City Council - Regular Meeting

Oh, really? Yes.

Oh, about what's going on across the street? Yeah. Did you say you could help her? Maybe you can.

Well, it's in the city of Eustis. Are we good? Okay. No? Okay, y'all. We're ready.

Okay. All right. We will call to order this May 26th, 2026 workshop and we're going to, oh, we have the chaplain today from the sheriff's office to give us the invocation. Josh Douglas, appreciate having you here. And then we'll remain standing afterwards for the Pledge of Allegiance. All right.

Would you please join me in prayer? God, right now we think about how in your word you tell us to seek out the good of the community. And in this place we get to do that. We get to do that so often. And Lord, I ask you to keep your steadfast hand upon this place. That they will only know your goodness and your graciousness. And may you be the God that is over all and that is in all, only for people's flourishing and their thriving. And it's in your great name we pray. Amen. Now would you please join me in saying the pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right, Jennifer, any changes?

Good morning, Madam Chair, Commissioners. No, there are no changes to the agenda this morning.

All right, we'll jump right in. Bill, Building Department, Building Services Director.

Morning, everyone. Bill Ondelich, Director, Office of Building Services. All right, this is our outline overview organizational chart accomplishments efficiencies benchmarks and then finally the proposed budget and We encompass the permitting, plan review, inspections, fire prevention for new construction, licensing, both hearings for the building examiners and special master. We do outreach, contractor and public education, and of course we assist any other offices that require assistance for permitting. This is our organizational chart. Some of our accomplishments, we've transitioned from permitting tech to the new title of development review technician. We've issued 17,000 permits and we've assisted 8,200 walk-in customers and are just shy of 49,000 phone calls. We completed 58,000 inspections, plan review reviewed 8,200 projects. We've got the 1,300 fire inspections and 2,100 fire plan reviews. Our plans examiners continue to get additional licenses. Same with our fire inspector plans examiner. And we've completed the 215 hours of continuing ed credits. Our licensing investigation.

Hey, Bill, can you click your little clicker? Thank you.

Sorry. Our licensing investigation received 1,100 calls for service, completed 532 investigations, 71 licensed contractor cases, 25 unlicensed individual cases, and 40 hours of community outreach. And we respond to 424 cases of substantial damage. So for the efficiencies, as I previously mentioned, we've combined the permitting technicians and the associate planner positions to create the development review technician. That's been pretty effective in combining what the functions of our zoning techs used to do with our permitting techs to try to have people help with, instead of moving them from window to window or transferring phone calls, et cetera. We also did the two to four months of continuous cross-training and we hired three additional development review techs to improve customer service and the response time. And all this is still a work in progress. For our inspections and plan review, we now offer some virtual inspections, namely water heater, AC change-outs, window and door replacement. The people that are using the virtual inspection seem to really like it. but we're still trying to get out to the community. We wanted to kind of roll that out slow to see how we could work out bugs, but it seems to be working pretty good. And then our plan review team, we have our plan review down to an average of two days, which is pretty spectacular. And for our county partners and memberships, we attend the Building Officials Association of Florida meetings. We are active with the HBA at Lake Sumter. We attend the monthly meetings of the Florida Association of Plumbing Gas Mechanical Inspectors, and we are on the Lake Sumter Building Construction Management Advisory Board. Then there's some benchmarks here that goes over comparing us to the different counties. right where we want to be for the plan reviews. Average number of inspections as compared to our surrounding counties. Average number of permits processed by permit technician. And then finally, our proposed budget, our revenues, and our expenditures. And I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Under your virtual inspection, is there a list of inspections online that people can do the virtual inspections?

There is, and we have an instruction list online, and then we list what we can and can't do. Like I said, recently we just added window and door inspection, and our team, probably last week, we started going through the aluminum virtual inspection for screen rooms, pool cages, stuff like that.

And I'm assuming you're doing lath and all that stuff, like your lath inspections?

Well, so what we're trying to do with the virtual inspection is we want to kind of limit that to, you know, very easy items because, you know, it's like I'm not going to send somebody out to do a framing inspection virtually. Right. There are certain things that I want to have our team have eyes on. But if you're going to pour concrete, you know, simple walk around with a tape measure, show the inspector what the depth is going to be for the slab footing, et cetera, measure the steel off the base or, you know, from the side and make sure you have the adequate bar size, et cetera.

And how long has this been rolled out for? A little over eight weeks. Fantastic. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Anyone else have questions? No. All right, great, thank you.

Thank you.

All right, now we'll have Glenn Goodsman, Office of Code Enforcement Director.

Good morning, Chairman. Good morning, Commissioners. Before I begin, I'd like to first thank the Board of County Commissioners for their continued support of the Office of Code Enforcement and your commitment to our quality of life throughout our county. So I would also like to thank our county manager, our county attorney's office, our executive director, their leadership, guidance, and continued collaboration that allows us to our office to remain responsive, balanced, self-oriented, service-oriented while handling complex and often difficult situations throughout the county. Code enforcement is not often easy work. It's one of the few professions where if you're doing your job correctly, both sides think you might be doing it wrong. And so, complainants feel we're being, we're not moving fast enough, while respondents are often thinking, you know, we're being too aggressive. And so, with that, our office strives to be professional, fairness, and dedication to our public service. With that, today I'll provide a brief overview of our office, our organizational chart, accomplishments, efficiencies, benchmark data, and finish off with our fiscal year 2027 budget. So that's the overview. Okay. Um, the office of code enforcement performs a wide range of responsibilities directly impact the health, public safety, um, and welfare of our, uh, citizens, our staff response to complaints related to code, uh, code violations, as well as, uh, land development regulations and ordinances. We conduct housing inspections, environmental CUP setback inspections, commercial landscape review and inspections. Our office also facilitates monthly public hearings for both code enforcement and the sheriff's office animal services. Staff continues, works closely with planning and zoning on code amendments and interpretations. And in more severe cases, we coordinate court ordered cleanups and demolitions. Our emphasis is a balance on enforcement with education, voluntary compliance whenever possible. So for our office organizational chart, the Office of Code Enforcement has a director, a public hearing coordinator, a program associate, an office associate five, an environmental specialist, compliance and monitoring specialist, a chief code enforcement officer, a senior officer, and five code enforcement officers. The organizational structure is designed to maximize efficiencies, communication, and field responsiveness. Code Enforcement Team operates as one cohesive unit with strong collaboration between administrative staff, the supervisor, and field officers. Our team's flexible cross-training remains an essential component of our office's operational successes. So for our accomplishments, one of the most successful initiatives that continue to be Great is the intensive code enforcement. This proactive effort focuses on blight reduction, education, and long-term neighborhood improvements. This year, our staff reviewed over 1,100 parcels across multiple subdivisions throughout the last year. Staff also have reported that visible improvements in those strategic communities. Another major accomplishments were maintaining our four-star national accreditation through the American Association of Code Enforcement. The accreditation reflects our national best practices, professionalism, training standards, and operational accountability. The Office of Code Enforcement continues to utilize a five zone coverage model to better balance between workload and population distribution. Each officer covers around 188 square miles. That continued use of mobile office technology have helped us maintain our responsive times under 72 hours. with many cases getting started within 24. We've also cross-trained and our cross-training has improved operational resilience and also allows our personnel to assist in other departments as needed. That flexibility has become increasingly important as the workload continues to evolve with AI. We continue to still have challenges that affect us from 2021 Senate Bill 60, which continues to prevent operational challenges with restricted compliance or anonymous complaints. Many residents still feel hesitant to file complaints when personal information is required. Despite those challenges, staff still starts to continue emphasizing education, voluntary compliance, and customer service to those that are hesitant. And so for benchmarking, our benchmarks, this slide represents the population per officer and neighborhood and comparable counties. Lake County officers is one of the highest population ratios in the region. However, that demonstrates that both workload demands and operational efficiencies. Let's see here. This one, again, illustrates the area of coverage. Lake County officers are still covering 188 square miles. But despite this unique logistical and operational challenges compared with the lakes and urban, compared to urban counties, despite those challenges, the office continues to maintain a responsive level of time throughout the county. Complaints, our complaints valid among neighboring counties are still relatively high. Complaint valid reflects both the community growth as well as public expectation regarding neighborhood standards. The office remains committed to timely responsiveness as well as consistent enforcement practices. Many cases are resolved voluntarily through education and communication before any formal enforcement is necessary. So with this slide, this represents the number of compliance relative to the overall enforcement activity. While the chart reflects open versus closed cases as a broader story, it's actually how we achieved success in Lake County when compared to the total received cases requiring formal action, only approximately about 8.7% of cases that actually come to us require formal enforcement action, which means it goes before a special magistrate. And so that means that 91% of the cases that we do see, were successfully resolved through either investigation, communication, education, or voluntary cooperation. And that's because staff is focusing on education, communication, and long-term resolution whenever possible. And so this slide represents the continued operational needs as well as organizational adjustments. Our personnel services reflect staffing restructuring. Operational expenses remain relatively stable and aligned with current operational trends. The office continues to focus on efficiencies, technology, utilization, and responsible resource management. Our goal remains delivering professional, fair, and responsive code enforcement services while protecting property values, public safety, and quality of life for our residents. That concludes my presentation. I'll answer any questions you have at this time.

