North area. So yeah, there are things on here which I call kind of quick reaction, quick fast track initiatives you could start today. And then there's one as you get further down where they take a little bit longer. Hancock Road obviously is a long lead item.

Would you be able, as part of your final report, to give us, I think to Mr. Bain's point, guidance on here are things you could do fiscal year 27? Yes. And two of those things might be continue your trail study. continue your nrpa study right like that and then in 28 adopt master plan absolutely right can you give us a timeline because we're all coming into budget 27 and we need to make informed decisions um i'll say i'm not thrilled on doing all this work and saying oh let's wait until next year i'd like to take this and make the community better in fiscal year 27 if we can so

Absolutely. Can you can I be forwarded the comprehensive plan overall schedule, and kind of those milestone deliverables if I have that I can work, because I definitely want to feed that into as our process.

Yeah, I can get that to you.

What I'll do is I'll submit that as we clean this up in the final submittal.

So as we go through budget, Brian, we can talk about, okay, what's adopted, incorporated, is that... Does that clarification help you?

Yes, for a fiscal year 27, because we start that really in full earnest in a couple of weeks. July 1, I think, is when we get our budget. That's perfect, yeah. And our sessions are late.

You'll have that.

So yes, I think for the budget, for some allocation of resources even if we haven't identified exactly all projects yet but we've got concepts or theories of like how much we want to try to tackle in that first fiscal year or put in that first the next iteration of the capital improvements uh plan that we can start to make those allocations and then i would be okay doing that without having approved quote-unquote So you're happy with that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I can get that for you. And that's why I know last council meeting we put one item, the Felton Park, we put it on hold. And that's why I was saying I felt like we shouldn't have put it on hold. We should have moved that project forward because we already budgeted for it this year. And that's just part of the plan that we set in place is to try to upgrade our fields. and everything. And of course, next year, I haven't looked at his budget, but I know he'll probably have in there another field that we're looking to try to do next year. So we have to talk with Brian and see what all he's got. I know he talked to Plain about trying to upgrade our field. get to where you try to talk to us about what i feel and everything so we own that that's why i felt like uh we still need to move ahead with felton park now that we have the funds there and it's already there and i think you got that you got to work there we can go ahead and get that one done but i i like every everything you got there and i'm pretty much in total It's going to be a matter of what Brian was asking. It's going to be up to this council, up to us to decide how much and where we're going to move everything to and how far we're going to go. It's going to be up to many, I'm quite sure it's going to tie into the comprehensive plan or something like that. It's just up to us to account for what we want to do with it and how much we want to do at one time.

Can I just ask one quick question that came to mind? When the Little League said that, and I think South Pole also, that they would Fund the maintenance. Do we have an outside partnership in maintenance? Or is it just Parks and Recreation can do maintenance on it? Remember you said something about the county. We're gonna pay for a new site.

I don't think Lou Lee would be able to fund the whole thing.

I'm just saying, that's the impression I got when you said that.

Financially, I mean, being corrected, financially we can accept money. What we don't want them to do is to... They have their own motors and whatever. Yeah, I understand that. They pay, they give us a 13 fee per season. Right.

Yeah, that's okay. Make this a bit cheap.

Yeah, I mean, it's actually fairly common in baseball fields with cities and counties that sometimes there's some buy-in and even sometimes some maintenance.

Thank you. Do we have any questions left for Mr. Hernandez?

Thank you, City Councilman Mayer. Thank you.

I don't want to hold a whole comment. I just thought if you didn't mention softball being out there in Oklahoma and

Oh, I tell you. Yeah. Thank you.

Let's go.

I'm sorry about the little delay. I guess we have a little technical difficulty, but I think we got it all worked out now. I can hear you. I hear you because you're right here. I don't hear you. I wouldn't hear myself, but I can hear myself now. Maybe I'm trying to hear you. Yes, sir. If you all would take the seat, please. How are you?

I'm fine.

Now is it working? It's working. OK. So, we started several months ago looking at the Bishop Park field. And honestly, in comparison to what you just saw with this, all this detailed information, we're still at very early stages of trying to understand what ought to be done here. Our initial approach, so I can stand anywhere here and talk now? So our initial approach was really looking at Bishop Park as perhaps simply a renovation project to kind of restore what was there or what has been there all of these years. So that's what you saw a month ago when we were here, when our renderings were presented to the city council. And following that meeting, I know Brian had some meetings with other folks from the community and talked about maybe some visioning for the park and some additional features that might be added to it. So we went back and kind of looked at those things. Brian, can I just advance this or do I need to click on each file?

You have to click on each.

Okay, how do I get back there? You have to show me how to get there. Oh, okay. All right, good. Still call these. So some of the input that was received last time, let me go back to this. I apologize, I don't know how to operate your system here. Some of the feedback that was received last time was enlarging the dugout space, moving the restrooms adjacent to the seating. We had, in our original rendering, we had anticipated restrooms and a small concession stand being located directly under the seating. So, we've removed that for this iteration. Oh, I see, I just gotta go to the tab, I gotcha. I'm used to using Bluebeam rather than Adobe, I'm sorry. So, and then one of the other, another one of the comments was that they wanted to try to keep the look of the existing structure. Dave Kuntz, Similar to what it is now well right now it's painted block, so you know we wanted to try to do a little bit better than that, and so what we were thinking is you know architectural block here, you know integrally colored still kind of the same form factor if that's the desire of the city to keep that look. and then just try to dress that up some. So other comments included, maybe including a playground. So we have a space here for a playground. And then also space for food trucks, which we thought could, those food trucks could happen either along on the street parking, or we're showing them in here in the existing parking lot that's to the north of the field. um so those were things we looked at uh brian i know the um ai generated image you provided us with there was a lot of other bells and whistles here too that you know you can have there's got to be advertising or or sponsorship opportunities that could be used along the perimeter of the field that rendering also showed maybe some of the something similar the existing city gateway features that you see throughout the city in the outfield we could do all of those things but really what we focused on is trying to see if we could renovate the facility and get everything to fit where it needs to be because for example the existing bleachers are actually over the the property line they're outside the property line so we wanted to try to reshape the grandstands a little bit so that those would be within the property line you know like it should be and then develop features from there. So we just finished these renderings I'm showing you just in the last, yesterday basically. We still owe you a construction budget. And what I would suggest doing, especially in light of what I saw in this presentation, There's some good opportunities here, I think, for visioning what the next step is with this field, with this facility and where it goes. So what I intend to do with our estimator is give you a budget that's gonna have kind of an a la carte list of things. So in other words, here's the basic cost to renovate the grandstands, you know, build it so it's structurally sound, get the larger dugouts in, do the new restroom facilities, excuse me, do the new restroom facilities, and then do like an a la carte menu of costs, like scoreboard. The rendering we saw, the AI generator rendering showed a scoreboard feature. And then some of the, you know, maybe solid, that could have the sponsorship opportunities added to them as well. So there'd be kind of an escalating or a menu of costs that you could select from. Of course, there was another item that was talked about that would be a big cost item, and I think it was mentioned here a couple times this afternoon, is doing artificial turf. That would be that would be a nice to have on this field but that's going to come at a large cost so what we're going to do is create like i said we're going to create a budget for you that has an a la carte list of improvements and then really the next step is you know this is very rudimentary simple conceptual design right now So what we want to go is deeper into a concept design, you know, incorporate the features that you want to have based on the budget that you have once you arrive at a budget. And then that will determine how far, you know, how much or how little gets done on this field.

