Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Linda, can you hear us now?

Yes. Yes.

Okay.

I guess started. Good evening, everyone. You know, this is one of three meetings this month. This one is not a required meeting. Therefore, we do not need a quorum to vote.

Linda in to participate since we'll be taking no official business for today's meeting. And we'll go ahead and start out with the five departments that's been identified for tonight's presentations on their budgets and their decision packets that they would like to present. And then seeing how time permits, anything else that Board wishes just to quickly discuss without having to find the applicant itself. With that, or Laura, do you have anything to say before we get started?

No, not at all. So, I want to thank the BAB and the departments for the back to back meetings that we're having these days. Looking forward to hearing from the departments and your input. We'll be taking notes and we'll be recapping, typically at that third meeting, we'll be recapping some of the input and preparing for the joint session. So anything else you'd

add? The departments are gonna look at their presentations to ten minutes, Robla. More towards the less, but ten minutes. So if you see me waving, it's just me reminding them that they're close to their time.

You'll have a little music.

I know. I think we'll get it for the next round. Okay.

Well, then we'll just jump right in. First out of the gate is HR. Jerome

Post, Director. Last month I introduced the department and the functions to you. Tonight I'd like to start by putting a few faces to those functions. So I've got HR staff, division managers and others here tonight. I'd like them to either stand up or wave when I call your name. First up for recruitment and onboarding, Nivia Cullen. Application and compensation, Milan Valkansky. Training and development, Nicole Archie. Benefits administration, Michael Lin, aka Mickey Sambo. Employee and Labor Relations, Richard?

Is Richard with us? Nope. Okay. Risk Management and Security, Guy Hine. And of course, my Deputy Director, Kristen Milligan.

I think you met her last round. We discussed some of the challenges facing us last month, particular the recruiting and onboarding piece, being able to recruit and retain qualified talent. We'll be talking about how we're doing that or what we're proposing to do. Addressing employee relations issues and the plethora of union negotiations with the IFF and FOP, we're keeping employee relations busy. And then employee development and training, including the cybersecurity, active shooter, and compliance training is keeping Nicole busy as well.

The decision packages that we had last year, we actually had two that we implemented. The first one, I think most of you are aware of is the classification and compensation study that we are undergoing. We do have an update for you tonight in that the committee that was put together to work with purchasing to identify the successful vendor met today to review the top four vendors that they wanted to see presentations from and I'll ask Milan to give us a little update because I think you sat in on those presentations. Thank you. Yes, we met this morning and we've evaluated the final core.

We successfully have selected one of our Management Advisory Group out of Virginia So we are moving along with we got the vendor selected and we'll be putting the contract in front of the commission as soon as we can get to it through the steps that procurement has set for us. The second decision package that we implemented was the increase of a part time to a full time position with the FMLA. And I'm happy to announce that that person that was doing the job part time took the job full time, and she has been able to keep up with all of the FMLA requests that are roughly about, I would say five to 10 per week that we have in addition to some of the other benefits administration that she's assisting with relative Family Medical Leave Act, those who qualify for medical conditions for themselves or for immediate family members that they have to take time off work for. The decision packages that we're looking for this year, we have two again. One, I may have Nivia answer any questions for you, but we're looking to implement a new module with the NeoGov applicant tracking system that we already have.

NeoGov is widely used through public sector and government agencies. It is quite helpful to us in, processing applications and posting jobs, etcetera. But they do have a module called attract, and this module actually provides access to public sector databases of about 2,800,000 candidates, including about 275,000 in the Southeast Region, of The United States. It's a proactive program. It allows the city to reach out to qualified job, candidates rather than for job seekers to react to job postings.

And then we'll be able to message and communicate with qualified professionals who may not be actively looking for positions. And this is going to help us address the issue that I brought up earlier and last month about the ability to recruit and retain. As you may know, if an employer actually reaches out to a professional recruitment agency, that agency usually has a pool of candidates or they have the ability to reach out to people where HR professionals that are internal to an organization don't always have that available to them. This will provide us the pool of candidates that we can actively reach out to rather than passively wait for them to apply for jobs. And in this module, we'll also help us provide some recruitment analytics and sync data with our current ERP or enterprise resource system that will interface with it to provide better or more timely reports and data for us.

It'll also reduce some manual entry and potential for errors with that interface with the ERP system. Cost of that, as you can see from the decision package, is about $33,662 We're hoping that that'll be approved for us to be able to use technology to our benefit with the recruitment process. The second one, I know this is going to be sensitive, so I'm going to tell you that this is a wishful and we would like to have it, but it is an additional position, and that is to provide support to the employee relations division. Currently, relations only has two people, the manager and assistant manager. They are professional level employees, but unfortunately, a lot of their time is being taken up with clerical support duties such as administering the city's random drug testing plan, which is a weekly program that we have to randomly select, or we have a vendor, a third party, randomly select who gets sent for random drug testing.

And that is subject to federal guidelines, DOT and state DOT, as well as safety sensitive positions. But this position would also help us with a lot of the scheduling of meetings, civil service board, union meetings, etcetera. And those of you who may be following what's going on on the state level, there is another initiative, to further deteriorate the ability of the civilian unions to operate within the city. We do have two large unions, Teamsters and Federation that contain combined about 1,200 employees. If those unions go away, those employees will then be subject to the civil service board for grievance processing for any, disciplinary issues, etcetera.

So we're anticipating considerable more use of the civil service board if this happens and we have no reason to believe it won't at this point. So in addition to tracking records, databases, discipline records, etcetera, we're looking for this position to be able to help those two professional level people stick to the professional level work that they're they're required to do. Cost of this position comes out to about 93,548. And with that, I will take any questions.

Okay, well thank you. Since we have quite a few other members here this evening, ask that you kind of limit your questions to about, well, around about ten minutes on our side. If we run over, we'll have to work within that. So, is there a look? Melinda, you have any questions?

I do not. That was great, Jerome. Thank you.

Let's start on that side of the table, Rich.

No comments.

No, just the sticking point of wanting to hire an extra staff if there's something internally or better that they can do. Or is is that causing issues with any kind of turnover?

I'm sorry, I didn't.

Is it causing issues with turnover internally? What is it? If it's something you're asking It's really a work you wanted us to consider, we should

Yeah, it's more of a workload issue and then efficiency of use of the professional level staff.

So you're just getting feedback from the employees that this is just causing them

a lot

of Well,

recognizing that there is some work that is going undone or is being tardy simply because we can't get to all of it. I'm more concerned about the compliance with the random drug tests to make sure that we're doing them on time and correctly.

And just lastly, is that something that typically within city organizations falls the way that we're doing it? Or are we doing it in a way that others aren't?

I think it's pretty typical, particularly if you have a random process that you have a third party actually draw the names or the employee numbers, however they're doing it. But we still have to do the coordinating and notifying and making sure that those employees actually go to the test immediately once they're called up. Okay.

Samantha?

No, I don't have any questions.

No question at this time. Thank you. A quick

question. NeoGov, so you have access to a more qualified database of people who actually are in the government. And Correct. 275,000 in the Southeast. So In the Southeastern Region. So you expect to be able to fill vacancy and with qualified personnel better, I suppose. Right? How would you measure that that actually?

That's largely going to be in the time to hire.

Okay. Not in the quality of how you perform having

come from that channel. That would also be reflected in the retention and lower rate of probationary terminations if we identify the correct people in the first place.