Questions? I just want to say thank you. Sometimes I feel like all the code cases are only in my district. I know everybody else has them too, but there seems to be a lot in Northeast Lake County. And I appreciate the attention that you give them and the follow-up. And as you said, if you can get it worked out and you can get it fixed, that's great. I know we have some that... you know, we have to weigh out whether it makes sense to try to go to court for an injunction versus just try to get it into compliance. So appreciate that.

Thank you.

Anyone else? All right. Okay. Thanks, Glenn. Moving on to economic development. Meg Brew.

Good morning, Commissioners. For the record, Meg Brew, Director for the Office of Economic Development. Our presentation this morning will follow the traditional outline. The Office of Economic Development pursues the county's vision of a prosperous local economy supported by a wide range of career opportunities, a diversified tax base, and an exceptional quality of life by focusing on the growth, retention, attraction, and creation of businesses and employment opportunities. Our office currently consists of four FTEs. Currently the CRA coordinator position is vacant with responsibility for the CRA having been transitioned to planning with assistance from economic development. In Lake County, we approach economic development from five key angles, which include business attraction, business retention and expansion, business creation, site development and workforce development. Business attraction, of course, focuses on bringing new opportunities to our community by offering attractive incentive programs, cultivating prime locations and fostering a supportive business climate. We recognize the opportunity to shape our collective futures by seeking out and actively pursuing businesses that will pay high wages, be good corporate citizens and contribute to a diversified tax base. Equally important to business attraction, if not even more so, is taking great care of our existing businesses. Not only do they drive our local economy and employ our residents, but they also serve as our best advocates when new companies consider relocating here. We maintain strong relationships with local businesses through targeted site visits, active participation in our chambers of commerce and industry events, and ongoing regular communication. In the past year, we conducted 23 site visits to existing businesses and participated in 81 community meetings to learn about the needs of our business community. In Lake County, we recognize that entrepreneurs and small businesses are truly the backbone of our economy, and to support them, we partner with several organizations that assist entrepreneurs and business owners at every stage of their journey. Talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Working with our municipal and private partners and in lockstep with other departments that fall under development services, we prioritize strategic site development to make sure that when opportunity knocks, we have the doors ready to open. Over the past year, we've worked very closely with LEAD to categorize our current and potential sites in Lake County using a stoplight framework to assess site readiness. We will be proactively marketing more shovel-ready sites in the next year and working to overcome and identify barriers for sites that lack critical infrastructure. And then last but certainly not least, workforce development remains an important focus area for Lake County. Our office partners with Lake County Schools to assure that the local business community is engaged in their career fair, and our participation hit a record high last year with 79 businesses participating. Our staff serves on advisory committees for Lake Sumter State College, Lake Technical College, and the Lake County School Board. Over the past year, we've worked with LEAD to host quarterly meetings with each of these educational partners, which allows us to learn more about the needs of our school system and inform educators about future employment opportunities that may positively impact their students. Through a partnership with Career Source Central Florida, we were able to sponsor local youth participation, 70 of them and their summer career program. And just this past spring, we hosted the first class of high schools career express students here in Lake County for a day of learning about careers in public service. I want to emphasize, of course, that none of these efforts are carried out in isolation. Instead, our our office serves as the central connector for a budding ecosystem for economic development. We lean into true collaboration with others when working in economic and workforce development spaces by meeting regularly with our partners to provide top-notch service to our local businesses and identify pathways to prosperity. We also maintain close relationships with each of our nine chambers of commerce, going as far as serving as ex-officio members of several boards and working groups. Attendance to monthly chamber functions affords us the opportunity to fellowship with the business community from Astor to Four Corners and troubleshoot issues before they're elevated. We also strive to be a good partner to our 14 municipalities. We have recently started quarterly meetings with our economic development partners at the municipal level to assure that we are complementing their efforts and bringing them the types of projects that are best suited for their communities. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't also shine a light on all of our incredible internal partners. Economic development truly touches nearly every other county department, and we have enjoyed especially fruitful collaborations with our friends at Public Works, library services, communication, extension services, tourism, and of course, planning, building, and code. This year, our team has played an active role in the comprehensive planning process and worked alongside our executive director to develop a series of public meetings focused on growth management. Our office also plays a crucial role in providing funding to and managing the contracts for several key partners who are essential to advancing our collective mission. These partnerships allow us to multiply the efforts of our small team by supporting and standing up complementary organizations. The SBDC, supported by a partnership with UCF, is a valuable resource for businesses in Lake County. It offers expert guidance in business planning, financial management, and access to capital and market analysis. Over the last year, the Lake County SBDC with offices in both Groveland and Eustis assisted 265 businesses through 617 unique consulting sessions, totaling 1,311 hours of one-on-one consulting, all provided free of charge to the business owner. As a result of this assistance, local businesses have raised $5.7 million in capital, created 13 new businesses, and increased sales by over $7 million collectively. It's easy to brag on the SBDC, but I am certainly not alone in thinking that we have the best SBDC in the country. As you learned last week, the Small Business Administration recently recognized our UCF SBDC as the best in the entire country. Another key partnership is, of course, with the UCF Business Incubator Program in the city of Eustis. The incubator officially opened in October of 2023 and is currently serving seven clients. Overall client revenue increased from $174,000 in quarter four of 2025 to over $700,000 in quarter one of 2026, demonstrating a true trajectory of growth. In addition to serving clients one-on-one, the business incubator also plays an important role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem at large by hosting workshops and other no-charge or low-charge learning opportunities around the county. Through our relationship with the Orlando Economic Partnership, we have direct access to the latest local economic research and assistance in contextualizing and applying the data. The OEP has been instrumental in supporting our efforts to deliver quarterly economic indicator reports, as well as on-demand reports for other government offices. LEAD, our public-private partner for economic development in Lake County, focuses on business attraction, retention, expansion, and creation. Their work complements the county's efforts and extends our reach in a very meaningful way. In the past fiscal year, LEAD provided technical assistance to 51 existing businesses, visited 77 businesses, supported 51 entrepreneurs through training and resources, managed 14 active business attraction projects, and responded to 24 leads from Florida Commerce and other sources. LEAD also hosts One Million Cups every Wednesday morning in both Eustis and Claremont with an average attendance of 50 entrepreneurs per location. And it's worth noting that Lake County was the very first community in the country to host two chapters of One Million Cups. Finally, last summer we contracted with SendFluence, the Florida High Tech Corridor's clustering initiative to conduct a cluster analysis of Lake County. Through data analysis and stakeholder interviews, the study identified agriculture technology and human performance as potential industry clusters in Lake County. This summer, Lake County will officially become a partner of SendFluence and the Florida High Tech Corridor, and we look forward to connecting new and existing businesses to the corridor as we work to share Lake County's brand throughout the region. Many years ago, leadership in Lake County identified four strategic corridors that could function to both absorb the growth that we knew was coming, and more importantly, to serve as job centers, allowing our residents to earn great salaries closer to home. Lake County, in cooperation with the city of Claremont, has revived our monthly Wellness Way meetings with a renewed focus on economic development. This past year, a logic model-based plan of work was developed for Wellness Way, which has allowed us to measure forward progress and course correct as we move closer to our long-term goals. We worked with LEAD to launch a new website for Wellness Way and have been working very closely with our phenomenal communications team to produce a series of videos to help the public better understand economic development efforts within Wellness Way. Christopher C. Ford, our oldest and most established corridor, continues to be a magnet for high-performing businesses. Our offices work closely with LEED and property owners in Christopher C. Ford to market recently vacated sites as well as turnkey speculative space and to attract new employers to locate into the Commerce Park. The Mineola Interchange is also shaping up to be an exciting corridor. This past December, Advent Health opened the doors of their new hospital in Mineola. Cricket Can will be opening in the very near future and that will be both a brewery and restaurant and a manufacturing hub. And the very first stage of the Mineola Commerce Park is already breaking ground. Finally, we've been working with our communications team to develop a branding strategy for the Wolf Branch Innovation District and are in communication with Mount Dora and developers regarding infrastructure needs to support growth in that corridor. As part of our business attraction and business expansion efforts, our office manages an economic development incentive grant program that makes our community stand out. This incentive program has been leveraged to attract high dollar capital investment and high paying jobs to Lake County. To this end, the Office of Economic Development revised our incentive ordinance this past year to include a bonus incentive for businesses who locate into one of our four strategic corridors. Additionally, we created a limited hotel incentive designed to incentivize the development of high quality hotels with the amenities that our visitors expect in order to keep tourism spending and tourist tax revenue local. As stewards of taxpayer money, it's incredibly important that we mitigate financial risk and invest public funds only where a high return is expected. The addition of a clawback clause to all of our incentive agreements serves to strengthen the performance-based aspect of our agreements and assures that county monies are well invested and attracting targeted industries. I'm happy to share that even before we recouped money from Kroger and Ocado through termination agreements, we had already recognized a 600% return on the investment of those public funds. We're currently managing compliance for one incentive grants agreement that's active and in fiscal year 26, shepherded our first hotel incentive project through the process. As a result of these efforts, over $119 million has been invested into Lake County and 341 new jobs paying at or above 115% of the average wage have been created. In addition to our own grant program, we're also responsible for reporting for the Florida Jobs Growth Grant accepted by Lake County for infrastructure improvements in and around Mount Dora. Reporting on new jobs and capital investment in this area began in the summer of 2024 and requires quarterly reports. One of the benefits of working well with others is being able to recognize efficiency through cooperation. We've worked closely with LEAD to eliminate redundancy in the resources that we both access and to share resources as appropriate. Our divide and conquer approach has allowed us to reduce our budget in a couple of key areas this upcoming fiscal year and to become more efficient of our use of time and talent. Through a collaboration with the Office of Planning and Zoning, we've been able to manage the CRA without adding an additional FTE, which represents a cost savings to the county. This brings us to the first of my benchmarks, but before we talk dollars and cents, I wanted to talk a little bit about growth. As you know, our population has grown from just shy of 70,000 people in 1970 to approximately 450,000 today, and we are still growing. UF's Bieber projects a 40% increase in population between now and 2050, outpacing all of our surrounding counties other than Sumter and Osceola. It's imperative that we lay a foundation today for prosperity tomorrow. Our office is focused on making sure that as Lake County adds these new neighbors, we also add new opportunities for all of our residents to engage in meaningful and well compensated work and to enjoy the quality of life that they have come to associate with Lake County. We're constantly seeking out innovative ways to bring jobs to Lake County while still preserving and protecting everything that makes this such a uniquely special place to live. At present, 70% of our workforce leaves the county every day to go to work. And when you take a look at average wages paid across surrounding counties, you can understand why someone might be incentivized to battle traffic every day. It's important that we bring not just more jobs to Lake County, but genuinely great jobs. Reducing our outflow number is not just good for individuals who will gain more time with their families and reduce the wear and tear on their cars and their nerves. It's also good for our roads, our traffic, our collective car insurance rates, and the local economy. When people work where they live, the entire community benefits. As of fiscal year 26, Lake County is spending less on economic development than six of our seven surrounding counties. I feel this really speaks to the value of our strategic partnerships. And this brings me to our fiscal year 27 budget request. Our total budget ask has been reduced by 18.5%. This savings is accomplished in part by the fact that our incentive budget will naturally shrink as agreements mature or are terminated. and grow as agreements are added. Additionally, we were able to recognize savings from some of the efficiencies that we discussed earlier. And with that, I would be happy to entertain any questions you might have.