Are you suggesting tearing down the building still?

Yes. I can almost agree that existing bleachers and grandstands need to go down. It's the same that one was there when I was four years old.

Yeah, when I first went to look at this facility and the fact that the upper section of the bleachers are closed off due to safety concerns, that kind of told me all I need to know. Well, beyond that, you have your existing restrooms that are underneath here. And if we're going to move all of that out, we can certainly look at the possibility of saving the shell of the building and then doing something with that.

I specifically asked us to ask our building inspector what we could do to not trigger ADA and not have to tear down the structure.

Well, accessibility is going to be triggered. The fact that because of the historical village and the historic factor for me, these are trying to maintain the historical. I also understand that because of the beaches, and I know those grandstands now, they all open underneath. It's just dirt underneath. It's not even concrete. You can crawl underneath them, and you almost have to do something with them. The restrooms, they get the ADA and everything. They have to come out. You don't have to get EPA.

You don't tear down the building. That's the point. It's a vintage building. That's what makes it.

Remember, remember, once, if you don't do any renovation, you're right, we don't have to worry about ADA. Once we started renovating and doing that, which I guess I mean, Mr. Ward, tell me how it fit into that. ADA scheme because I know the state, the law basically states as long as you're not renovating the building, you don't have to comply with ADA. Okay, it was built prior to 1989, I think it is. Without that, you have to apply ADA, so we need Mr. Ward to interpret that law.

If you were to leave the building as it is and just say, we're going to replace the bleachers as a maintenance item, Right. I think if you, even then, you still would want to add some accessible seating there. Because as long as you're going to touch it, you need to try to do what you can to improve it. But the dollar value required to do that or the extent of the improvements may not be as extensive. So if you want to keep the shell, you know, that's something we could certainly look at. That's really kind of what you're seeing here is just a new version of the same shell.

It's just a couple of dollars. I mean, that's the problem is when I talk to the baseball players, what they told me they wanted was talking to public works. It was an opportunity to make this the entrance to downtown. It's part of East Avenue. It's a complete it's an opportunity for us to say, welcome to Claremont. And to do an historic baseball concept on the outside do do you know you walk through the turnstiles when you're coming in and it's got this vintage vibe to it and and you can do the history of baseball and. You know the way that they described it to me is because of the way the outfield fence goes instead of having chain link and this is showing chain link fence with there's no shade. there's no shade on the outside there's no grandeur to this, this is papers on the corner. You know, they were talking about, let's make it so you got this beautiful kind of brick and iron looking fence on the outside and you're coming in. But the one thing that was loud and clear is we have to turf this field. This field is unplayable. I hope the baseball people will tell me I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Nope, I got you. Okay. The turf is unplayable and there's no point in having grandstands for a field that you can't play on. So we have to take care of the playing surface, first and foremost, but beyond anything. And it's evident that this facility has been in disrepair. It's evident that the wood bleachers have not been maintained. Because this isn't an issue of the buildings falling down. This is an issue of we have wood bleachers and we haven't maintained them for 40 years.

Well, you're right. They've never been maintained. You know, we've been... Talking about doing something with it, since I, even before I was mayor, we was talking about doing something with it, you know, because it hasn't been maintained and we haven't been putting any money in, but it used to be maintained very well two years ago. When I first came back, I was surprised when I first came back in 2000, well, 20, 1998, how good the condition of the field was, but I guess that's still because it hadn't been that long before the high schools had stopped using it for basic high school

So I thought we were going to see a new entrance to downtown. We talked about making East Avenue more walkable. I mean this to me is...

He says it's preliminary. He says it's preliminary and I thought it was kind of quick to be coming back because I think we just had this one about three weeks ago, about five months or so ago. And he comes back and I thought it was a little quick for you to be coming back and everything. I would like to hear what the gentleman has to say and what they have to add and what their visions are. Sure. Unless you finished.

No, I'm... Sorry. I want to hear the input. I mean, you know, because I think that's what needs to happen here. There needs to be a vision. What are we going to do with this field? How do we want it to be presented to the city? How's the city going to use it? And I think that's what really needs to be developed. And then we can do anything. It's easy for me to change to a picket fence on a rendering, and you get a whole different look.

Exactly.

a whole different budget number too so we just got to decide what the vision is and how far we want to go with that well on that note have we heard from that lando pro team with that major league baseball grants do we know what they need no we didn't i'm not i mean you're in the league right come on come on come on are you in a league i know yo yo you play on sunday morning most of y'all i'll tell you what i feel a lot better than i've saw

How are you doing? I'm David. Kind of like, maybe did we forget about Bishopfield a little bit? Again, I'm David Santiago. I own Double Play here in Claremont.

We train anywhere from 8-year-olds all the way to 18-year-olds in baseball. We have people watching.

in baseball, and we have softball coaches as well at our facility right here on 50. I've been practicing at this field for the last four years through my facility, but through Little League, I've been at this field for the last 10 years. It's the forgotten field. It's a forgotten gem. It's unfortunate. As much as potential there is for this place, you know, I've passed around some renderings. The turf field, Would be great. I play our turf fields in the weekends with my tournaments. We get through the rain, lightning. You can't do nothing about lightning, but we get through it with the rain. If we didn't have the turf fields, we do play tournaments at natural fields and we know when the rain comes, we're done. OK, the opportunity to continue that game is out of question. In its present state right now, we're planning to bring collegiate summer teams here, but I can't do that at this field, okay? I would have to look at a high school, perhaps maybe down in Davenport. They have turf complexes there, but I would love to bring a collegiate summer team here. And with that, it brings teams coming from Cocoa, coming from New Smyrna. It brings all that where we saw that our July and our August numbers kind of fell. Maybe we can bump those a little bit. Not a whole lot, right? But a little bit. It brings also something new to Claremont that we haven't had or haven't had at all on the baseball side. You know, we want to talk about we're the choice of champions. I would love for that to be true for baseball. You know, I think we're there for softball, having NCC there, having collegiate championships there. You know, I don't see that happening with baseball side of things, but at least for up to, you know, collegiate summer team, you know, maybe a semi-pro. I don't know. I've got things working. But, you know, collegiate summer team, we could bring that to Claremont. And if we have something to revitalize Bishop Field, we could definitely do that.

and then this looked good. I heard him say something about a scoreboard and I wrote down a note and I looked at the scoreboard here. What's the cost of a scoreboard these days? The last time I read the ball was some years ago, it was up in the $40,000, $50,000 range. A lot more than that just for a scoreboard.

Do you want to put WB in it?

I don't know.