And there is evidence that where it's been used before generally it provides better results.

I'm going to have to ask Nembia to provide whatever research that we've done on it.

The track allows us to actually document the candidates that come from the system. When they get hired, they would be, we would be able to use that as a source. And there is evidence that sourcing from a track, you have more success in tying the job to the right person because for attract, the applicant goes in and puts in their interests, puts in what kind of jobs you're looking for. And we, an HR department, as a recruiting department, then find those people that are interested in our job.

There is a better matching.

Correct.

And so we look forward to getting better results in retention and performance, right? The second question quickly, the completion study, if it gets approved, can we expect results applicable for the fiscal year 2028, Rajat?

We are going to try to expedite with a lot of the data that we've already collected to share with the vendor to see how much legwork they really need to do in the field. I would like to have, my goal for this has been to have recommendations from the vendor by this fall. So we now for

the next year budget process.

Right. For the budget process, it wouldn't be effective till probably 2028. Depends on what the results are. Know, there's a certain level of expectation as I put out there for employees once we do this, but it's all going to depend on what happens with the budget and what happens with the tax liability, etcetera, on the state level. Thank you.

Olivier participated in one of my questions, so thanks for the very first question.

Jerome, I just have one question, it does not pertain to the decision packet, it's more reference to the most recent vacancy report that we received. And I went back and I compared it to one year ago for the same period ending 03/31/2025 and 03/31/2026. And we had an increase of 52 employees during that cycle, during that period. And that kind of stood out because the police and fire numbers on your report are the same. And I don't remember us budgeting outside 52 new positions within the city.

There may be a couple different reasons. One of them is that new gov system that we're currently using, NIVEA as a relatively new staff member has been working to make sure that the data that we're getting out of that is correct. So I'm gonna ask either NIVEA or Kristen if there's a reason for the difference in the 52 position.

So when we converted over to In for, we had some difficulty producing the vacancy report at first. Wasn't speaking to Neoga. And when we hired Nivia in addition to our HRIS analyst, Danny, who was very experienced with In for, we were able to better collect the data and compare it to the two systems. So we're confident in these numbers that this is more accurate data.

Okay, thank you. Very good. We'll move right along then, thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody. I'm losing my voice, so I will try and speak as loudly as I can right now. I apologize.

Thank you for being here.

Listen, I'm a trooper. Olivia was saying I was studying my work.

Do you need a whiskey? I

do scratch.

And I'll take her with whiskey.

That's the official line for everybody.

Well, you for having me today. Today with me, my team members, I have Aaron Kendrick, my Deputy Director sitting at the end. And in the audience, have Jason Botelier. He's my Senior Management Analyst. He handles all of my budget stuff. So I'm here today to talk about the finance department. First of all, we're not asking for anything this year. Yay, thumbs up. But I want to highlight some of the benefits that I've received in the department through the last two budget cycles and some of the improvements we've made since receiving it. So first we'll talk about the three positions you've given me.

They've all been filled. We do have some vacancies, but it's not tied to the new positions that were given. It just has to do with people who had retired and were still replacing those positions. But we're successful in that, and we feel like our data and the help is really helping out having that additional staff here. So that's first of all.

Second of all, a part of our budget packet last year included some funding for a P Card audit. So the city auditor's office just completed a P Card audit. And as we were going through trying to determine what to do, part of the recommendation early on that I got was to maybe have an AI software that can help analyze the data. So instead of buying, hiring an outside consultant to audit the program, I kind of want to have more real time access to how the data is moving. So we've decided to switch.

And instead of paying an outside consultant to audit once a year after things are done, is to have real time data analytics with an AI tool. So we've sourced that and we're currently in with IT and procurement right now to onboard that new AI software that's going to take all of our vendor data, all of our PCard data, and take all of our rules and regulations, put it in there and help us make sure that compliance is being met and on a monthly basis instead of only once a year when you do the audit. And I think that's going to really add value to the program versus just having someone come in spot audited once a year. So that is underway and I'm really excited. I think the person who's most excited about it is Jason because he's my PCAR coordinator and does all this stuff manually himself and having an AI tool to help him filter, check for split transactions, check for duplicate payments and just make sure compliance is being done is really huge.

So we're excited about this new process and hope to have it onboarded and working by the end of this fiscal year.

So those are but

on top of that, we've really taken the challenge this year. The first couple of years with the ERP was very challenging, just getting it to work and understanding all the nuances. This year, our focus has really been on enhancing the current ERP. We've stabilized it. We're able to get accurate financial reporting from it. But how can we make it better? How can we cut down on processing time? How can we cut down on things that takes us a long time to get done? So are One of the major initiatives I wanted to spearhead was to cut down manual checks. Right now, we didn't have In our old system, we didn't have the ability to do vendor ACHs.

It just was an old system that didn't do it. This system does, and we're currently in the process of building a vendor self-service portal, which will put the liability in the vendor's hands and let them be responsible for it and to be able to open up our vendor ACH program. So with that, we put some guardrails around it, which includes a vendor validation, account validation service, allows us to see that the account is valid before we pay them to make sure there's no ACH fraud. So we're building all those systems around it. And we're currently testing it right now, and we're hoping to go live with that fairly shortly and to begin a vendor ACH program rollout beginning of next fiscal year.

And that alone will save the city about $50,000 a year because it takes us on average about $6 per check between the check stock, printer, ink, envelope, UPS, and then staff time to stuff and mail 12,000 plus checks a year. You know, we're saving ourselves the time, that time, and cut it down, maybe about 75¢ a check instead of the $6 we're paying now. So that's a big initiative we're working on, and some of the funding that we've received allowed us to get through that. Also, of the things, an initiative that you guys supported several years ago was a transition of the credit card fees to the end user when they're paying for the credit card. Majority of that has been done.

We have one department that we're still waiting to negotiate the contract with. We've been having challenges with the vendor to get negotiated, but all other departments, except for that one department has switched over their program already. And we're finalizing, hopefully going to come to the end of the road with that project and get the final department onboarded with that project and close that one out.

Which department is that?

It's the parking department, the parking fund with their meters, their multi meters and they're small amounts and it's Yeah, it's been, we've been working, trying to, they've been trying to get a new software onboarded and through with that new software, implement the program, but we've been having some challenges getting that software on board. Okay. And also I want to talk about some of the improvements we've made. We're now in our AR program in the current system. We haven't been doing any collections efforts because the data was stagnant.

So now we're beeping up our collection efforts. We're actually mailing statements every month. We're going start mailing dunning letters in hopes of trying to collect them some outstanding balance. Now they're not as huge as the ones in water and sewer, but every dollar counts when we're collecting money. We have money from different organizations that we've done services for and they have not remitted it to us, and so we're going to be beefing up our collections.

And one of the things we did last year is we approved the budget for a brand new utility billing software. I'm happy to announce that we have selected a software vendor. We're currently going through implementation of that. And a part of our cleanup process was last year going through the utility billing system and writing off a lot of old bad debt that had been there. About $5,900,000 of bad debt was written off last year from the utility billing system as a way to clean the data to get ready for implementation of the new CIS system.