Not a question, just a statement. Meg, I've never seen anybody with so much energy and passion as you. And I appreciate working with you.

It's a lot of caffeine.

Just an observation. It is kind of fitting that economic development would come in with a pretty significant reduction in budget. But as you indicated, it does reflect those incentives that are being spent off or used. So it could be next year we get some really amazing employer. and we bumped that back up again. But appreciate the efficiencies and I think it's great that you guys are taking such a lead with our education partners, with the career curriculum that school district is really, really immersed in as well as Lake Tech. And it was pretty cool the other day at the Lake Tech graduation to have the students that were actually high school students that were also attending Lake Tech at the same time. So we're doing that with Lake Tech, not just with Lake Sumter. So there's a lot of great things happening. And the one thing, I was talking to Deanna Thomas about, and that is that you just don't typically see that in counties where you have the county government working so closely with education partners, and I think that that's one of the things that's making a key difference, not just in their performance and student performances, but economic development overall in Lake County. So I just want to say keep up the good work and I think that's critical to ultimate success is developing that workforce and creating a desire and an opportunity for kids to stay and students to stay in Lake County or to come back to Lake County.

Thank you.

And I do want to say, I certainly appreciate you and your team's work on some of the adversities we've had throughout last year and the way you handled them and the way you did your job placements was fantastic. So thank you for all your hard work for you and your team.

Thank you so much. I appreciate your support.

Yeah, Craig, just to mention Kroger again, I mean, it's pretty impressive that you guys were going to, we were able to get in there, work directly with Kroger, get incentives back. get the funding back, as well as help employees find job placement. You've really jumped right in there and got it done, and it's a success story for sure.

We appreciate your support in allowing us to be proactive and kind of grab the bull by the horns on that for sure.

All right, thank you. All right, moving along to planning and zoning, Mike Fitzgerald.

Hi, good morning. For the record, Mike Fitzgerald, I'm the office of planning and zoning director. We'll be presenting the fiscal 27 budget. We'll be following a similar outline to the other departments. In our overview, we manage the growth and development in Lake County. We process and review development applications for site plans, preliminary plats, rezonings, master park plans, comprehensive plan amendments. We're coordinating with all 14 municipalities to support the initiative of joint planning to manage collectively the growth and planning in Lake County. We issue site plan approvals for residential and commercial development. We prepare and review applications for public hearings. We update the comprehensive plan and the land development regulations. We assess impact fees for new development and we respond to all planning and zoning public records requests. We have 23 full-time employees broken out by planning, development review and inspection, public hearing and finance. Some of our accomplishments, as Bill stated earlier, we completed the merger of associate planners and permit technicians to become development review technicians for efficiency for customers. We completed the cross-training of those merged employees in transitioning to their new position. We've updated the Lake County Water Supply Facilities Work Plan pursuant to state requirement. We've initiated the update to the Lake County Comprehensive Plan 2050. We completed the data inventory and analysis for that. We reviewed and updated all the elements for the comp plan and there should be a draft that is printed and bound that is either on its way to the board members or you may have already received them. If not, it's on its way. We've initiated the update to the land development regulations. We've got a scope ready to go and we're going to work with the consultant on initiating that and hopefully we'll get that adopted in fiscal year 27. We've successfully processed outstanding online applications and we continue to draft standard operating procedures for efficiency. We continue to use our automated appointment management system. We've worked to identify a new software system to replace our CD Plus system to try to get more of an efficient software that we use. And we've also worked closely with the Public Works Department to restructure some of the personnel that were doing site review and inspection. For residential development, they have now moved from Public Works under planning. We've improved career training and progression opportunities for individuals in the department, and we've increased project handling efficiency and overall communication quality with applicants. Some of the benchmark metrics, we've processed 1700 public records requests, 204 development applications, 130 live record applications, and 102 pre-submittal applications, and like everybody else, we've initiated our ADA compliance. In comparison to surrounding counties, you can see that Lake County still takes the lead in regards to being fiscally conservative when it comes to the planning and zoning funding. And when you compare that to the next slide, we have 23 full-time employees and you can see the other counties are pretty well staffed. Brings us to the budget. Just one thing of note in this budget, you can see the spike in personnel services. That is reflective of the reorganization and absorbing the public works employees. And I'm happy to answer any questions.