I left this in.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and council. And this is like a month ago when we heard about this. By the way, my name is Jorge Vasquez. I'm the head coach at Real Life. And we do have a high school team that plays at Bishop. So this has been our home field for the past five years. And like Coach Santiago said, it's just unplayable. So I think that phase one has to be the surface. Turf would solve a lot of problems. You don't have to turf the whole field. There's still a trend. A lot of colleges just turf the infield. That's where a lot of the maintenance comes from. So if you could, I mean, ballpark what I've heard, 300 grand to turf an infield versus 1.2, 1.5 for the whole field, right? There's a lot of volume in the outfield, but I would start there. I am very partial. If you could keep the structure, That would be huge. We see what it could be right down the road, Leesburg. Have you guys heard of Pat Thomas Stadium? Unbelievable. We play them. We play Leesburg High. We play First Academy. And then the Leesburg Lightning play there. And to Coach Santiago's point, there is a need to expand the collegiate league here. They've actually asked, hey, would Bishop, if it gets renovated, would there be a team? And that does bring impact because you have kids that have to come stay here. You bring future major leaguers maybe that play. It's kind of like the Cape Cod or the Alaska League. I played, I'm a Cubs fan, played with some future Cubs in my summer college days. Ours was in South America with Athletes in Action. But I do think if we could, that's the only thing I would voice is there's a clubhouse in there. I don't know if many of you know that. There is an actual clubhouse inside Bishop, that would be a must to bring a collegiate team. We would love to use it as a high school team. We don't have a field at our high school. It helps bring a sense of community to have that clubhouse use that, you know, Leesburg, they use the clubhouse at Pat's Thomas stadium. Uh, so does first Academy. So, um, and then the maintenance, I think that I was talking to bright, which by the way, Brian and Taylor and page do an amazing job, uh, But I think it should also be maintenance should be on the teams to use. That's part of like growing up, you know, high school, we had to do our own maintenance baseball. There's a reason why you maintain it in the middle of the game. They have to drag the field. They have to rate the mounds. If we're somehow allowed and empowered to do that, like even now, that's a quick win that we could do to do this. But I would say that. the field surface has to be the first priority, you know, and obviously there was patches done to the, to the grandstand. I mean, it was falling apart, you know, my, my family's up there and, you know, you know, they stepped through there, that step through it, you know, but if you could, you know, maybe eliminate the bathrooms to make more locker, more storage, that's another big thing. Storage baseball has become very tech, you know, you're, you're bringing pitching machines in your, you know, and it'd be nice to keep those there for the teams like us, double play that use it, primarily that we could keep some of that equipment there. But yeah, obviously I would love to keep the history of it if you could keep the shell of it.

It's a men's league.

It's a men's league. And that's another thing. That's a big deal. The men's league is the place here, the place at Samford, the place at... Yeah, that's another, you know, and if you do turf, you could play more games. And to Coach Santiago's point, Central Florida is the mecca of travel baseball, collegiate baseball in the spring, because I played up north in a small school in Kentucky, we would come down to Cape Coral to play to start the season. If you could put the money in here, they could come and play some of their spring games here. You have D2 teams from up north, NAIA schools. They would play here. They would play at Pat Thomas. It would create synergy to go around and be like, hey, Bishop's being used by XYZ teams, college teams, and they'll bring money. I mean, they will bring the finances, but I do think... Yeah, the buses. I mean, it's something that... And in the summer... That collegiate league would be plug and play. It really would. It is a thing. Leesburg, they average 1,000 fans every game. It is a thing. But you would have to have, again, maintain the clubhouses, expand the dugouts. I love the idea of the concession stands outside of underneath it. I think if you could preserve the shell, I'm not a GC guy, but if you could preserve that while rebuilding everything inside of it, maybe save some money there. Yeah.

I do know they play on Sunday morning. Every Sunday morning I call myself getting dressed and leaving the house early to talk to them. They're not there. They're on my way to church. I keep saying I want to stop in and find out who they are. The last couple of weeks I've noticed they've been playing through the night on weekdays. Yeah, yeah. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights.

Yeah. That's definitely his group. And let me tell you that when we play their home games at night, I mean, we'll average, you know, 100, 150 people. That grandstand, it's popping. I mean, it really is. It's a great thing. And, you know, if we could just maintain the charm. But it definitely needs a scoreboard, too. I even bought a scoreboard that we would bring in because it's almost like, you know, especially high school baseball, sometimes the scores look like a football game. So, yeah. there was um i don't want to go on record but there is give us a lead um there's several grants and there's actually several major league scouts that live in claremont city uh and so um there is grants and it's, if you put in some, they put in some, but I do, they do start, you know, and a lot of them is turf. They're doing turf because they know that the maintenance is such a big deal. So they, um, but, uh, there is a gentleman that, that we work with Wilmer. Uh, he's, he's tapped in. He's more like little kid programs, but he's mentioned a lot of the grants. Uh, I know real life at one point was looking at it for a field. They, they abandoned that, but there, there's a grant out there. So, yeah.

You're welcome. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you. I guess what we have, I don't know what y'all thought of this. I don't know if you saw any of these and everything.

I did. Those were the ones I was referring to, yeah.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Hold on. Anyone else from the public want to comment on this before I bring you back to council? Is there any way to go back one slide?

Okay, so I already spoke on behalf of the trail system and the cycling and all that stuff but this whole plan actually means a whole lot to me because My house if I may so i'm actually here on behalf of the 10 houses that are all in back of bishop field and we all 100 support the field we love having it there we support the renovation of the field one thing that's concerning about this specific plan and that all of us in on Second Street right there are concerned about is increasing the traffic, increasing the cut throughs and decreasing our property values. So those are three things that we definitely are cautious about. Specifically with this, my wife and I do not want a turn in directly across the street from our house. If we could renovate this field, renovate the existing footprint. I know there has been some talk about maybe adjusting the footprint of the field a little bit to accommodate collegiate play, things like that, moving home base, whatever. That's all great. It's definitely way overdue as far as renovations go. I don't think there were any repairs really made to it after the last hurricane. So renovating it, rejuvenating it, bringing in additional play, all sounds wonderful. We as residents right there just want to be cautious of whatever footprint actually means for our quality of life right there.

And I can tell you that I

I can tell you that every week or so I pull home run balls out of my front yard. My dogs love them. They chew them up. I can't give them back.

I'm not sure. The netting along the outfield fence on that area is along 2nd Street. Are they gone? Are they torn down?

There's no netting there. It's just the chain link fence.

We used to have netting over there to try to protect cars and everything back there somewhere. I hear you concerned and that wasn't a concern, especially with the parking back there, balls coming back out, lighting, one other thing that I invested, especially with hopefully the lighting don't disturb you all back here.

I do have a question because there's sometimes that those lights are on until after 11 p.m. and there's nothing going on. I don't know if they're on a timer or not.

I'll be honest with you, I've been complaining about it. And I'm coming home most nights, and I'm seeing the lights on. Sometimes I'm sitting there almost at my house, and I can look over at myself.

It's got to raise the power bill a little.

When I come down, there's nobody there. So I've been complaining. Long before I was a mayor, I was complaining to this council about how much energy we're wasting on an empty field. Not just that, but also a park path. We have the same thing probably. I see the same thing in McKinney Park. All our fields. So we need to get a, in this day and age, we need to get a hand on it, because it's very much energy.

Okay, I'll get that contact information from you. Thank you

Okay, I'm not a sportsy girl at all, but what I do love that was said here is treating this as an entrance to historic downtown. When you said that, I was like, oh, even the way the topography works on East Avenue, it has you looking up towards this corner. um which is such an incredible opportunity and then of course this is a historic field and historic neighborhood let's not let's not ruin it let's enhance it let's capitalize on that like that's such a such an asset and cities all the time they kind of throw that stuff away too fast And, um, I think there's just a really cool opportunity here. Um, it's trickier and harder and I wouldn't assume that it's cheaper. It might be, but a lot of times restoration and renovation isn't actually cheaper because it's more complicated. Um, but there could even be grants on that side of it too, outside of the athletic part of it. Um, if you treat the project and approach the project that way. So that's all I'll say. Thank you.

one more thing to add about safety.