So one of our things several years ago you guys used to focus on is why was our uncollectible rate so high? It was so high because we didn't have the ability to write off that old debt. We, I hired my team, I challenged my team to try and get that rate down, and they spent two weekends in here writing off thousands of accounts to get it down to the point where now the data is no more than three years old inside of there. I feel really confident that the data is becoming cleansed and getting ready for the transfer to the new system. So that's my presentation. I have nothing else.

Okay. I'll start on this side.

Just a minor question. With the 50,000 in savings achieved by the use of ACH, that just gives you more money to do the other things that your department

Well, the savings will be in most of the savings is time instead of my team having to stuff and mail, because that's the largest cost, it's physical cost. The other costs are like maybe $0.35 $0.68 in mailing. It's not really huge cost, but the biggest cost is time. Efficiency. Efficiency. For sure. Yes.

Two technical questions, ERP system. Did you have a consultant? Yes. Did you still have this consultant?

No, we have hired

a few.

Good day, you did. So you think you're going to be able to clean that up? And what the percentage of ACH that's being currently what's the penetration of ACH versus check? I mean, when

There's very little ACH.

What's your objective for next year?

The objective for next year is to hopefully get about 75% of the vendors enrolled in the vendor ACH program.

25% in the

We want to be very strategic though, and I'm saying that because before we did not have a vendor ACH program, so a lot of vendors enrolled in our e payables program and we get a rebate off of that. So the minute I roll out the vendor ACH program, a lot of people might want to switch, but they're contracted through procurement to accept it so they can't switch. When the new contract they comes might not want to continue doing it when we roll it out. So the goal is to not to cut as many checks. So we're trying to, I would like to be 75%, but I think my goal, my team has like a 50% reduction, But either way, our goal is to get as much less paper as we can and more electronic payments as long as it's secure and the vendors have control and we can ensure that fraud won't happen.

And for the UT software, do you anticipate that it's going to stay clean over time? Because every database, when you clean up, it's good. And then over time, we build again that history. And so let's make sure that we keep that clean.

Oh, 100%. The problems with the cleanliness of it is not so much, it is the system more than the process. The system is just really clinically really old. You don't get good data out of it. And so it's hard to manage it. And we pay a vendor to manage it for us and pay a lot of money for them to do little small fixes. Like what AR system? I've been in finance now over thirty years. I've never seen an AR system that couldn't do a write off. This system couldn't do a write off.

It was the craziest thing, but we had to pay a vendor to try and fix it and it didn't work. So we manually did it. You know, it's the new system is miles, miles ahead of anything that we want and is already connected to the AMI, so they're all going to sync together.

One last question about AI without getting Mr. Moutier too excited. What is the efficiency gain from because we've talked about AI, everybody talks about AI. We said, give us pilots and give us examples of efficiency. I think the commission would actually love to hear that, too, but the advisory board is, And we demonstrated that before in our meetings. Were you able to express the efficiency gain?

I'll let you answer that, Jason.

Right now, everything's manual. And I'm not catching anything in real time. Six months down the road when we did the audit. So this is going have built in functionality where it'll apply based on our ecard policy and real time.

So it's a constantly updated dashboard,

right?

Provides a streamlined and actions, go to the departments and determine if they really are a violation of policy or not.

Yeah. And we are the vendor that we're going with is piloting it for us for a full year. So we'll decide whether we like it or love it or not. And then what we're doing within The Philippines of the contract is billing in a five year pricing after the pilot period so that while the pricing is locked in. So we are piloting it just to make sure that it's going to meet the needs that we have and ensure that it's going to do everything. I don't want be locked into a contract in, you know, six months into it, hate it. So we really wanna see it. And a lot of internal auditing agencies throughout the state of Florida, Clearwater's internal audit uses it. They use it to not just audit PCARS, but other things. I'm hoping to expand it out to help us do some compliance with not just the PCARS, but other things like our travel program.

One last thing, and I don't want to take too long. The liens, when are you presenting a recommendation and get more money out of the fee.

I forgot about to mention that to you, but I am working with the office, the structural innovation team, and we're going to help us create that cost, full cost recovery model. And from that, we'll be making a recommendation to commission.

That's going to be by

I'm hoping by the end of the summer, we'll have

that whole process done. I hold you to that.

Erica, you hear that?

Early fall.

Okay. No, but at least we have a

Yeah, we're working on it for sure.

Just so you know, the Council of Civic Associations has made a couple recommendations from their last meeting. They've just put it together. And I think Commissioner Sorenson said that he was going to

kind

of spearhead that working with staff on that ordinance.

Excellent. Oh, and then you know what? I forgot to highlight a very important thing that I did recently. I don't know if I highlighted with you guys before, but we just recently completed negotiations of our banking contract and the amount of interest on our bank account has increased tremendously over 2.5%. So before they had us in a rate model that was locked in because of some changes that was going on in the market where they couldn't take a lot of capital on. So they weren't giving us interest. They wanted us to take all the money off of the bank account and keep it very low. They've since switched it and now we're getting the Fed rate less 25 basis points in our money. But that's a jump from 101.06% to 3.5%.

And in real money and others, how much does it represent?

That represents just in the last

few You do a favor?

This went into effect in February And just in February and March alone, we earned extra 300,000 per month in interest earnings in the bank account just from that one change.

Sure. City manager William is very sensitive to the one.

She's very happy. I'm leaving her right. I'm putting something

up for her.

I'm talking about it. You.

Can I

also ask Linda to just speak to our staffing complement and how that impacts our ability to submit the offer on time? Yeah. History has been.

Yeah. So that's a part of what the staffing complement did was help us align the resources to be able to reconcile the millions of lines of data we get on an annual basis to prepare the ACRA. Some of the challenges we've had was getting information from our pension companies, getting information from different sources because they were relying on us to get that data in the system for them to do their work. So good news is that we are well ahead of anything we've been in the last two years. It was very challenging the first year because of the ERP implementation.

And second year, it kind of like rolled on. But this year we're well ahead of the game. We have draft financial statements already prepared. We have an audit advisory board meeting tomorrow, but that extra staff really helped us with the timeliness and helping to get the data reviewed and reconciled and posted so that we can be where we are today.

Moving along.

No questions. Report.

Thank you. No, Jason asked my question. Thank you, Jason.

Thank you. No, I was just that was a great presentation. I'm very interested to see the growth of some of the AI products. And ultimately, what I would love to see down the line is so many of the AI products that are out there now, it's like they're telling you that they invented open sourcing. They continue to get better every month. So it's always a new program, a new product coming out. I would love to see the city potentially take a stab at bringing in proprietary software for themselves and building out their own AI model and owning it and potentially becoming a model for other cities to utilize for their finance departments as well. So thank you for your presentation.

I'm good. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Linda.

Great presentation. Thanks so much. I just was, curious just in the area of accounting and financial reporting. I know, it it looks like the monthly financial close, is now within sixty eight days of month end, and I just wanted to refresh my memory. I I think that's definitely an improvement. I know, obviously, there's been huge challenges with the ERP. But I guess what I guess what was it last year? Like, what what has been the improvement? And I guess, what is the, kind of goal for the monthly financial close?

The the monthly financial before was taking over a hundred and twenty days to get done. Now we're within sixty eight days, and the goal is to do it within forty five.

Okay, great. Well, that's a great improvement. And Thank

that's definitely because of the compliment, the personal compliment you guys offered.

Good return on investment. A 100%.