What did you do to reduce your operational expenses?

That is... related to the comprehensive plan expenditure and the fact that that money is already encumbered and we're moving into fiscal year 27, we don't have to encumber as much money.

Perfect, thank you. Yes, sir.

All right, thank you, appreciate it. Whitney Boylston, Office of Animal Services Director.

Good morning. This year we have added some available pets to our presentation. So here you'll see Abby, featured right up front and center. If anybody's interested in adopting, you can see me after the presentation. We're going to be following the same outline as you've seen previously. That right there is actually Wayne, renamed Hank. He was just adopted, but at the time... So that dog looks so much like my Clayton. It's amazing. Right. Isn't he precious? Okay. So at the Office of Animal Services, we provide a variety of services. including pet adoption, pet reunification, assisting residents with rehoming animals, and our team is committed to providing a high standard of compassionate care to all pets that enter the shelter. Our team also plays a really important role with law enforcement for the purpose of animal cruelty investigations, which is something that I think we often forget is one of our responsibilities. And that includes our veterinary team playing an important role in the rehabilitative and curative aspect of those cases. And also, we have our very popular Every Day is Catterday program, which is ever-growing, as you'll see later in the presentation. We also offer our weekly wellness program which allows our residents to receive low cost preventative pet services including vaccines and microchips. So our team is very busy. Overall, our shelter admissions are trending upward. Every month we hold a volunteer orientation and information session. And part of that is, as we say, we tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the Lake County Animal Shelter. We've had to revise that presentation multiple times in recent years where we used to say that we sheltered between 5,000 and 6,000 pets. Then it was 5,500 and 6,500. Now we are saying that we are sheltering between 6,000 and 7,000 animals annually. So as our admissions are rising, we are providing more care to more pets. We're doing that with a very small but mighty team. You'll see that we have a total of 28 FTEs. That includes our medical team, which is one veterinarian, two vet tech twos, two vet tech ones. Our customer service and guest services representatives, we have four of those working our front desk. We also have our animal care team, which is comprised of 11 full-time animal care technicians, two lead animal care technicians, and our animal shelter supervisor. In addition, we have some program coordinators who do a very large and broad job, including coordinating programs such as our foster program, volunteer program, rescue partnerships, on and off-site events, proactive reunification, and our animal care coordinator is responsible for our enrichment programming and play groups and all of the fun activities that we are able to provide to the animals in our care. And as we've mentioned previously, our staff is all fear-free certified, which is a philosophy to help reduce fear, anxiety, stress, and frustration in the animals that we care for, as well as our staff and residents we serve. So our team, though small, very mighty, was particularly busy in 2025.

Reminding you to help control the pet population. Have your pets paid or new.

So as you saw there, we are experiencing even more admissions so far in 2026. So right now, we're about 5% to 6% year to date over what we saw in 2024, which was, as mentioned, our busiest year ever in the history of ever since we've been collecting data. But part of that is we have seen a 30% increase in our Operation Community Calderday program so far year to date. We are hoping to keep that momentum going. I'll tell you more about that in a second. So our adoptions continue to be our most popular program and we're encouraged that we're able to find those positive outcomes for those pets who are in need of a new home. Um, we are currently hosting a month long promotion. We'd like to thank, um, our procurement director, Ron Flanga for, um, his role in that promotion, as well as our really talented communications team for putting together those assets. For our certified pre-owned pet sale, we have all makes and models at low and high mileage options with no money down. So that sale does go through the end of the month if you'd like to come down and visit us. And if you did, that is Thunder, who you will see on the screen right there. He is currently available for adoption. And then you can also see that our number of pets adopted has been increasing year over year. So we love that. So Operation Community Catterday, as you know, is a very popular program. So this is where residents are engaged to trap cats. They bring them to the shelter. We provide the sterilization, vaccination, air tipping, and then they are returned to their outdoor home. This program has continued to grow year over year with 2025 of course being our best year yet. And then in 2026, we have seen that 30% increase year to date. So we're expecting 2026 to in fact be the best year for community cats we have ever had. This is because we are always looking for opportunities to increase efficiency and continually improve the program. We've done two really important things to increase the number of cats we're able to serve. The first is that we are coupling our Catterday School Roadshow with a special spay day for that community. And we've held a couple of those in the past several months. We went up to Paisley. We were able to do 76 cats as a result of that roadshow. Out in Montverde, we did 52 cats with that roadshow. And for those of you who are not familiar, a Catterday School roadshow is where a member of the community reaches out to us and says, hey, can you please teach Catterday School to my neighbors? And they host us and we come. And then after we complete that program, that community is invited to bring community cats on a special spay day where our goal is to do 50 cats or so. on that day for that neighborhood or community. And it's a really great targeted way to come in and sweep through a neighborhood and have a high impact on those cats and reduction in the population. And then on top of that, we have started a tactical TNVR program. And that's in coordination and partnership with the Lake County Sheriff's Office Animal Enforcement Unit. So they are helping us to target specific areas and do high volume trapping. Currently, we're in the midst of the rabies alert in Tavares, and so all of our additional community cat efforts are focused here locally. So far, I think we have seen about 150 cats and kittens coming in from Tavares. We've got an additional rabies spay day scheduled for June 12th, so we're hoping to get a whole bunch more cats in fixed and vaccinated and protected. So we love Trap New to Vaccinate Return, and so does our community. We have another really popular program, which is our Wait Till Eight program, continuing always growing, and that's where we turn our resident finders into fosters. And very young kittens should not spend time in animal shelters. Their immune systems aren't developed, they're at great risk of disease, failure to thrive, and they really need more care and attention than animal shelter staff can provide. And so our Wait Till Eight program is a voluntary program where residents take responsibility for those kittens. They keep them for about two weeks generally until they are big enough, old enough, and well enough to be entered into our adoption program. And one of the great side effects of that program is that when you have a kitten or four in your house for a couple of weeks, it turns out that your sister and your coworker and somebody who lives next door all want to adopt those kittens. And so they find placement really before even entering our system. And we're able to support them with the sterilization, the vaccinations. It's a really wonderful program that we love. This demonstrates kind of how our animals are entering the shelter and also how they are leaving. So you can see that our percentage of animals actually from different scenarios remains really consistent, though we are seeing that growing portion of the Operation Community Caturday admissions, which we love. I mean, that is one space where we do not complain about our admissions rising because it's such a valuable service. And then, as mentioned, our adoptions are on the rise, and we had a couple of years nationally where adoptions were struggling, and we're hoping that this is the light at the end of the tunnel and we're coming out of that shelter crisis. That is Mayhem. That was his name previous in his life. He's been renamed Hemi, and he was actually just adopted, so you cannot take him. So here you can see our benchmarks with our surrounding counties. As usual, we do not benchmark with Volusia, though that should be changing in the next year. Volusia had historically contracted with the Halifax Humane Society, though that relationship has changed. And so in the future, we'll start looking at their numbers across the board. But for now, that is Kit Kat, and she is available for adoption. So we are sitting right there in the middle of our dog and cat admissions regionally, and we do adjust these numbers because comparing animal shelter to animal shelter is very difficult, but we do the best that we can to provide a good comparison. Interestingly, when we look at the dog and cat admissions per 1,000 residents, we see that we're a little higher on the scale there with 15 animals coming to the shelter per 1,000 residents. That is Mossimo. He is available for adoption over there. And we are still leading the region in our positive outcome rate. So we celebrated a 96% live release rate in 2025. This is one of those slides where it is so encouraging because we are seeing our neighbors continuing to improve. And it wasn't that long ago that these numbers regionally looked very different. And so there are no closely guarded secrets in animal welfare. We all want what's best for all animals. And so we are really pleased to see that so many of our neighbors are increasing their live release rates as well. That is Pokey. I was so sure that she would be available for adoption because she is a long stay resident and she in fact just got adopted. So hopefully this home is the very best thing for her. This is our proposed budget for 2027. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer those. That is Taj. Taj is currently available for adoption. So if you're interested, super duper sweet, friendly dog.