So one thing that we need, and this could be a quick fix, foul balls. So netting, yeah. So literally baseballs are running $12 a baseball. I mean, it's a thing. So if we're in a game, there's foul balls going here all the time. I literally have like our JV guys, you've got like 12 year olds, 13 year olds, you know, they're like middle school for us. running across east avenue to get baseballs baseballs you know we have umpires yelling hey we need baseball we need baseballs right so that's one thing the netting the other thing is a piece of equipment it's called a it's called a batter's turner it's a batting cage that's movable we have the space here to do that every park has those uh you know you go down to the nerve down in uh polk county they have four of them you know uh we actually have one that was donated to us i think i called taylor to see if we could bring it over somebody else took took them up on that offer. But if we could have a batter's turtle there for practice, you bring it in, you probably see in a major league game before where you can't hit a foul ball, basically. That's a need. If we could do that and then the netting. We could use more. Right now, there's only one right here. Maybe make the double here and the double there. I mean, that's cages and both sides.

The cage and the bull, I think, that we talked about at the council, the cages, bullpens, pitching cages, batting cages, all that.

So I just want to share part of the list that I shared with the Bentley group. So grandstanded dugouts with the same look as existing structures. Two locker rooms under the grandstand. New dugouts that are larger. But if you could just do the infield, that's where the word tear.

And to be honest, the netting in the outfield Bishop, I mean, when I got some plates, a huge part for baseball standards, it's pretty big part really daddy needs to be clubbing. It's the thought it, this is, this is where.

you know, that the especially down East Avenue, understand that we if we do this, and we make it right, eventually, they're going to be college players, they're going to be guys that are going there for potentially pro triage.

So that's where we just would be 700 feet.

So that might be right. Oh, yeah, right.

Yes, definitely. Yes, it's actually a shorter fence there. And I think the original if I remember correctly, the original scoreboard used to be right. Yeah.

So right center. Yeah.

And we need a flag. We stand up there. We bring in our own sales system. We do that. You know, our national anthem. And we're like staring at nowhere. And it's actually there's a neighbor over here that has a flag. And we stare at that one. So, you know, that's that's a quick fix. There's a black hole. We need something.

So when I talk to the base.

They're actually right now they've reduced it to 34.

Thank you. So it's not just bigger, it's 34, which is three of the standard bleachers, right?

If you double the size of what it is, I have a team of 22 where we're in there. And what they were looking at is this is a

with the playground, and then a gazebo of restrooms out here. This is what they said to me, I don't know if this is it. The gazebo of restrooms out here, so the idea is the families could be here while, so these guys are scouts to understand, so they're saying they're gonna recruit local kids and try them out. So if this is a smart field, so you put a Yakutech smart field system here, so all the scouts would be in here during that event. That's another, there's a... And then the families are kind of, you know, they don't get to be with the scouts.

That is something, so the Hintrack system, it's something they're standardizing. You've seen baseball, they're calling ABS, automatic balls and strikes. They're $20,000. If you do build it in here somewhere where you can house one and it can't be stolen, problem if we went in on one together or if the city provided to make it a smart field if you put a hit tracks in there you need to secure it right so that's a way to secure it in in grandstands what do you think about that idea of the cages on the one side and like a family area on the right side i i mean i i still see i still think no And now you're crossing the parking lot to get to the food trucks. Well, there's still huge here. You can put the bullpens here and there's still a crossway up here. You can still have a, this is really wide. It's really wide.

Right now, there's two bullpens there on the right side, which you cannot use. That's another issue.

Because of maintenance?

Yes. Because of maintenance, the way it's made, it was done wrong. What I was going to say is, if you guys are going to invest in this,

and one of the coaches at Double Play. Did you see any of them?

My name is Joseph Mercado. I'm one of the coaches at Double Play. I played minor league ball in Puerto Rico. I used to play in this field in the men's league. I've been coaching in South Lake Little League, Mineola, Groveland. My son right now, he's playing college ball. He's one of our coaches also. He was here earlier. He got bored. He said, Dad, they're not talking about the fields.

We got to get out of here.

So, yeah. The thing is that I've been traveling around to mostly new fields and I see what they do and they look real nice, but when it comes as a baseball player, there's always something, something that's missing. It was, you know, it's because I think that they don't ask an actual player. Like you were saying that you spoke to people. We had a tryout, we've been doing trials, MLB trials at our facility because we were trying to do them here, but the mound was hard. And we had a major league player that he wanted to invest in fixing the mound himself. He was going to pay for it because we had several tryouts and we couldn't do it. And the college league that he was talking about, that's a big plus. You got teams from Tampa, St. Pete, Jupiter. Right now, the closest one now here, the central floor, is Leesburg. And the field there, the bleachers are concrete. The dugouts are as wide as where you're sitting at. Those are the dugouts. No, you are literally, none of the kids sit in the dugout, you can't. But they bring in fans and they do showcases. And right now, like you were saying, the bullpens, the part about the food trucks, I didn't understand that too much, but right now you have the bullpens are not here. The bullpens are right next to the dugout, right? Well, the dugouts right now are...

Number five, right?

Yeah, the bullpens are right here. There's no bullpens over here.

So we'd still have room for like a family area inside the park.

and the idea of the food trucks was there's the curb cut so you could drive the truck in that was why they were right and you can you can fence this off because you're gonna have to bullpen it will walk here so the ball doesn't get by and the cages that you have here you you wouldn't be able to do them this way yeah they don't have to be the way they are now you would have two two on each side um The reason you need a bullpen on each side because this team, home team here, they want to warm up instead of coming all the way over here. They hit the batting cages here, nobody hits during the game.

So you could put the cages all on one side.

Yes, the cages over here, a bullpen over here.

the same thing somewhere or you know around here so that's the question is could you do all the cages on one side so you pull down on both sides of cages could be on one side yes and you need to leave room for that just beyond and there's room there for the batter's turtle so we we can bring it in because i mean right now we can't do that in price so we'll be able to go this way and we thought about i remember when i was playing here there was a gentleman living under

Yes.

Like on purpose? Homeless. Homeless.

Yeah, he was living under there. And he would come out.

He had a locker.

No, he would go into the natural beaches. Underneath the beach, as I said, underneath the beach.

Yes.

actually in the bleachers that's where the uh supposedly the equipment to chop the lines and yeah at the maintenance but what he was saying is i get it turfing the whole thing will be nice but it's not well it is necessary because if you're going to have these big these really good players on the field they're not going to nobody's going to put their grid player in the outfield on a field that's maintained at a recreational level there's probably it has to, a whole field's gonna have to.

I mean, that would be great, but it's not like it's a main thing, because there's several high schools right now, Lake Bradley High School, only the infield starts. TNXL? TNXL, yeah, that's what they have.

Yeah, but in this case, though, we're gonna have to do a lot of work on the outfield to get it, if you can keep it real, it's gonna be a lot of work effort to be done out there, because I know it's a lot of homes and everything in the outfield as well.

Outfield grads. I understand. I mean, our grad student does a good job, but finding a major academy is not what we want to do. We want to do the same what this league does. And I'm not going to indicate grads. I'm just referring to better players.