Congratulations on that accomplishment and great presentation. Just one quick follow-up. You said you manually wrote off $5,900,000 Was that totally uncollectible or could you send it? Is there, did it go to a third party collection that they got, if they got 50 of it, we got 50, that type of thing.

So this is stuff that had been to collections for years and it had, like I said, the old the system was not built to write things off. It was implemented in 2009, so it was years and years of data that we were sending to collections and it was all tenant data. So it was not owner data. Because owner accounts that we can still collect on it when they close or if they sell the house. So this was tenant data, which is one of the reasons for the support to switch from tenant accounts to owner accounts only so we don't have to write off this large back debt anymore.

Okay. Thank you. Very good. Hey, Morsha.

Good evening, everyone. Morcia Garcia, director of Community Services Department. I have here with me Katrina Johnson, our assistant director, and Danielle Murray, our senior financial administrator. The Community Services Department is a newly launched department. This is our first fiscal year in operation.

We consist of the city's customer support center that supports our citywide call center as well as the fixed to FTL application. We have our economic development division, which is a newly created division that joins our newly created department. We have community inspections on our org chart, which is community enhancement and compliance. We have our business tax division, our housing and community development division, which includes the city's homeless initiatives, as well as our arts and cultural affairs division. For fiscal year 2027, we're requesting two we have two decision packages presented.

Our first decision package is around our nighttime code enforcement coverage. We're requesting to add three positions to our existing team of four nighttime inspectors. The three additional positions would represent one senior co compliance officer and three co compliance officers. The officers would work between Thursdays and Sundays from really 05:30PM until 03:30PM. What this does for our nighttime coverage is it helps to reduce our overtime.

It provides a more real time response for violations seven days a week. The types of violations that come up in evenings and at night are things related to commercial vehicles parking in residential areas, vacation rentals, noise. Noise complaints can be residential to residential or residential properties experience commercial noise typically. We also have at times special events that our vacation rental or nighttime operations team addresses. So examples of this would be spring break.

We see an increase in vacation rental properties that are not properly registered through the city. We also see an increase in valet parking in residential areas, so the team would help address those types of issues. Also, for things such as Tortuga, we tend to see a lot of commercial vacant lots being used for overflow parking or valet parking. And then throughout the city times such as our holiday season, we tend to have a request for overtime that adding these additional positions would help reduce. In addition to our request for the nighttime code inspector, we have a request for expansion of our shelter bed.

So under our Housing and Community Development division, our homeless initiatives program exists. The city currently has 20 shelter beds at the Caring Place. So that is located at the central homeless assistance center. It's here in Fort Lauderdale at 920 Northwest 7th Ave. This decision package is to add an additional 15 beds to that program for the city. That will bring our total bed count up to 35. And those essentially are our two requests for this fiscal year. So I'll end it there.

I'll ask the first question. If memory serves incorrectly in '25 budget, we added three nighttime officers. Correct. So now you're asking for three additional. So that would put six nighttime code enforcement officers on the street.

So we asked for four at the time, one senior and three co compliance officers, and this would bring our count up to seven.

Seven. That is the nighttime violations or code complaints that come in on real time now justify the call value to justify those positions?

So leading into this decision package, we actually did an analysis of what calls we received. What I will tell you is it's essentially about our ability to respond, not necessarily the actual volume. So when we deal with violations that are really time sensitive, for example, a noise complaint is a time sensitive violation, at times a parking complaint could be a time sensitive violation, we were finding that our response time times was exceeding twenty four hours and the violation would have been cured. And so our request isn't necessarily driven by volume in as much as the response time that's needed to address those violation types. So then what you're saying

is that three that we were about to hire in the '25 budget were not sufficient to meet that actual time frame of the number of calls coming in at a timely manner?

I believe based on what the issue was at that time, which was more so the midweek to weekend coverage, it did address what our concern was at that time. Since that time, we found that the days that we do not have coverage are problematic, which is why we're making this request.

For Thursday to Sunday.

Yeah. Yes.

Well, they were hired Thursday through Sunday nighttime.

So this new request would be for Monday through Wednesday.

And a very quick question

about the shelter bed enhancement. And it was just I know that shelter beds are very expensive, which made me think about shelter beds versus prevention, but I imagine the need is so acute now that prevention may help cut the need for beds later. And maybe we need the kids not upset accurate with.

Yes. So the city does have a list of services that we provide directly through our partnerships with agencies such as fellowship. We're in the process of exploring our partnership with rotary connection. And we also have community court activation every Wednesday. And so there are a number of things that we are doing to aid with the prevention of housing problems, I would say, affordable housing issues. I would also highlight the fact that Housing and Community Development as a division is a part of this department. And so by being a part of the department, it allows us to really look at affordable housing, how funds can be used through CDBG to complement the unhoused population and

their needs. Thank you. Follow-up from a question by our chairman on the enforcement. So I understand there is it's not responding to the volume of coal or increasing calls, it's giving a better response and better result for residents, which is a conversation we had years ago for my community, my homeowner association and with you as well. I would recommend really that we you introduce in your performance metrics something about the resolution of this because you asking for money to get more effective and to get actually a result for residents, which is the ultimate metric that we should have, all of us, the voice of the resident, they are our customers.

So why don't we actually focus on the metric of that in regard with extra money and extra resources? I don't see it in the current metrics, and I wish there would be something like that. I love the fact that you have proactive, you know, percentage of code originated from enforcement, that's great. Average number of days from complaint to first inspection, but that is not addressed in you're asking for better resources, which I find very positive, just like the metrics of success reflect that task and this increasing resource?

So I agree with you. I think that the creation of this department does allow us to take a better look at what our KPIs are and identify better performance metrics. And I think that not just with code enforcement, but with all the other divisions and community services, there is potential to reevaluate those.

So shall we see that for fiscal year twenty

twenty eight? Is definitely a cause.

Because I was hoping we would see it in your metrics of performance for fiscal year we discussed.

Right. It hasn't changed yet for fiscal year twenty twenty seven for Yes. This And I do know that specifically for economic development, we did identify some new

Makes sense.

Measures for this current fiscal year. So, yes, we're looking

at it.

Looking forward to it.

Yeah. And one of the things the manager has been doing in the budget meetings with the departments is really digging in on performance measures and providing recommendations on new performance measures. So some of that information you may see in the budget book that ends up being published because

we've been

doing a lot of that deep dive in our meetings with the report.

Great. Very happy to hear that. Thank you, Patricia.

Thank you.

I don't really have any I'm just curious, how long can somebody stay in one of the just an overnight thing?

There is, like, about a is a maximum of, I believe, thirty days that they're allowed to stay initially. Then there is an extension that they're allowed for up to an additional thirty days. But what the team does is they regularly check-in with fellowship. They receive updates of anyone that is in those shelter beds, and they have an understanding of what the challenges are that are preventing them from having long term housing. Yes.

These shelter beds, are these just for individuals or, or does this include families?

There are some for individuals. There are also some for families.

So right now, only only 20 beds available presently?

Yes.

That's not a good sign that you are requesting to keep on because that speaks to the times that we are going through, obviously.

Where's the county?

I

I just have a quick question on from the resident perspective. Building I live in currently and completed in 2019, it's right down

the street here, I can't tell

you the amount of code enforcement calls that I've

had to make and I can't

imagine the other people living in my building have also had to make And it's, well, I can't do anything unless I see it happen. So at what point do we stop putting the onus on the city to resolve this and start putting more pressure on the developers who built it in the first place who should have had a lot of these issues ironed out beforehand? Like where is that dividing line? I'm asking.