All right. We're taking it in. It's really hard. If you put an animal on each page, it almost guarantees that we're going to be enthralled with the animal and not looking so much at the numbers. Was that the plan? I don't know.

I'd love to go out there and work, but I'm afraid I'd have a lot more animals at the house.

You'd need to build your own shelter. Oh, God.

Thank you for what you do. I mean, it's really needed. And a no-kill shelter is amazing.

Yeah, I'm just super happy to see the fact that the Catterday program is growing even more, and I love the idea of you guys actually targeting with the – the sheriff's side of the operations to do your own trapping. That's usually the intimidating part for people. If they're not accustomed to that, that can be a big barrier to getting people involved.

So we do teach our monthly Catterday School program, so you can learn everything you ever needed to know about how to trap cats and take advantage of the program.

And how to make sure the raccoons don't end up in your trap. That's always the scariest part.

We go over that in the class.

Yeah, great, great numbers. And just looking at your, so you've got the personal services side of it, are you adding more personnel or is it just the cost of?

So that's just reflective of the cost and wage adjustments and things like that. We would love to add some more staff if that funding were to become available because as I mentioned, we are serving more and more animals and the demands are growing for our services.

With the rabies situation in Tavares, have you seen any more cases?

So we had the one single positive, which triggers an alert from the Department of Health for 60 days, And so we are just monitoring the population and then continuing to provide additional rabies vaccines. We did free rabies vaccines for City of Tiberias residents. We saw about 100 pets through that initiative. And then with this targeted TNR program, like I mentioned, we've had about 150 cats come through. We are hosting a community conversation on Thursday evening specifically about the rabies alert and how that impacts kitten care. for those kittens that are originating from the rabies alert area and we will have a representative from the Department of Health there to help facilitate that conversation because it is a difficult situation to navigate safely because rabies of course is fatal as we all know.

So just to give us a little idea what that would look like, so the difference between how you handle the kittens in the rabies area.

Right. So we actually had a meeting with the state veterinarian as well as representatives from the Department of Health. And the standard recommendation is to not place animals that are coming from a rabies alert area. Well, not placing animals is a very grim outlook. And so we spoke at length about what it would look like for us to be able to achieve those positive outcomes. And that does include a four month quarantine period for kittens that are originating from the alert area. We have never had a rabies alert quite like this one. And that's because of the high density and population of community cats right where this cat lived and where it tested positive. And so that in combination with where we are in kitten season, we're having to be very careful about how we're handling those animals. Our staff, of course, who are rabies vaccinated pre-exposure are the ones who have to handle those. And we have basically, it's a rabies nursery where we are monitoring kittens that have come from that area. They do have to be subjected to that four month quarantine period prior to ultimate placement. We also admitted a large number of cats from Tavares High School who are going to be under those same criteria. And so it really is a very complicated public health issue and communications has helped us to get that messaging out, but you know how it is. You see a kitten on the street and you want to help it, and so then you touch it. We just had one come in over the weekend where someone had found the kitten. They took it to a local vet. Nobody ever said, oh, this came from a rabies alert area. They did end up giving us the kitten. We're going to complete the quarantine. But those can be very dangerous situations.

How long after exposure would you actually see symptoms in an animal?

So that's the really difficult part about the rabies virus. So we can see the incubation period from a couple of days. depending on where the location of the bite occurs, right? So if an animal is bitten close to the central nervous system, the head, the neck, near the spine, the virus is going to progress much more quickly. And then also the size of the animal is theoretically a factor. So if you got bit on your back foot, but you are a Great Dane, it could take much longer. So anywhere from a couple of days to several months for that virus to become symptomatic, And then the animal is only contagious with the rabies virus, only shedding the virus in its saliva, generally for the last seven to 10 days of its natural life. And so you could be running around with rabies but not infecting anybody until the very end and conclusion of the disease.

Well, thank you for the information, appreciate the presentation, and love all of the extra little animals on your pages. Any other questions? All right, thank you. Now moving to the Office of Probation, Ashley Henry, Director.

Good morning commissioners. For the record, Ashley Henry with Lake County probation. I am the new chief probation officer. Our presentation will follow the standard outline. Some ask, what does probation do? The answer is, quite a lot. In a nutshell, probation serves as the bridge between accountability, rehabilitation, and community safety. We supervise individuals ordered by the court, connect them with resources and services, and monitor compliance, support positive behavioral change, and work to reduce recidivism while helping individuals successfully reintegrate into society. This includes both our adult and juvenile programs. County probation has a total of 16 full-time positions. Myself as the chief probation officer, one probation supervisor, one office manager, seven probation officers, two program associates, and four probation associates. Probation staff often have repeated contact with defendants, providers, and the like. This can be through office and court visits, telephone contacts, virtual meetings, and such. This field is a mix of supervision, crisis management, and holding people accountable while balancing public safety. In the last fiscal year, the probation office monitored more than 26 court-ordered cases by performing over 6,200 personal supervision contacts and more than 12,000 telephone contacts. We facilitated the successful termination of more than 1,500 probation cases. Willa achieved a record-breaking year, completing 296 cases, and teen court conducted 39 court hearings. We completed 82 vehicle immobilizations that resulted from DUI sanctions, but this is all just a small part of what we do. A core component of probation involves supporting rehabilitation and facilitating victim compensation. In the last fiscal year, victims were compensated in excess of $63,000 for their damages through our supervision efforts. Community service can play an important role in rehabilitation by promoting accountability, structure, and positive community involvement. Officers coordinated the completion over 9,300 hours of community service in one year with 260 individuals. Zero Hour Life Center is one of our recovery community organizations in Central Florida. County Probation collaborated with Zero Hour, the Lake County Opioid Task Force, and numerous partners last year to facilitate a day of hope, healing, and connection. Agencies provided resources to the public and individuals at various levels in recovery. The next RISE event will be held in October at the Salvation Army in Leesburg, where additional persons will be connected with care. Some of our efficiencies include the collection of cost of supervision, which is a standard condition of probation. In the last fiscal year, we collected in excess of $450,000. In the event that there is a violation of probation and a warrant is issued or a person has an active pickup order, we routinely coordinate with the Lake County Sheriff's office to various police department, other agencies to have these individuals apprehended. This can be done at the jail and the probation office out in public or someone's home controlled environments are always a safer option for all involved. Last year, more than 55 individuals were apprehended in the office or were served with a probable cause violation of probation at the jail preventing release. So approximately 22% of our active warrants were served within our office or at the jail. A key tool to accomplish the execution of probable cause violations is the use of the Falcon Offender Watch List System through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. When an individual with a prior arrest history is arrested and booked into a jail on a new charge, we are notified right away so that we can take swift action if warranted. County probation prioritizes treatment for underlying substance abuse and mental health conditions. We assisted the Lake County's jail diversion initiative by screening and diverting hundreds of adults and juveniles to community mental health and substance abuse programs. We coordinated referrals for defendants to peer recovery community organizations and specialists to support warm handoff approaches to support our substance abuse treatment. This is especially essential when our offenders are being released into the community without support. We partnered with Be Free Lake and other nonprofit recovery community organizations to distribute Narcan to support Lake County's opioid abatement plan. Probation cases ebb and flow, and there are consistently defendants coming on and off probation each day. We are projected to have an average active caseload of just under 800 defendants each month this fiscal year. We are always happy to close the case successfully and pride ourselves on our ability to effectively supervise offenders with a successful completion rate of 78%. During a point in time count in March of this year, Lake County was actively supervising 867 cases. Orange and Polk counties have a rather high number of active cases compared to the others. With that, they employ more supervision officers. During March of this year, we were staffed with six supervision officers on par with our surrounding counties. The number of officers and number of cases affect the caseload size for each officer. In March, our officers were averaging 145 cases each. As stated before, cost of supervision is a standard condition of probation as well as statutorily required. So Lake County charges $55 per month for supervision and there is a one-time $20 administrative fee for each case. This is average across our counties. Probation is funded through the general fund. Our proposed budget reflects staffing restructure, anticipated wage adjustments, and aligns to current expense trends. The requested budget is just over $1.1 million. Teen Court is funded through a restricted local programs fund by a $3 mandatory court cost. The requested budget is just over $100,000. And the combined budget request for probation in Teen Court totals just over $1.2 million with a slight reduction from fiscal year 26. I thank you for your time today. And I'm excited to continue to strengthen our current operations and to develop and expand new programs and initiatives. And I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