Can I get you to come to the back, Paul?

Is the council open to, because this is an interesting debate. We're on the same page, and I'm finding it to be an interesting debate. Is this account with the council ever be open to some sort of management agreement for this facility? Not dissimilar to the one that we have for the rowing facility where there's a group of people I mean, listen, baseball has experts, they have real facility experts, they have experts beyond any measure of expertise. Statistically, yeah, if we have, if there's a group, not dissimilar to the rowing facility where we had a relationship where someone else managed the facility is that something the council would be i'm not saying we're committing has it ever been done before yes we do it with the wrong club yeah but i mean that with baseball with maintaining the team every major league organization in america is managed by a private facility baseball teams do it i guess the question is if we if we did that yeah i'm not saying we should or shouldn't right now there too i'm not saying we should and we did

and how do we let other groups use that facility?

Yeah, I think that becomes the question.

It'd be a corporate public use. And essentially, like if I would do it, I'm just saying, this is what I do. I rent out lanes in my facility. And then on top of that, we do tryouts. We do showcases. We do other things. And we go out to the public that want to use these things. You know, they want these services. And essentially, we are the keeper of those facilities.

I thought this was going to be a presentation on the future of Bishop Park and

person in this room what bishop field should be and we're going to get 30 different answers i think we haven't even addressed what is bishop field is bishop field a recreational place for kids to go play baseball for low for the city of claremont or is it a professional combine place to to that is like i don't think either one is bad but we're we're like going down this road of like top of the line everything and that's okay but that i don't think that's the history of bishop field can i address the bishop of the field the history of bishop field has been a place for the kids of claremont to play ball and i don't know i i don't know if i'm comfortable saying the city needs to in its parks and recreation programs provide a semi-pro to pro facility without having that conversation with the community. I don't know that the general community feels that way about Bishop Field. I think we went down this road today of a $10 or $12 million project And wow, that's a whole different thing than what came to us and we said, let's workshop. And if that's the route we want to go, great. But man, that is not what was kind of presented as what today was going to be. I feel like today was going to be a presentation of what was the Parks Department, after hearing from the council and city staff hearing from the council, they were going to present a plan. And if we're not ready for that, that's okay. Then maybe we shouldn't be dealing with this today. There needs to be a special committee of people that gets put together to get something to the table to present to us. I just don't know that, I don't know, I feel like we were all over the board on this.

I think what you're trying to say is, is it a little league field, or is it a professional field, is it semi-professional? Can we outsource it to people that really know how to run a professional field? Does the neighborhood want a professional field? The additional parking that would be, and concessions and things like that? and what we want with it. What it was in the past. What do we want to do in the future?

Let me give you the history. You're somewhat incorrect about the history of Bishop Field. Bishop Field has always been a multi-use type field, I guess you could say. Semi-pro has always played there. Kids have always played there. High school have played there. College has played there. That has always been the history of Bishop Field. When I was a kid, we used to go down there on Wednesday nights and play as Boy Scouts and everything. Some of my Little League players, we would practice there. So it's always been somewhat, not just a Little League field, it's been a community field. It's always been different. All ages, I think similar approach. As I said, one of the big things with me growing up, we used to have an old Negro baseball league that played in the outside. And remember, it used to be, I don't know if you, Brian, want to turn it right down, on the other side, Interstate 4 and 27 used to have a big baseball club. Huh?

Tinkerfield?

No, not Tinkerfield. It used to be a big, in the 80s, 90s, I guess it was, there was a big baseball complex down there called Baseball Club. They had all baseball. And they would sometimes come, some of them teams would sometimes come up here. It was a semi-pro baseball league. Matter of fact, I even got a team together from my base, from MacDill Air Force Base. Of course, like I said, I was in that department. I put a team together, a team, to play in that league. I used to send a team from MacDill Air Force Base. We used to play some of these semi-pro teams, and they actually came up here and played in Bishop Field once. In reality, that field has always been for everyone. And I think that's what we're trying to get back is preserve the history. I would like to preserve the history. It's very important for me to preserve the history of the field and have it in good shape for anybody. If we're going to bring some college in here, just to help economic impact, let's bring them in.

Without excluding the community. I think we were all on that.

Yeah, the community is still there. I mean, like I say right now, I know people out in the community, I don't know where everybody be coming, but on Sunday mornings when I'm on my way to church, and there's so many cars and people out there, and even through the weeknights, I've been seeing a few of them down in the plain and all that, where they're all coming from. It's being very well utilized right now.

But Mr. Mann, I think to your point, it'd be great if there was a designated committee to talk about what might this look like. Because honestly, all you're really hearing here is sound overwhelming. a baseball field. They're literally just saying these are the basic elements. The other stuff is the architectural art. That's what's overwhelming.

Yeah, but I think also, too, if you talk about historic significance of Bishop Field, Wrigley, Soldier Field, Fenway, Lambeau, what do they all have in common? grass, none of them have turf. And turf, while easier to maintain or long-term viability, it does change the historical significance or structure of that. And I think there needs to be some examination of that and some weight of that, the historical character and value of it, the gateway for the city. I think that's paramount. to this whole conversation. I'm seeing a parking lot up here that my first initial reaction is, heck to the no. Because unless it's grass, I don't wanna see all that concrete up there. Uh, you know, and I think, you know, I don't know. I just feel like this wasn't really, I'm not trying to place blame. I'm not trying to be condescending. I'm really not. I'm just frustrated by the fact that I don't really feel like this was a workshop that was presenting. Here's what we want to do. Uh, it was a work session and, and, and we really, i feel like we just lacked direction on that conversation and we were just we were just starting to throw everything out um and i i'm worried that now we're going to just be back the same spot again of hey we're here we're the city council we're going to give direction to go back and work this and and we i don't know why we really spent the last hour uh having this conversation here today we're just not ready for the workshop i'm okay with that we're not well i think one thing that

you know, frustration, breakdowns and opportunity for a breakthrough. And so Brian said, Look, we because he's right, like, with a typical parks and rec department budget, this field cannot be maintained, to your point, as a traditional baseball field, you know, I think that's me all the way. But I can get there for the community safe, right? Like, that's kind of where I'm at. But if this I do think a way to this is a unique This is not your standard. And from the conversations I had with Mr. Foreman, it was, well, we could make it like, multi purpose. My opinion on it was, this has been a baseball field for eight years. To your point, it has a unique place in baseball history that is very important to many, many Americans. I think the only way to not put Mr. Foreman in an impossible situation, but still accommodate the standard that you're describing, and I do think this is a visionary item, is would we be willing to entertain a reasonable proposal for management at that facility. Because I believe this gentleman, the gentleman who stood up at our last meeting, I think there are plenty of people in this meeting alone who could come in and say, I've got the resources, This is what it might cost, or these are the things we need from the city, but we can maintain this. And there are examples of that. And if we're open to that, then I think that it would be very significant and responsible for us to say, okay, let's put together a committee. I could see a group coming through whether it's through and I don't know if they extend this far into the CRA, I don't know how that works, but for example, or if it's a new non-profit that's the Friends of Bishopfield or something like that, I could see that as a result if there's the passion in the community to take that responsibility and the accountability. And we do have an history of doing that. If we say, no, we don't want that, we want it to be through Parks and Recreation, I will say to you, I would vote today, let's turf it and start there because it's unplayable right now. And at least it would be playable if we could turn it and fix the wood and be done with it. But if we want to really say, hey, this is the gateway in the city, we see this as a real opportunity, I do think further workshops would be beneficial. And so I would be with you on that.