If you can share a little bit more specificity about what type of

violation you're deal with currently, there's the air return unit for the entire building sits on the Top Floor of the Pearl Flatwood Village, and there's a crack in my ceiling that they've resolved by filling the building has, the Morgan group, the ownership group. But when we've called out code enforcement in the past, I see it, I've taken pictures of it, I can't really do anything until I see it leaking because a crack that's been filled doesn't do me any good. But if the building was completed in 2019, should it really already have settling issues? I'm not trying to take up the time to be on a personal perspective, but I'm looking at it as an overreaching issue. As the city continues to build, what pressure do we put on the developers?

I'm not anti development by any means, but what pressure are putting on the developers to say what you're asking in terms of a request for an increase, where can we offset that cost by putting more pressure on the developers to offset that cost ahead of time. That's my point.

So, great question, and I appreciate it. And what I'm going to share is that what you're describing in terms of the development process as well as the inspection process related to types of violations is actually handled under our development services. And that's more of a Florida Building Code enforcement type of concern. What I can do is convey your sentiment to Development Services' Director, Anthony Fajardo, so that when they come before the Budget Advisory Board, they're prepared to address that question.

I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for that. I'm on the board for Flagler Village the building up here. The code enforcement, I think, been great compared to especially other cities. Man, we've lived in Los Angeles before then. Like, forget about it. 911, let alone

code enforcement.

Code enforcement is good. Are there when you say that you need more staff, are there because I actually don't hear rumblings. I don't know if anybody else does of code enforcement being delayed. I actually hear the opposite. The people are very happy with code enforcement. And I just got text today from somebody on the board about something with lighting because some something got knocked out. Whatever. Long story short, it got solved, and it's great. The stuff that maybe you're needing more staff for, is there something internally that we should be looking at that someone that should be handled by police and fire and not code enforcement? Because anything I think of code, if it's an emergency, like no noise ordinance, blah blah, it's like you should call the cops and get this handled.

Code enforcement, the street lights out or the sidewalk, whatever. Is some of that, hey, maybe it should be done. Maybe it should be a different strategy rather than hiring another staff member?

No, I do not believe that. What I will say to start is that I think that the departments do a really great job at collaborating internally when there are things that are not code enforcement and are based in a different department What I would also share is that there are neighborhoods that experience things such as like 18 wheeler trucks parking in a residential area or a high concentration of vacation rentals in their area where maybe people are coming through the weekday and disturbing the residential character of the neighborhood where they have a more time sensitive type of violation based on the area. I would also share that when we have things like holidays, I'll use Memorial Day is upcoming and people are going to be off on a Monday. Are instances where there's days of the week that have spikes in the amount of complaints related to noise, parking, vacation rentals, a plethora of things. And so it's not necessarily a citywide thing, but it is a dynamic to where those neighborhoods expect a rapid response from the city.

Yeah, I think if it makes sense, we want to keep up with the reputation of handling the lanes quickly. And then over to beds, we only had 20 beds. I'm assuming it's the county has most of the beds. Correct? Do you know the two things? Do know the percentage of beds that are full on any given night or week? How many more beds they think we need if we do it all between us and the county?

I can find out.

And then Well, I have the occupancy rate in the KPIs set to it was 93 in fiscal year twenty twenty five, and it's over 80% based upon the 20%, I suppose. Or Shay, it's right there in the performance measure. Yeah. I'm wondering

it's an 80% increase on the city's end. I'm just wondering what strategies and why behind that. Because a lot of times, I think it's a misnomer, lot of times the beds aren't the issue. We have enough beds, they don't want the beds. So then my part two is when somebody is using the beds, what's our turnover rate of how many return Usually, at least from my experience with this problem in other cities and this one, is that when someone's willing to go to the beds, path to getting them housed or in a better situation is easier than folks who'd want nothing to do with the beds or just want to do a couple of overnighters in jail.

It's just different things. Not everybody's the same that's unhoused, of course. So what is our rate? I forget the word. How many of them are we placing, and how many of them we're seeing again? I know there's official specifics of words for that. Yes, I wanted to use that. That's the term. So what is the rate? Do we know that for us?

I can find out and follow-up. What I do know offhand is that we tend to have a more a greater challenge with having unhoused women remain in the shelter beds. That's typically our issue. It's not necessarily the men or the families that we have an issue retaining. Do we

have I don't want take it too seriously. Do we have private shelters for women? I used to volunteer at them back in Philly where I grew up. It's an issue, obviously. It's a huge issue. Do we have private as well? Are those 20 beds plus 15 all we have for women that are unhoused or abused?

So to my knowledge, we do not have a private beds. And Chris, please feel free to chime in and correct me if I'm wrong. We don't have private for women's shelter.

So there's a woman in distress.

There is a shelter for women who are experiencing domestic violence. I think for women and children. It's a nonprofit that runs that organization.

And

I'll also say that our emergency shelter beds, which are through Broward Partnership and Salvation Army, are mostly at 100% occupancy. There's very little opportunity to get folks in there. The beds that Portia mentioned are through Broward Partnership, and that's because the county is expanding the central HAC. Trying to go up to 300, but they're incrementally incrementally increasing that. So we're able to get some dedicated beds for this request.

We also, We have diversified the types of beds that we have available because I think portion mentioned, you know, not everybody's. They have special things for shelters to put her department that has worked to diversify what's available to us. So whether it's mental health, substance abuse, or, or just family beds, for instance, you know, we work really hard to make sure we have something for everybody. Porsche also released an LTC this week, and we do it quarterly through the community services department that includes a lot of the statistics and information you're looking for. We can. Yeah, because you're saying 100

and that's not I haven't heard that. So the

shortage. What they call emergency shelter, which is the Broward Partnership Central and Northern Post Assistance Center and the Salvation Army, they're typically at a 100%.

But I know you mean. Yeah.

Yeah. Can I

ask a question related to doctor?

The people that are brought to these beds, are they from the city of Fort Lauderdale or are they from anywhere around the county? And I'm only asking because we're bearing the brunt obvious, and I think they're necessary for sure. So we're bearing the brunt

of the cost of it.

When our staff, our homeless Irish team refers somebody to a bed that the city's paying for, so through this request and the ones that we contract with, they're coming from within the city of Fort Lauderdale. The central hack, which is the homeless assistance center, excuse me, on sunrise and then the North Hack, which is in Pompano and the Salvation Army. So they, they could come from Hollywood, Pembroke, you know, just throughout the county. But what we've hit or we only take folks that we are serving within our city. And it's just talking about where they were last located, Cause their origins could be Carolinas, Atlanta. Yeah, no,

great presentation Portia. I guess just back to follow-up on a few of the questions. Just, you know, I'm in support of the additional beds. Just to understand logistically, only because, you know, obviously, you guys work with the county, and the county, from my understanding, still has the they they coordinate the access and assessment, and then they they have control of even the Salvation Army beds. You know, like, they they allocate people to the 500 or so bed.

Do these bed new additional beds still fall under their pur view, and so it would be the same process for a person to end up in the city of Fort Lauderdale beds where, say, you know, you have to do an intake at I know that North Fork Park is is one of the big places people go Monday morning. Like, these beds are still falling under the county's purview as far as all of those intake, measures.