OK. Great report. Excellent. Thank you so much for that. And could you tell everyone what Be Free Lake is, that organization?

Be Free Lake is our drug coalition, county coalition. They're a nonprofit, and they focus on working with our youth primarily, but it's all about rehabilitation and preventative measures for drug addiction.

So are they funded from the state, or is it just pure nonprofit?

They operate through a lot of grant funds.

Okay. All right, great. Well, thank you, appreciate it. Keep up the good work.

Thank you.

Moving on to Office of Emergency Management, Megan Melanies, Director. I want to tell you, the other morning when we had that huge storm, the gigantic rainstorm, I don't know if you all felt it where you were at, but I saw something on social media that Donnelly had washed out again. And so I literally, I mean, it was like 6 in the morning, and I just quickly got dressed and drove over. I was like, I had to see it for myself. And it was fine. Everything was fine. I drove down Old Eustis Road. completely fine. But on the way over, I thought, oh, brother, here we were the other day out there. And of course, they were giving kudos to you and your office for all the good work that you did and helping them get their funding in place and moving that process along. But it was so good to see that everything was intact. And that was just one of those typical. It was on word of mouth. I think it was maybe Mount Dora Tavares word of mouth that It was going around. So anyway, yes, that was good news.

And hopefully that will continue to be the case as we see these big rainstorms. Yes, ma'am. Well, thank you. I'm glad that it was fine. For the record, Megan Milanese, Director of the Lake County Office of Emergency Management. We are gonna be using the same standard outline that the rest of the presentations have followed. And just as a quick overview of what we do, we manage the Lake County Emergency Operations Center, so if there's something ongoing, threat or hazard or incident, we open the Emergency Operations Center to respond to that. We also maintain and update the Lake County Preparedness Plans, including the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan and the Local Mitigation Strategy. We also manage the emergency notification system, or Alert Lake, which is the voluntary sign-up system that residents can use to sign up for local alerts if they're interested in receiving public safety information directly to their phones. We also manage and coordinate the county training and exercise program. We do public education emergency preparedness training, just like the hurricane expo that we actually had earlier this month, where we invited residents to come out and get some hurricane preparedness information. as we are moving into hurricane season shortly. We manage the special needs registry, and we also review and approve healthcare emergency management plans for all of the healthcare facilities that exist within the county. Our organizational chart consists of four FTEs, so it is myself, the deputy director, and two emergency management associates. Some of our accomplishments last year include the activation of the Emergency Operations Center to a level two or partial activation in response to the hazards and the impacts that were caused by that heavy rainfall event that washed out Donnelly and were very targeted events that happened over Mount Dora and Eustis in October. and we maintained that EOC activation from October 26, 2025 when the incident occurred through November 12, 2025 to assist with some of that initial recovery and coordination. We also partnered with the Lake Support and Emergency Recovery or LASER to provide emergency temporary housing to residents who were displaced from the flooding incident and some of the subsequent cascading impacts, because unfortunately that event ended up kind of being a gift that kept on giving as we continued to see major impacts and some incidents that occurred as a result of the heavy rainfall. We also responded to an abnormally cold weather winter season. We had some cold weather incidents that were record-tying and were incredibly cold, and we relied on our partners at LifePoint Church We also worked with Hope International in order to provide housing and a warm place to stay for some of the residents who otherwise would have been impacted by that cold weather. We had a total of six activations of our cold weather shelter plan. And our fantastic communications team put together this recap graphic that we wanted to share here as well. We included the information of there being about 501 total sheltering of residents. So that might be repeats, they might be new folks who came to the shelter different times, but over 501 times people were sheltered during that cold weather season. Some of our efficiencies include completing updates and revisions to our local mitigation strategy. This is the document that guides how we pursue hazard mitigation grant funding. And as part of our update this time around, we also incorporated resilience strategies in order to be more effectively positioned to seek resilience grants as they may become available through FDEP. as we are currently going through our hazard vulnerability assessment as part of FDEP funding. And so that'll help us with future community strengthening projects and to diminish the impacts of future storms and other hazardous events. So our local mitigation strategy has actually now morphed into our local mitigation and resilience strategy. And we also again provided multiple incident management trainings to enhance emergency management skill sets so that our EOC responders and our staff and our first responders are more effective and we had 104 participants overall. This leads me into benchmarks. So as I mentioned, we do manage the special needs registry. This system is managed primarily through voluntary signups, although our home health agencies also do signups for their clients. So we're somewhere in the middle there. We have about a little over 600, almost 700 residents that are currently on the registry. And we do check in with them periodically throughout the year, as well as if we were to activate for any storms. We also do the healthcare facility annual reviews so we make sure that their emergency plans for those facilities are valid and they will make sure that those facilities are able to respond appropriately. And we currently review 101 of those plans which is a slight increase from prior years. And our total full-time emergency management employees in comparison to other counties, we do have four, but we are currently perfectly able to maintain those services with that level. And then our direct spending per capita, this is as apples to apples as we can really get to compare emergency management offices. It basically looks at grants that all of the county offices get as well as the general funding amounts and compares it to population spending. And that leads to our proposed budget, which you'll notice the major decrease. That essentially just reflects the completion of our hazard vulnerability assessment project that we did through utilizing funds that we received from FDEP. And then the personal services will be proposed wage adjustments and increase for insurance costs. And with that, I'm happy to take any questions that you guys may have. All right, questions?

Other than your team's doing a fantastic job, thank you.

Thank you so much. We love to hear that. All right. Moving along then to public safety support, Director Greg Holcomb.