As the mayor was talking about the Negro league playing here, there's a story to be told about the spiel education component that even someone who's not there for baseball. visits Claremont and realizes this is a historically significant place that has plaques and information for someone to be able to absorb that and take that in is truly an opportunity that I feel like we absolutely have to take advantage of if we're going to do work there to bring it up to something more than it is today.

As I stated earlier, I wasn't I was a little shocked to see it come back to us so soon, but I thought we gave more time than this because that was one of my concerns in the council meeting, would they be able to give us some real positive looks within 30 days or so, and how much time they need. So, as you say, he's just getting into his workshop, and I think one of the benefits of what we've done here today is the fact that we've thrown out a lot more ideas and things that he can go back and now work with, and I think that's what he was kind of looking for as well. It's kind of looking for some some guidance and what our expectations are as well. So I can I can I can sit in and entertain. I don't mind entertaining someone in the management field if we put all this into it, this funding into it to bring it up to where we want it. Yeah, why don't we have somebody because it is a lot. I'm going to be honest with you. We don't have the manpower to sit there and maintain this thing on a daily basis because it would be a lot of work to maintain. especially if we end up keeping real turf out there, you know, so.

Yeah, if it's real turf.

Real turf, I mean, you know, I mean, and going back to Mr. Bain, you know, and then Wrigley Field and all that, they have ground maintenance booths out there 24-7, you know, and everything, maintaining stuff, and I know we can't handle that here. So, yeah, entertaining, having somebody to maintain for us would be great if we want to do that. It could be, and it could be, economic impact with all the different people coming in to see how much I would take.

I mean, the only thing that you know, the point about outsourcing it has been who controls who can play there, that that, you know, that company, what is it then Not necessarily.

It's subject to whatever you come up with in the agreement. You know, we've done things where we share facilities subject to city events.

I mean, there's options. We write the contract and designate all that.

So, I mean, that would probably be the best way to go. This way, we eliminate our, you know, control of it. But then, you know, you're associating it with somebody else. And then what happens in the event of that they're not, you know, They'll let the bleachers go, you know, then what record I guess we could put stipulations in it to those things We don't release that we don't release our response to the last control of it, you know Is that something that we have to do another workshop on or we can't obviously can't vote on anything like that now Maybe that can come out of the next meeting and just say this is what we want to do to get the ball I mean we keep on you know Let's put this off another time. Why don't we make a decision? Obviously, we can't make that decision now. We can't do a vote now. But maybe we can put that in and have discussion on, do we want to outsource it to get it done as rapidly as possible? This way, I don't know, do you have to put a?

I have maybe a radical idea.

What's that?

Given what we heard at the ADA and where we're at in the comp plan, How do we feel about, so if we do a formal committee, they're subject to sunshine, and they have to have formal meetings, and it can, as we've all experienced, it can restrict the beauty of the interaction amongst the group. However, the nice thing about a formal committee is that there is formality to it. What if we were to form a Parks and Rec committee, a community committee, to help us work through kind of a lot of these issues we've got trails we've talked about different facilities and if that committee could take on we could say look we will definitely want you to address bishop field but then everything related to what we saw today and bring us back some recommendations which may or may not require another workshop but at least a committee i mean a lot of the people in this room today and other people who weren't present today of extraordinary experience in sports and facilities. Exactly. And so we've got so many people on the committee that, how do we, do we want to say, hey, let's do a committee for Bishopville alone, which I would support, or do we want to consider an overall committee? Or a recreation and trails committee or something?

Yeah.

Is that what you were going to say? Yes. Parts, arts, and rec. Having a city parts, arts, and rec board, I think we are beyond probably time for something like that. Because I think that there are experts that are very passionate, A, and also very knowledgeable, B, about these subjects, that they can work at that level, at that minutiae level, that we don't necessarily always have that expertise and they are able to formulate the actual presentation to come to the council level and be able at calling a board commission. I think there's some charter things associated with that. I think our charter does allow for us to do a work group or ad hoc. I don't know the language that's in there. A city attorney is shaking his head a little bit, but I think we have some ability. Maybe that's the out we go to move this forward right now, but then also look at how do we do the logistics to formalize something for the long term.

Because then whatever they, let's assume, First of all, do you like what you're hearing as a citizen?

I do. I do. It's a step forward.

Okay. So let's assume Mr. Sandiano is on the committee representing baseball, for example, and he gets with a group and brings it to the parks board and makes a proposal. Well, all those people, presuming you've got soccer pros and wakeboarding pros and all these different pros, and they go, well, yeah, that sounds great. That makes a lot of sense. I don't want to manage that, or I don't know.

we can't do that like now we're getting other people who have similar experience who can analyze before it comes to us can i make a suggestion yeah so if we keep rather than do a large arts and record commission because i because i've dealt with them before and they stayed on there for years and years and what invariably happens and i'm sorry to say this people on the commission are seven people on board and they have their own agendas. And so they wind up hurting as much as they want. So if you keep it to a simple ad hoc, okay, we have a committee for Bishop Field. The people who are passionate about Bishop Field, they have that meeting. The group that's passionate about or how, what goes on, what that part looks like. But a group that's passionate about what's going on in the arts and recreation center.

Oh, like Hiawatha for example.

Hiawatha, yes. You just keep it to a specific subject. The people who are specifically interested and knowledgeable in those subjects. Because if you make it a broad board, then it's kind of...

Effective is that's one of the things I was sitting there thinking I don't have no problem committed I've dealt with them like you before and that's what it happened you get this person on him. I'm only worried about basketball This person worried about this and worried about football and everything but then when I broke them out and gave them their own committee then The biggest complaint that we have to still worry about but it worked better by having each one of our own committee I just always looked at their budgets and tried to make sure each one of them had the same amount of money to spend to make them manage their budgets effectively.

If you couldn't tell me, I'm giving this one a petition of that more attention.

It was up to you as your committee to come to us and tell us what you need.

I don't have a clear feeling about which one I think is better for the committee. I hear what you're saying. I don't have enough information to give direction to that. I would like to see a solution. I wouldn't even mind it being on the agenda next meeting if everyone else feels. I could do my research between now and then to have a formal opinion if we were willing to say, discuss and decide on whether to establish a committee or board and we could make a decision at the council meeting. I would be okay with that. Where is everyone else right now?

I have to thank you, Mr. Wall. Do we have time to put it on for the next agenda? Yes. We are only a week away.

I mean, you know, it's my opinion that you can add items the day at the meeting. So it's my opinion you can add items at the meeting. So yes, there's definitely time. He's tainted.

Well, no, it's the notice I'm sorry Yeah, that's true Yeah That's why I'm asking that. Well, I'm a woman. That's not to say, I'm not saying that to say, hey, we may not be able to do it on the next council, but the one following.

Well, look, I mean, ultimately, you have full control over.

I'm very interested in the thoughts about the committee versus the board and Mr. Peters and Mr. Bain. What do you think about those ideas? I don't want to overcomplicate it, but I do want to .