So these would be for the city's count to add to our 20 beds.

So so would the is the county involved in deciding just like, you know you know, when they do their, you know, task force for ending homelessness and people, you know, have to meet and do their intake, will we get people from that group who are Port Laurel residents?

Yeah. So, Melinda, there's multiple points of entry. So we can, as a city, refer folks to these facilities. The ones that we contract directly with, our homeless outreach team assesses and transports to those facilities, and we work directly with those providers to make sure that we are bringing them to the right place. For the county facilities, there's a couple points of entry. We can go through task force. Our homeless outreach team is also equipped to assess and take folks to those facilities as well.

Okay. Okay. So there's multiple entry points. It doesn't it's not a requirement that the county, like, sign off on this as far as a person going to a bed that we're paying for.

Right. And, you know, the caveat to that is the ones that we're proposing for the Broward County Homeless Assistance Center, you know, there is some engagement with them, but, you know, it's more we're the point of entry for the person that's unsheltered, but we're placing them into the county system.

Okay, but thanks for clarifying.

Okay. As a follow-up on those three night time, I'm assuming you'll utilize them so they don't have downtime if there's no actual real time calls that will do enforcement of non for hire for hire vehicle enforcement along Los Oslo's barrier in the barrier island and other nine time code violations that don't require an actual call.

Yes is the answer. We would have their workload be one that allows them to have a full ten hour shift. So that's to start. We typically do provide additional credentials outside or certifications beyond just the co compliance officer certification. So we would be willing to partner with TAM if necessary to have them certified to do parking tickets.

It just gives you more justification for the positions. Thank you.

Bill, you reminded me that I wanted to ask the question, but over time, How much money in percentage of personal services cost fiscal 2027, how much overtime do you have for your department for this new division? Can you give me a real number?

Division specifically, it's $70,000 is what we were requesting, dollars 70,000.

I'm talking about over time in general for your personnel, including for enforcement. I don't think that any other division is really relevant to that question. At least that's my focus. What is the percentage of overtime in your cost of personal services on your $9,000,000 fiscal year 2027.

So specific to this division, it would be the $222,357

Not for those people only, not for those additional, It's collectively. Collectively. Right. You say

For this for community inspections as a Yes.

Thank you.

Now this year, the commission asked that you had 20 fourseven during the spring break and that you incurred some overtime costs by doing that. Because your budget, yeah. Okay.

Very good.

Thank you. Okay. Wow. Now we're we're into the final inning, final stretch. Kind of do some softballs out there. So now we're saving the best for last. Milos, and then we'll go to Cara.

Thank you very much. Good evening, everyone. My name is Milos Mytodovich, and I have the privilege of serving as the director for mobility and parking department. I also wanna recognize a couple of members of my team, a couple of stars. Ekay Tegwer, she's our deputy director.

Morgan Duttner, she's our division manager. And Martha Romero is our senior financial administrator. So they're helping me do everything that we do day in and day out. So for our department to help address some of the transportation challenges, our FY twenty seven budget request is really focusing on a couple of different items. Those are state of good repair, improving safety, leveraging external resources and grants using limited investment, addressing congestion and mobility, finally, infrastructure for biking.

So to start with the state of good repair, the first request has to do with the $40,000 in a recurring funding request to maintain pedestrian crossing signals, including rapid rectangular flashing beacons. We call them RRBs and also in roadway pedestrian crossing lighting. We have those at about 40 locations citywide. They have been installed over the last ten, fifteen years. However, we do not have a dedicated funding to maintain them, so they fail.

Their typical lifespan is about seven years, but really depends on the usage, and it also depends on the location. So anything that is closer to the ocean fails quicker than anything that that is further away. This request is based on really industry standards, and some of the components obviously failed before some other components. But we believe that this would be a good start in order for us to just do better from the standpoint of a state of good repair. And this would be a reoccurring request.

The second request is for the safety. So at Southwest 4th Avenue near the entrance to the park, there was school which stopped operating. There is existing crosswalk out there. And given the school stopped operating, Broward County Traffic Engineering will be removing some of the breadth and crossing improvements that were making crash and crossing safe. They have reached out to us.

In order for us to keep that crosswalk in place, we would have to install one of the new rapid rectangular crashing beacons. We looked at the proximity of alternative crossings if we were to eliminate this one and the crossing is not the closest crossing is more than thousand feet away. So we would want to keep the crosswalk in there and in order to make sure that there is proper level of safety, we would want to install the ROVs. It's a one time request. The third request has to do with the leveraging external resources.

We're asking for $50,000 in recurring funding in order for us to conduct road safety audits. Road safety audits are a requirement from the Florida Department of Transportation if we are to leverage some of their funding. One of them is local safety grant funding that is available typically on annual level, most recently for FY '25, they had up to $4,000,000 for it. So if we're able to secure some funding for road safety audits, it would help us get some return on investment provided that we're successful in securing those grants from the state. There are a number of different corridors that we could use funding ultimately if we were to secure it for road safety audits, to mention a few.

It would be Sistran Boulevard, it would be Southwest 31st Avenue, and they also then also Bayview Drive and Northwest 13th Street. So some of these corridors were identified as part of the Broward County's safe streets for all action plan as a high injury network corridors. The fourth request has to do with addressing congestion and mobility. We're requesting $30,000 in recurring funding to fund a dedicated or provide dedicated microtransit survey during some of the city's special events. Our current microtransit survey is funded by the grants and that does not provide us flexibility for us to use for ad hoc type of services during any special events that the city holds.

Ultimately, we are able to secure. It would help out mitigate some of the traffic congestion and traffic and parking challenges as well. Finally, the the FIC request has to do with improving infrastructure for biking. So we are looking for $20,000 in recurring funding to start installing more bicycle racks and bicycle repair stations. We'll be focusing on key corridors such as Las Olas to certain extent, we'll be focusing on anything along the beach, including A1A.

And we would also be leveraging this funding to install some of the bicycle repair stations as well so that those who are using bikes can do any small type of repairs in case they need to do so. We believe this would provide for a secure way for bike users to utilize their means of transportation, promote biking and also start going in the direction of improving overall bike network and facilities and infrastructure in the future. So that concludes my presentation. I will take any questions that you guys have.

Start with, Melinda.

That was great, Milos.

Thank you.

Yeah, I don't have any immediate questions. I mean, I'm in support of your items in your decision package. Just curious on the bike parking and repair stations. I think I saw one on Riverwalk. Do we, is it, if we get those, can we, is there a way that we can somehow highlight for bikers where they are or is there a way?

Absolutely, we can. So so one of the things that we are to do is do a better inventory of those. What we can do and plan on doing is getting that inventory and publishing on our website so that locations and number of parking spaces and not only locations for the parking, but repair stations are also not.

And just and this is kind of a, I guess, kind of micro, but the at the repair at the repair station, can you also get air in your for your tire?

That's that's optional. One of the optional items for the for the bike repair station, Another one is element that holds the wheel in place, or you can hang your bike in order to pump the air in it. But, yes, the answer is yes.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Rich?

I'm good.

Nice news.

Hacks. I'm just gonna say great job

with getting more and more people parking tickets. Thank you. There's a lot of them.

No.

Thank you. It's a great presentation.

Thank you

very much.

Thank you. Can

you remind us, Minos, the micro transit? What's the occupancy? Yes.