Good morning, Commissioners. Greg Holcomb, for the record, Director of the Office of Public Safety Support. So here to present our 2027 budget. Same outline as you've seen in previous presentations. So public safety support by... Virtue of the name, we support all public safety, so the technologies in the radio system, the 911 system, the addressing system, and the networks that support all of that system. We facilitate the 911 side of the house, and that's for all our 911 centers, which includes the Sheriff's Office, Fire Rescue, Leesburg, and Groveland. Those are our 911 centers here in Lake County. And we maintain and manage the oversight and equipment for those particular locations. Something new that we added in our overview this year, it's not brand new, but it's up and coming and we're seeing a lot of increase in it, is the oversight of the bidirectional amplifiers, which is the systems that support the commercial buildings so that our first responders have radio coverage inside the buildings. That's becoming more and more complex in Lake County with the growth that we've developed over the years. So we're managing that program to make sure that the radio systems and interference are in place so that we protect our first responders when they go into those particular structures. So our organization, we have 12 FTEs. We're separated into three sections. So our network operations, which is the engineering side of public safety support. We've got our E911 side, which is the addressing along with the 911 systems, along with the grant programs that we manage, databases we manage, and the technicians that help support some of that equipment. And then we have our countywide radio, which supports the tower sites, the infrastructure, and the user equipment that is out in the field across the county. So some of our accomplishments this year. So we completed tower construction in the South Lake, so it's sort of southwest in the The 33-561 corridor, experiencing some growth there. Lake County needed some radio coverage in that area, so that tower's completed. We have construction in progress on two additional sites. One is in East South Lake, which is covering the Wellness Way area. Uh, and the, uh, the, the tremendous growth that we've seen there over the years. And then, uh, we also have a, uh, tower that we're building up in the Altoona area. Uh, both of those, uh, it's, uh, good to point out that, uh, uh, there are replacement of lease towers. Uh, so we have leases for both of those locations and this is elimination of those leases. And we'll talk about that a little bit further. Then we refreshed our 911 handling equipment and our recording equipment. That was through a grant program through 911. So that is actually completed as of today. So we've got new 911 equipment in those 911 centers and recording equipment in both of them with redundancies and resiliencies necessary for those. We also completed and are in the closeout process of a grant for five of our towers that experienced some issues during the storms last year, or the year before, and that was again through a grant program where we replaced five generators, the uninterrupted power supplies, and the bypass switches that go with those. and we'll talk about an expansion of that a little bit later in some of our efficiencies. A station alerting system has been put in place for fire rescue emergency dispatch. That's an automated system, so their dispatching is being done 100% automated, so the voice in that system is is an automated voice that remains the exact same no matter how critical the incident is or how light the incident is so that it brings a level of consistent communications to the field. And then we work not only with fire rescue but with the other municipalities and have put 14 of the existing fire stations on that system. which does an alerting and a display within the fire station so that the first responders, when they get alerted for a call, they get a screen display of exactly where the call's at, the address, those type of things. that they can view on the way out along with waking them up, turning on lights and corridors in a very safe manner for those first responders. And then we completed our virtual geo prime, which again during the storms we identified that we had some, redundancy issues that we needed to address. So the north and south has redundancy built into them now that if we lose the main brain, if you will, of the north or the south, it virtually switches over to another location uninterrupted in communications, which is a big enhancement to our system. Our efficiencies, again, I talked about those new towers. When we put those in place, that's going to eliminate leases of about $158,000 a year, which has an annual escalator on it. So obviously, if we lease longer, it would be more than that. We continue to work with the cellular carriers. This does a couple of things. We have sites that are capable of carrying cellular along with the public safety services. So it brings some revenue in, but also it brings those services to the community and the first responders without adding towers in locations, which in a lot of the growth areas, that's very positive not to have additional towers in the area. We've worked closely in the final stages, hopefully this year or first quarter of next year, of implementing the integration of the computer aided dispatch system. If you recall a few years back, the sheriff's office came for funding to replace their computer aided dispatch system. We've worked closely with them to not only work on that replacement, but consolidate that with the fire rescue system that already existed, allowing that interoperability between fire rescue and law enforcement across the county. That includes the law enforcement of not only the Sheriff's Office, but the municipalities and the mobile data terminals that they use, their laptops that they use in their vehicles on a daily basis. We've requested some grant funding for the ECOC on some issues that were experienced there during the storms. So about $2 million worth of grant funding that we're in the process of working with FDEM on putting in place. In addition to that, the five tower sites that we did the replacement on and completed, we're working on the other 14. I estimated about $2 million on that as well that we'll be replacing generators and UPSs, or uninterruptible power systems. And then we also included during our emergency activations, We had regularly and consistently requested portable generators as backup to be able to move around the county if a generator had an issue and there was a critical location. So we requested that through a grant program as well, and it looks like that's moving forward for grant funding to have portable generators of our own, not relying on the state to deliver those and having that delay in services so they'll be on site and be able to be used on a daily basis and obviously on an emergency basis as well. And then along with the fire alerting system, we've trained our employees for those systems and certified them to do the installation and work on that new technology. Some of the benchmarks that we identify on a regular basis. So this is address points, not to be confused with population. These are actual points and dwellings. And it's based on the Department of Revenue numbers. So you'll see our growth is about 1%. That doesn't sound like a lot, but roughly about 2,000 homes over the year. And if you break that down, that's about the three dwellings a day that are coming into Lake County. So, uh, the number of 0.85% doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a, it's a lot of growth in Lake County. So, uh, and we manage that, uh, um, along with the others. And then you'll see that, uh, um, the, uh, the higher numbers are where the, a lot of growth is happening is in Marion County currently. Um, and as well as in Osceola County. So the Marion County's numbers may be skewed just a little bit because there are some projects going on with address verification like we've done a few years back, which sometimes that increases the amounts once they get the numbers in place there. The other benchmarks, radio users, sounds kind of boring. It's the number of radios available that the counties own and use on a daily basis, but it's also reflective of the number of in-service first responders for those agencies. So Lake County remains at a lower number, but a very efficient force that we've got with our first responders. And then the number of 911 calls. So this is a number of calls per 911 answering position. So we have 33 positions in Lake County and roughly they answer about 600 or 6,468 calls per position. So, and we're very high in that number. So it's kind of proud of that. with our low number of telecommunicators answering calls or capable of answering calls and the number that they process on a regular basis. So that's a pretty big accomplishment for Lake County. It speaks highly of our telecommunicators. And this is the same breakdown, but it's just Lake County. So those are the four 911 centers that I identified, the emergency communication centers, the sheriff's office taking the mass majority of the calls for Lake County, and then EMS, roughly 40% to 50% of the calls that come in for service go to fire and medical. And then... Leesburg Police Department numbers and followed by Groveland. And then our budget is actually three separate sections, so I'll go over each one independently and then collectively at the end. So our network operations is funded by the EMS fund, personal services, like you've seen in the other presentations, spiked just due to the changes from that standpoint. And then our operating expenses have aligned there. We did some alignment in the EMS funds between our funds and some fire rescue side of the house. So that's why you see a reduction in that side from the network operations. Countywide radio, personal services, again, same situation. Our operating expenses there, we have a couple of contracts that come due, six-year contracts in the upcoming year. and those expenses have risen pretty drastically. In some cases, we're still working on a couple of the contracts that will come back to the board, but the majority of our operating expense increases there are related to that side of the house. It's good to note too that we kept those down a little bit even though they show a pretty major increase by utilizing some new legislative capable 911 funds that can fund some of the 911 center equipment on the radio side of the house. Previously under legislation we weren't allowed to do that so we've moved some of that money over. And then our capital outlay reflects the project for a overall system redundancy that we've put in budget for this year. And then our 9-1-1 proposed budget, a lot of grant funds came due. So you see a large reduction in capital outlay because of the grant funds. And that's contributing to some of the reductions there. And again, we were able to keep those numbers down by utilizing some of our reserves. Sometimes that sounds like a negative scenario, but in 911, we keep reserves to a level that allows us to have emergency funds if something major happens to one of the 911 centers that we can address it immediately. And the fact that we ran the grant programs to replace our 911 equipment and our recording equipment allows us to reduce that and utilize some of that funding elsewhere. So that's been a very positive scenario for us. our 911 budget and then collectively put it together and it shows a reduction in our overall budget and the general fund makes up about 28% of our budget. The EMS fund makes up about 7% and then the E911 makes up the additional 65% to cover that. And with that, commissioners, I'll open it to any questions.

Anyone have questions? I was curious on that three dwellings per day. That's countywide. You're doing the 911 addressing, making sure that you've got that in the system countywide.

We address for the entire county with the exception of Tavares, Mount Dora, Leesburg, and Lady Lake. They do their own, but we work collectively with them to bring that information into our system so that we have a collective addressing system.

Okay, and then on that chart that showed the radio usage, now why would that be that Marion would have so, it looked like they had significantly more in the realm of radio usage, is it just?

Yeah, in that scenario, um, it's just mass and, uh, the number of radios they use for their responders. Um, so, uh, um, uh, the, uh, uh, Lake County is, uh, is pretty efficient in their first responders. Uh, that doesn't reflect just responders, uh, uh, and I'll use the example of fire rescue. So their radios hand off on shift to shift to shift. So not every fire rescue individual, uh, carries a radio. but they carry a radio when they're on shift as opposed to law enforcement that carries a radio with them at all times as an assigned radio. So in the Marion County side, maybe law enforcement might be a little higher usage than some of the others, but those numbers are reflective on what they've provided us.