There's two different things I'm hearing you.

company that's going to manage it but who's going to build it the city's going to build it who's going to yeah we don't even talk about his number right now would you say 20 million to complete the project so let me let me be clear what i'm what i'm looking for is we're certain it sounds like we're comfortable with at least a group of people who are baseball experts to make a recommendation to us for what it should look like yeah be managed and if they say we're willing to manage it and we want it to be natural term i would be okay with that if they're willing to manage it and there's probably some financial connection and that's fine those are details but first the question is how do we get the people do we say there is a committee for efficient field alone or do we say actually you know we're talking about this big overarching plan for the city or is it appropriate for us to have a parks and park committee of which bishop field is just our board of which Bishop field is just the first project that they're working on, or maybe they're working on other multiple projects, but we want missions come back sooner rather than later.

I think if you just do Bishop field, like Brian had said, and then just want to, and then if it doesn't work, then you can dissolve it. You know, you're going to know, you know, if it gets into chaos, then, you know, but if it comes out, what is it? These people are coming up with great ideas. I never even thought of that.

I'll tell you, I don't know if it's a wrinkle or not, but the committee idea that you're talking about would be subject to dissension.

I think at this point, I think we're far enough along that it needs that one.

Mr. Watt, he wasn't in here earlier, but he was talking about the ADA. And I know state law basically, if you don't renovate a building, and it's not ADA standards, if you don't renovate a certain renovation, you don't have to apply the ADA. I don't know exactly.

You mean, is it, if you haven't actually maintained it?

Well, if it was, for example, this facility was built pre-ABA, okay? So it doesn't meet ABA standards. Now, my question is, how much can we do to it before we have to meet ABA standards? For example, I got a problem with the Bowdoin Center right now. I get all these complaints out of Bowdoin Center. And they say, hey, they're complaining, and they've written to everybody. I think they've been to Mr. Van Wagner, and trying to make us meet ADA standards, but we keep telling them we don't have to because it was built and filled with 1989, and they have never renovated the building, so they don't have to meet ADA standards. So my question on this, when we start renovating, how much, what can we do? Batting cages and all that wouldn't play any part. It's more or less the grandstands and everything. anything we do yeah I'm good yeah I mean I always want to caveat but I mean yeah I just I know I'm missing this thing beside my trying to avoid 88 and everything but they could be costly how much can't

I'm just going to say I feel uncomfortable looking. I feel like we're looking for a way to not comply to make the city facility accessible. And I have to admit, I don't like the way that makes me feel. And I don't like hearing that.

Well, let me clarify for you what happened, because I agree with you. I don't like it either. It happened when I said, can we preserve this building? And it was, well, we have to. When we tear it down, we have to build it in compliance with ADA. So my question was, what is considered tearing it down? I don't have the answer. So now we're going down a rabbit hole that I did not mean to trigger. So let me start. Yeah.

And I think it's legit to ask a question just for information. Totally. Totally. But I think that where we've gone with it is maybe this direction of how do we avoid it? And that really worries me. And I think we're not... we're not being inclusive of our community when we talk about it in that way. So I think we just have to think about how we're saying that and how we're addressing it. But Ms. Strange, you asked about my opinion on committee and commission, and I think that there will always be, and notwithstanding the fact that it can be, but there will always be the argument that boards and commissions either slow down things their care, their agenda driven. But I'm of the philosophy that by city council members are experts on everything. And we have, we again, I'll keep saying, you can hear me say, Claremont's maturing city, not just about growth, it's about maturity. And we have just bigger things that we're tackling with our with our age and with our growth and with our needs and wants and desires. With that comes the need to involve as many people as possible in that process up front so that we get good feedback and perspective before it comes to the ultimate decision making, which for our city is the city council. And so I will always err on the side of planning and zoning or a code enforcement or a a transportation historic preservation. I've got a list of 11 different ones that could be at some point, some communities utilize. I'm not saying we have to have them all, but I think my starting point, my center is we always should involve people who are in the community who are passionate and knowledgeable and connected to start with the conversation. Because I think like right now with planning and zoning, people who live in a neighborhood who have a development go back to 7-Eleven and all this way. The people on Runner Circle right there, they were here at PNC because it came up at that level. And they were able to voice that opinion. PNC weighed in and made a recommendation and then they were able to come to the council. And I think same with parks. The folks who live Bishop Field, those 10 houses, 12 houses, they would have the opportunity to speak at a parks and rec board and be able to give perspective on what was being recommended to the city council for action. And that's just another layer of transparency, information gathering, involvement, engagement that I think is good for a city of our size as we grow even larger. And if we can start to get some of those systems in place and it, and really it comes down to the intentionality of the council making those appointments. It's up to us. If we don't like who we're appointing, they do have a term limit, right? We make different appointments or we can even structure things to say like for parks and rec, we, we must have one wall. And you can create now, obviously, that's a couple of caveats, because you gotta make sure you find people to do that. But you can structure your boards and commissions to be able to try to avoid some of those things, I think, to do that. But I digress on Bishop Field. I apologize for that, but I wanted to answer your question. I do think we have to give the folks who have been here today and that we've already kind of formally and informally asked to be a part, awaited to continue to be a part. And I think if we can do something with specifically, to the Council Member Buecher's point, with Bishop Field and get that going and get it up and running, even as an ad hoc. be able to hash all that out and bring it back either in a workshop or a city council meeting or community meeting, public meeting, and then we then take action on it. I don't think it has to be long term. I think this could be done The iron is hot, and we should strive in terms of the community is there. The knowledge is there. The conversation is there. Let's not delay it. I think we owe it to the folks who passionately talk about this field and the need for it and the role of it in the community to do something now.

So do we feel comfortable directing staff to bring us a committee item at the next agenda so that we can? Sure. And how do we appoint people at that? Point or is it not appointed?

I think we have I think If this city attorney can tell us what our ad hoc process is and the controller I think there is some language there that maybe talks about it.

It's in Chapter one of the code and it basically for the admin chapter to be one or two but it says that the City Council unless the Charter says otherwise kind of blank committees and Special things that we have to mr. Why do we need to?

Have the committee first before we have city staff go ahead and advertise the fact that we're looking for people for the committee. No.

So we can go ahead and have him. No, the city staff will answer to you. If you're upset with the fact that they're advertising for you. No, well, well. No, no, no. So they can ask.

Go ahead. Like I can say, we can go ahead and come up with a thing to advertise for a committee. And once they get all the names together, like always, they bring it back to us.

If we put it on this meeting to approve the ad hoc, and then to also advertise, we have the one meeting in July, the end of July, that gives people a month to apply, get the applications in, get the information out, and then we vote in July when we apply to the ad hoc. We've got a committee on the right.

Who's defining the number of members of each committee? Is that going to be like?

No, there's no your your code is very flexible on that. It doesn't have any requirements Could be three could be

professional baseball we have one business owner who's also connected to the college level and we've had one high school coach and we've had a resident and we've had the local league and I think now you're talking about youth I say you might be 14 under and then high school and then college and pro business resident I mean, this is what we're that's six Yeah, but we're I think we right now concerned with good for Bishop field getting committed for Bishop field I think the committee should get these five people.

I think we should It's a seven person committee, but only six people. Yes. This kind of work I do every day. I ran in real sports, baseball, and all these kind of things, ball fields and all these bylaw committees, referees, unions. But it can be fun, but it can be a lot of work. And similar to Brian, I think he's been doing a pretty good job with everything.