So when it comes to when it comes to ridership, yeah, ridership is about up to 23,000 a month for the most recent fiscal year, which was FY '25. We continue in the same trend for this year, and that is only for the downtown and Gold Mile Northwest communities and other service area takes about 14 fourteen fifty passengers a month, about 1,500 a month.

And how much do you expect with that temporary micro transit improvement with the 30 ks? How much more traffic do people serve? That would really depend on

the service plan to put out for every one of the special events, but I would expect that that would give us about probably close to a thousand hours of service. And depending on how many events we deploy service for and how many vehicles we put in service, ridership would go up or down. But we can follow-up with some estimates. I don't know that I can comfortably say right now what that would be.

So for that decision package in particular, it's more dedicated more towards events. So like anything the city has going on, it's not necessarily to expand our campus service.

No, but I'd like to have an idea of how much it depends compared to the recurring

I see where you guys

just as a proportion and losing percentage. Not looking forward to increasing ridership necessarily through that, but I think it would be interesting to put the 30 k in regards with the impact that it might have.

We can develop some planning level estimates. I'm just curious.

Yep. Okay. Thank you. Milos, last fall we had under public comment, Estelle Brennan, president of the Croissant Park Neighborhood Association. She came in and they were concerned about child safety outside one of the school zones crossing and asked about crossing guards. Were you able to help facilitate or any safety measures to assist in that request?

So I would have to go in and look into that particular school. So school crossing guards are, go ahead.

Yeah. So it was actually handled by the police department.

They were able to use

some of their public safety aids to serve during those times. And really, were most concerned with the time periods right before school was starting because of the number of parents that were doing drop off and taking unconventional routes to drop their children off. So the police department was able to utilize overtime from their public safety aides in order to implement that program. You'll hear more about it from the police chief when he comes because he has some stats on the services that was provided.

But related and finally Is there any

advanced safety type of equipment that can be utilized versus personnel costs for these types of issues?

Yes. So related to that, recently within the last two months, our city commission awarded the contract for automated school zones. We are working, we actually had a kickoff a couple of weeks ago with a selected vendor that would be installing devices at about 12 schools citywide, three schools per district, and we plan on launching that for the beginning of the next school year. So it would be automatically device would be automatically issuing towards where feeding within the school zone. So that's one of the improvements.

The other one is that over the last couple of years, we implemented a program where we, during summer break, we would go and proactively take a look at conditions of the payment markings and signage around the schools and any equipment of that safety story that we could leverage. There is a group within Broward County Traffic Engineering division that handles exactly that. And there is a portion of the CIRTACS program that goes into improvement of operational safety around schools. Okay.

Very good. Good. Yeah. Oh, we've saved all the hard ones now really for you. Good.

Good evening everyone. Carl Williams, parks and recreation director. Joining me are you keep members of our team. I believe Enrique Sanchez is back there.

There you

go. Amy Jean Baptiste is also our deputy director, doctor Nancy Gassman, and our senior financial administrator, Vadashra Vakarayan. So this year, as part of our review for decision packages or above page requests, understanding kind of our landscape of the city and kind of being fiscally responsible, we took an approach to not look at positions, but more so look at how we can address funding gaps and proactively address efficiencies that we can utilize resources from a perspective of addressing our service levels and service level needs. And with that being said, we do have five separate requests with that. And the first one is advancing our urban forestry master plan.

At the early portion of this fiscal year, City Commission approved the Urban Forestry Master Plan, which the goal is to increase, or achieve 33% canopy by 2040. And as part of this decision package, we are looking for 150,000 in support of horticultural supplies, which would be supporting tree plantings. 120,000 of that would be reimbursable through our treaty trust fund. And ultimately, the package that we're asking for is 30,000 in real terms fund off. The second item that we are looking for, when we are talking about addressing, funding gaps and being proactive, we're looking at amending our parks and recreation equipment replacement plan.

These are some of our larger dollar items that we would need to purchase that we know we're gonna need to purchase once they reach a certain lifestyle or a life cycle. And, you know, these would be like your mechanical systems, circulation pumps, things of that nature that would be going to failure at our aquatic center. And so this replacement plan is a ten year plan, and we're requesting to seek funding to proactively address any issues that may come ahead and also have a plan together when we know we'll be able to replace them. Our next item is we currently have, as you all know, at our aquatics center, we have a 27 meter dive tower and we have a dive coach. Our prior dive coach retired several months back and we recently filled that position.

However, it's a contract position that we were never funded for. Recognizing that this is the highlight of some of our portion of our barrier island in a highly utilized facility, we want to make sure that we have a coach to be able to train our athletes to utilize the platforms from the various levels that we have. And so this decision package is to obtain the funding for this contractor position so that we can address our budget and make that whole from that standpoint. Our next request is for our aquatic center maintenance plan, and this this differs from the previous one that I mentioned is these are your upkeep items. These are more of your smaller items that we would have ongoing maintenance with for our facility.

And so this is primarily for pool equipment and annual maintenance and parts. In this particular request, we're asking for a $177,045 with ongoing funding of just shy of $20,000. And this is for preventative maintenance of that facility. And our final request is an interesting one. This one, deals with termites and the ongoing challenges to protect our canopy within the city.

And so our plan for this particular item is to collaborate with the University of Florida with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences to identify a framework for how we can assess and address these termites, deliver target treatment for these particular areas, educate the community, and then also strengthen our internal forestry operations as it stands. So for this particular request, we are seeking a 145,000, which includes a $50,000 grant, and year two includes a 160,000. That also includes a $50,000 client grant for a total request of $305,000. That being said, that concludes our requests and

for your questions. Okay, I'll start down at the end of the table. Samantha?

What did you say the total was for all of the the five?

I know I got maintenance, swim coach, preventative maintenance, termites, and it was one home.

$718,003.83 year one net cost And ongoing of 341,000.

What was the items? The,

subterranean termite treatment $145,101,160.

Oh, okay.

You. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Say it loud. Say it loud.

I'm proud. Yeah, we need to share.

My favorite department.

The four H program is under parts and Rex.

300,000 just not like.

One of the reasons you're one of my favorite department, Paul, maybe not the data that I need is that there's a lot of reduction in operating expenses. The increase of budget is relatively contained and reasonable, so I want to acknowledge that. Are you listening assistant city managers and city manager? Ability noted. But it's interesting that there are significant numbers and reduction and one time funding for the separation of The United States, you know, semi sanctuary, fleet maintenance, reduction.

So the request that you have compared to the reduction, you know, it's all a balance that I'm focused on and we should be all focused on. I think it's a good job and doing more with less or doing more with the same is a good culture. And I think Parks and Recs represents that. We didn't mention the revenue enhancement that you're working on, which is also a good direction. I'm hoping that, you know, with the leadership of our chairman on that with the increase of fee of the special event, all of that, I think it's a great direction. So thank

you for

leading that.

Thank you very much. And just to kind of piggyback off that, so we did present to our commission and they are amenable to that. So we will see those changes coming forward, likely start by the beginning of the next fiscal year. We still have a little bit of work on my end to clear that up with commission and once we do that, those will be. No questions. Thank you.

Just a couple questions to react actually. On the amendment to the recreation equipment replacement plan. This is over and above anything that was addressed equipment wise in the Bayesha Parks bond? Yes. Okay. And then I've heard pros and cons on termite treatment for subterraneals for the trees. What have you heard? Is it highly successful or is there still research being done on it?