Yeah, and this is just bigger than a church. This is a historic restoration like this.

Well, actually, yeah. I know we've been here almost for a while, and it's time to go, but one of the things that I do want us to consider is maybe looking at increasing our park and rec department, because we do need more fields, and I know the staff

process today helps us start to establish a plan, a vision and a plan, and the budget follows that. So I think that there's still questions to be answered.

So for Gary and for Betsy, basically it's on the polls and so we get feedback from the committee and the committee reports back to us. Yes.

Well, they also have, and I would say he can give input to the committee once the committee i think you all had real good discussion here today starting to get direction that's what we need thank you thank you well we know the baseball we had other anything other than i just mentioned other for me it was looking at increasing recreation department uh manpower something the other was so you guys at the last meeting Well, like I say, for me, it closed the park. I know you sent me the figures saying it's not that much we spend every year on stage, but then some years we spend more and everything.

I get it. So the years that we spend more, 22 and 23, because we held the stage here for a while because it stayed through Cookies and Cocoa. The stage was out here for a couple of weeks. So last year, when we just did the platform, it was 1640. Now... We know the stage. And by the way, we were recommended to see the brain. You don't know. We are awarded. Yeah. But we were recommended for city hall. But there still will be production costs every time you use the stage. So that this is for a shell that will be wired. But somebody's still going to have to bring a board. So

Well, I'm not looking for us. Maybe we have a sound system.

So that's still good. So that's still going to be there won't be zero dollars, a little less. But the platform for light up last year was 1640. The stage that we brought for light up the year before was 2800. So that's so you're in that range. between $2,000 and $3,000 a year to run the stage plus production costs. More like it, but just like it.

Just like it, yeah. Well, the stage, one of the things that, because I was up on that stage and I had trouble trying to move around, so it was very, very small, but I mean, I was very afraid of people falling off because it was very small.

And I think part of the intention of the stage too is, you know, the food trucks that Main Street has and farmer's markets that may have somebody who could set up some sort of one-man event at their thing. Just something for community events that are downtown.

I think that was the whole idea when we first started talking about this years ago because first Friday was actually using this as a stage and we were trying to do this with our events that we were doing and we were trying to turn this into a little entertainment market, actually. So I think that's it. Personnel would like to see what's still move forward to try to see what it wouldn't. I think what you brought us, it was like a hundred and some thousand dollars just to do the study? A hundred, it was a hundred. For a study?

It was a hundred, that was the... That's the architect. That's the design. $2,000. Expensive. $2,000. We don't worry about it. So maybe next year.

Well, I feel that way, too. That's about $400,000. Yeah. And we've got the conversation on the agenda.

I believe it's on the agenda next week. City Hall. And then we've got the question of seven straight. And I think we need to make that decision. And that decision, if City Hall was chosen, then the stage might interfere with that. And so I tend to think I'm probably not going to be willing to afford the stage right now, given that it was what slide I mean, spend 10,000. And you won't fall off. but I know I've given a great deal of thought since our last meeting and I'm not quite ready to move forward with the stage given the potential for the parking garage conversation, but I am willing to move forward with Lake Felter. So that's where I'm at on those two items.

We table vote to this meeting. Yeah, I think where I stand today on that would be to table again, the City Hall stage, but to take action on the turf.

What was the cost of the turf? $600,000.

And it's organic turf.

Well, I think it's $600,000.

Let's be honest, it's $600,000 and another $100,000 something, so it's going to be close to $800,000, I thought it was.

No, $600,000 was with the, because the original

I thought it was another $180 or something. We're not voting on this. But that's fine. I know it's going to be over the long run, we're going to save it. How much does it cost us now to reinterpret field every year, $100 or $200?

Yeah, well, I mean, if we dug it up and reinterpreted it, that would be $100,000. Yeah, we've been spending that every year. Yeah, that's a... We started with the soccer field. That's our smallest soccer field. That's a field that we've never been able to get in good condition, even when we've put a bunch of new plastic for a very short amount of time. Soccer field is a turf field that we can talk about when we get to budget, and what we talked about today, how lifting in turf, but soccer fields are easier to maintain on turf than baseball, but this was kind of like, being like, let's get this in, let's take some pressure off of Hancock and Powell, multi-purpose fuels, and get more people And make sure the lessons learned on this one.

So we can do the next step.

Is there any sort of guarantee or warranty on the, because you said you have a hard time keeping it, like if the sub, what's it called? I'm sorry.

Oh, no, it's not about the sub. So when you're maintaining, because artisans are still using it. around mounds and home plate, and especially around first base, where there'll be pieces that will have to be replaced more regularly, where soccer fields, for the most part, we don't have to touch for 10 years.

Yeah, and we probably spend a lot on maintenance.

20 per field, depending on the field, $20,000, $30,000.

So, I mean, just so that we're all seeing clear, we've spent about $300,000 on maintenance. We're spending $700,000 to put turf in. So the turf, let's call it $400,000 on maintenance. And let's say we replace the turf at some point, so $500,000. It's starting to get close to the same price. It's a little bit more for the turf, but if the turf happens to last a little over 12 years, you're kind of getting free use of it.

Do you have to cash for turf?

We utilize the field year-round instead of having to shut it down three, four months.

It ends up being kind of the same over a decade.

This is a big deal. I mean, you know, we're in Florida. It's very, very hot in the summer.

Well, and maintaining a slant.

It depends upon the type of year. You can play on artificial turf 365 days for 10 years.

It depends upon the turf, the type of turf you use.

Personally, I like the real field myself.

But it's a new day, a new time.

Anything else? So are we going to bring this?

It's in the next agenda. Can I table or pull it from there?

Yeah, you have the authority to pull it. So I'll pull up this one if you're all in agreement.

We don't have to put a date on when we bring it back.

And that's what I was asking Mr. Watt. We can just leave it there and wait for it. That's the way I

He's only allowed to do it once.

He's only allowed to pull it once.

Pull it once. You know what? I'll check that, though. I mean, it's a good question.

Well, I'd like to see it come up during your budget workshops, which will be in July.

Okay.

We need to keep it on the agenda.

I think there are like six people talking there about what to do. I think we just need to understand if we tabled it with a date, I think we have in our rules the city manager's ability to pull something from an agenda. It sounds like we We may have thought it was only for one meeting that he could do that, but it's one time.

Is that — That's my understanding. I mean, so I'll check it. Worse comes to worse.

I was going to say, worse comes to worse. We just table it at that. We just all understand that we're not going to probably — and let the public know. we're not gonna take any action. The intent is not to take action. The intent is to have it on the agenda, to table it again, and we'll just put a different date out there. That way you're not in a jackpot. Because I do think it's important for our downtown community and our community at large to understand that it's not just being shelved. It's just we're not gonna take action yet until we have some other things in place. And I think we owe it to them.

So maybe like a motion to postpone indefinitely.

Indefinitely, we're going to just vote on it, kill it, and keep it. No, just vote no. Just vote no, and then kill it, you know, and move on. Almost the same thing, to take it indefinitely, you never know when it's going to come back, and whenever you decide to bring it back, we'll bring it back, okay? Just kill it and let the people know.

It's almost like doing a 15,

All right, all right, and so we're okay with that. And I guess the, I forgot those items.