So, you know, I think it's a combination of that because there's definitely research being done and we are not the termite experts. We are relying on our partners that we've kind of found and kind of brought this issue to us, to the city, and recognizing that, you know, when we do have issues with our canopy and termites are leading that, how can we address that? How can we limit the issues with these here termites and moving and migrating and addressing? So there's there's a lot of layers to this. And with the amount of trees and canopy that we have throughout the city, the amount that we're asking, because I know that you mentioned the 300,000, that was a it's a sticker shock, but that's actually a small amount compared to what will likely be needed if we're going to move this forward for years to come.

We have to make sure it works, it's effective.

Yes.

This is

It has an impact.

This would be considered like your next step of

a pilot program and identifying people and treat them, educating our staff and, implementing what we've put in place. And then, oftentimes I hear from constituents that, you know, the city's not doing enough to help reduce the child drownings. Do you feel that the Parks Department has the adequate funding and programs in place to address some of these concerns?

So, yeah, I I do, but we can always do more and we are going to do more. One of the, items that is a commission priority is Learn to Swim, and we are going to be addressing the level one of the Learn to Swim program to provide more opportunities at an affordable rate, to provide those swimming activations for the youth. Ideally, you know, we want to be able to offer this free and we'll be looking at grants and things of that nature to help supplement that effort.

Yeah, we evolved with the Y and I went to their, what's it called beach ball, big thing they do every year. And they're, you know, obviously going in right across from Flywheel Village. Do we partner with that? That's a big priority of Hawaii, one of the biggest fundraisers. They did like a million in person. It's pretty great.

No, we don't partner with Hawaii. That being said, we do have a relationship with the Y where we have a project that's being built on Federal Highway.

Yeah, John talked about that. Yeah. And so there

will be opportunities for us being in Holiday Park.

That's what I'm saying. We're talking about, you know, either through grants or through everything else, but they are they have the full force of the why behind them nationwide. And then in South Florida, particularly, they have that fundraiser every year that I've gone to a couple of times. And the folks, the CEO of the South for them is wonderful. We already have a good relationship, but I would just think that's an angle as well for child drownings. A big thing. As part of the city's financial contribution to

the pools for the Y, because the city donated $2,000,000 towards that project, are public opportunities in swim.

I might

have already done that. I just wanted to

Yeah, there are learn to swim stuff

incorporated in that agreement.

It's great. Glad that initiative is something that we're all thinking about, but I'm good. I'm good.

Yeah. No. I appreciate you doing everything you can to strategically partner with with folks, look for grants funding. One thing I will say is when I'm looking at some of the line items for infrastructure and resilience, just in terms of the budget that's allocated for public outreach and educational materials, I feel like one sort of begets the other, I and almost wonder if there's more that can be done to increase almost the budget request for the public outreach and educational and see if that might lower some of the other line items in there. What can it goes back to, you know, when I went to go tour the new waste management facility in Riverbine.

It's not a matter of people not wanting to recycle, it's that they don't know how to do it. If they know how to recycle, is it easier to do? Can it be more accessible? So I almost wonder if there's an angle to that in the future.

So last year we received a budget amendment decision package for adding a resilience coordinator whose primary function is outreach and we have just hired or hope to be waiting for them to accept the position, a sustainability coordinator whose primary function is outreach on sustainability. So, we're certainly looking at those opportunities. We've developed. Resilience materials outreach materials as part of our Fortified Lauderdale program. And so, we just presented to our sustainability advisory board.

Last month on the topic of what our resilience outreach will will be looking like. So outreach is certainly something that we are very much

more.

Interaction with the public coming up in the future.

That's great Doctor. Gaspard. How do we actually evaluate the outputs, the impact, not only the efforts and the outreach, but the outcomes, that would be interesting to also have some sort of KPI around it.

As you may be aware, when you're talking about outreach type efforts, it's a little easier to count activities, much harder to

I'm not saying it's simple. I know, but I think that's still at the core of what we should have in our thinking.

I think part of what we're looking at over the long run is things like the number one percentage of new blood policies. We get the education out there. Are people realizing it? Doesn't matter where you live, you need a blood policy. And if if we can do

you see you already have some ideas? Looking for the KPIs. Following up on your question.

Linda, do you have anything?

Just wanted to say great presentation and decision package, Carl. Yeah. In support of everything, it seems very reasonable. Just it particularly I know, you know, two of the items are focused on trees, and that makes sense given our master plan to increase the tree canopy, I think, by 33% by 2040. And with regards to the subterranean termites, I I did not realize this, but AI just told me that we that Fort Lauderdale is becoming something of a national case study for how invasive these termites are for urban tree canopies.

And I know I know there's already been some analysis and work done by UF. So I think I think it sounds very important, particularly because given our hurricanes and the trees can look healthy from the outside, we've got a lot of large oaks in certain areas, even in the downtown that, obviously, we need more research done to see how we can stop the spread of this.

Thank you. Yes.

Thank you, Melinda. Well, to the presenters tonight, thank you.

Yeah, thanks, everyone.

You had a long night, let you guys get out and get some rest, guys and gals. And thank you again. Great job. You and your staffs are all doing. Appreciate tonight coming in and doing presentations. I'll defer down to is city manager still here?

The city manager had to step out. But

while they're still here, I just wanna say thank you to the first round of presenters. You guys rocked it. And we were worried about time tonight, but you guys were so mindful efficient about that. So thank you guys so very much for your.

Yeah.

Thanks for that for your great questions. I've noticed some follow-up items. We're going to try to continue to send the follow-up items with this department that are for them even though they do have any information, ahead of the department presentations from the, what keeps you up at night discussions and also the last meeting. So we're putting together that information.

Okay. Quick round robin of, any of the board members, any any burning desire to bring anything up unofficially or anything? As for final call oh.

Well, this is just just minor. I did hear get a email from Chip LaMarca earlier today, and he said that, he does think they'll be going back to Tallahassee in June to talk about, property taxes.

Good.

While we're on that subject, quick, what what do you build, staff, or you're building the assessed value increase, what percentage?

So for fiscal year 2027, we're assuming 7%, similar to the model that we presented in February with Stantec. We'll know a solid number June 1. So a lot of times they get it to us right before Memorial Day and we'll share that when we have it.

Don't want to be nice if we get 7%, realistically, I've been looking at some numbers and looking at reassessment values on new construction, but resells of units and everything. And I'm very cautious. I hope we even end up around 5%. Nice, it'd be nice if we get seven, but hope not to build too much expectation up that you have contingency plan if there is like a two percent reduction. As I think 5% around that will be more realistic.

Thank you for that feedback. As we build the budget, we do build the current service level budget and then we have levers in case more money comes in, we know what the priorities are or if less money comes in, we have ability to look at strategic reductions and program based budgets, which we build throughout the process. So we'll be in a position to make informed decisions and make recommendations to the manager.

Good. Melinda, to your point about the email you got from Chip, in conversation, I heard that the governor last week did bring up that he wants to revisit specialization on property tax. But in talking with the public affair lobbyist Daphne last night, she said the flavor of the House and the Senate is not to do anything this year. So it's gonna be interesting to see what kind of standoff there is between the governor and the House.

Very good. Thanks for that update.

Thank you. Okay. Well, return till next week. Thank you everyone. Thanks, staff again.