And then one other question I had was the other day we were somewhere, and I'm trying to remember where we were at. It might have been in Southlake. We were talking about, oh, I know, is when we went down to make a presentation on ambulance coverage and response times. And someone in the audience asked the question about whether we had the technology to actually alert the intersection that we had an ambulance or first responder vehicle coming through the intersection because there were questions about whether people were getting out of the way, whether that would affect our response times in these highly congested areas if we actually were able to get people to be more aware that I don't know if the signal changes or how they do that, but my immediate thought was, well, some of those big intersections down in Southlake are going to be state roads anyway. I'm not quite sure how all that works with us versus them and whether that's something that we could even do.

So the approach, working with traffic engineering, there is a system in place. It's only addressing some of the major areas, Claremont being one of them, the corridors. So there's a transponder system on the apparatus that actually will change the light to green in the direction of travel from the unit. It's not collectively across all of Lake County. There's some. pretty heavy expense, not only to the intersection, but to the apparatus, but we do have the system in place, it's just not 100% across Lake County.

Okay, so it changes it to green, so they can just try to get, and then people just are hopefully spreading out of the way, and okay, I got it. All right.

Along those lines, though, the better system, as I understand, is with DOT District 5, what Seminole County has, because they're triggering the signals further than even our own people when they're in their vehicles traveling. So they're able to get to it and line up the perfect traffic pattern, if you will.

Through that intelligent system.

Yeah, it's true. But Seminole County would be the person. They're the...

agency to talk to about advanced traffic management system and using Seminole County, uh, uh, prior life. I came from there. So, uh, they started back in the nineties, putting their system in. So, um, uh, but it is developed across the entire county and, uh, the systems have changed to where they, they used to be a line of sight, uh, from the apparatus to the light and now it's internet based. So. in their direction of travel, GPS, you know, all of those particular things, they can change traffic lights much quicker. Unfortunately, Lake County's not there yet, but.

Yeah, and I don't mean to be derogatory towards what we have, but the DOT-5, that was a benefit of doing that management. Traffic management. Yeah, with them.

Well, it just seems, I mean, I think it's worth learning more about from our standpoint, and especially where it ties into those response times, especially in those locations where you're dealing with a lot of heavy traffic, a lot of congestion, and you're trying to get your ambulances and your fire trucks, et cetera, through there.

It can be a double-edged sword, just kind of give you the flip side of that, is it also changes your traffic pattern. So your traffic management systems and your engineers work very hard to keep traffic flowing so that drive down a corridor on a regular basis can change that traffic pattern and back up the regular daily traffic versus for a certain amount of time until it all keys back in. So there is a give and take in that engineering and those systems. But yes, they have come a long way and are very intelligent now.

All right. Well, thank you. Appreciate the presentation and the update on the many things that your office is working on.

Well, thank you, and thank you for your support.

All right. David Kilbury, Office of Fire Rescue, Director.

Good morning, Commissioners. David Kilbury, Public Safety Director. I'll be presenting for fire rescue. All right, I'll move into the overview. We're an all-hazards fire department. We provide structural, wildland, and vehicle crash responses, as well as HAZMAT and SORT, our Special Operations Response Team. We also oversee all of the county's EMS system to include our medical direction, administrative to both us and our municipal fire departments, and that's the clinical assurance, the education, and the state regulatory compliance. We provide countywide fire rescue dispatch, and we also do existing construction inspections. So we have grown to 589 full-time positions, and we're made up of five divisions with operations being the largest with fire and EMS. So talking about our accomplishments, the theme really is construction-based. As you are aware, Mascot finished Station 91, our South Claremont Station 109. We've completed the Fruitland Park Station 56, and we're actually near completion of the Bassville Park Station 71. And Station 85 in Montverde is well underway. The trusses are probably on or getting very close. We've added four ambulances to the city of Claremont, added two brush trucks. We earned a perfect score of 10 out of 10 with our emergency communications dispatch with our recent ISO. And we are currently on track and have achieved compliance on the inspection frequency with the Florida Fire Prevention Code. Also, we have brought in $8.6 million in grants into fire rescue. The biggest, as you're aware, is the SAFER grant that brought in 36 firefighters. That was $7.5 million and allowed us to bring 10 additional engines up to three personnel. We have a million dollar state grant for design in the Panther Run Wellness Way area for a station 113 public safety facility. We were able to achieve a $150,000 grant for six drones that are soon to go into service. We just got the PO on that. All of our pilots have went through the testing and passed for their licensure. And we also received just under $25,000 for 300 protective hoods as a cancer decontamination grant. very appreciative of that we swap out at the fire scenes for those carcinogen laden garments to get washed and then moving into the efficiencies i am proud to share that through our strategic plan we now have a lieutenant on every fire apparatus of every shift As Greg just mentioned, we have the G2 station alerting and that is truly heart healthy. I want to just thank the commission for that is through the years when we had two-tone sequential and many tones were going off, you would drop the adrenaline in your body, you'd start to increase your heart rate and your breathing rate because you knew you had a big incident coming in. This technology changes that to where it's calm, it just goes out, no voice excitement from the dispatcher, and the feedback from the people that ride the trucks really appreciate the system that's in there. So thank you to that. We're soon to graduate our second in-house paramedic class. They started in January, and as promised, I told them they would graduate to put it in perspective before hurricane season. And so that second wave of paramedic classes, I believe, five weeks remaining, and they're excited. I also have mentioned here is the paramedic academy, and that is not the in-house paramedic class. That is the innovation of our trainers in-house to how to get a better pass rate with the medical directors, and they do an intensive two-week class after they've gotten all of their training out of the way. They just test them and test them and test them on the protocol and anything and everything that can be thrown their way. And the medical director said, whatever you're doing, keep doing. People are passing at incredible rates that are truly prepared to provide services in Lake County. So we're really proud of that accomplishment. As you're aware, we've added four ambulances to the city of Claremont during the peak load. And we've implemented a hub concept on the city line of Claremont and Mineola where four of the ambulances are staged at night. and we also have two staged in Southlake County at Station 109. So our challenges, as you know, funding for both EMS and fire remains to be challenging because of the spiraling costs. And people and the associated costs are what drives the majority of that. As you heard me say many times, there's been very few technological advances that have replaced the human firefighter or paramedic on those scenes. It takes humans to save humans. Not cheap. It's very expensive. We have several old volunteer fire stations that are in need of replacement. We need to transition to more single-staff ambulances, and we're moving toward a population-focused hub design. We're in the process of finishing the purchase right now of our second hub concept in the city of Eustis, and we're excited about that. That'll give us future expansion capabilities in that city. However, we continue to grow and we're somewhat behind as you'll see in some of our slides, so we've got more work to do. And then the last thing is our water supply for compliance with ISO. Not having the hydrants countywide is a struggle, but I assure you we are working on a plan for that for hauled water delivery in the coming fiscal years. So moving into our benchmarks, we are slowly increased to around 60,000 calls a year for incidents, and this is EMS exclusive. And of those, about 75% of those calls will result in a patient being transported to the hospital. Our EMS call volume takes up roughly 82 to 85% of our total call volume. And this is the one where I kind of want to demonstrate where we're behind the curve growth. But I do want to clarify and be fully transparent. Four additional ambulances have been added this year. So this chart does not represent those four. But you can see that four won't change the tremendous difference in some of the surrounding counties where Some of them, with the exception of Polk, are almost double our transport. And what this represents is per ambulance, that is about how many incidents they're responding to a year. So we've got some work to do, but we're exploding in growth, and we've already made some great strides with adding the four ambulances. So this is the shocker, I know this frustrates the commission as well as me as the fire chief, is the spiraling out of control costs since COVID. In 2020, we were able to buy an ambulance fully equipped for about a quarter of a million dollars, 250,000. And today in 2026, it's over $500,000. In that five years, the ambulance cost has doubled. In fact, in 2020, today's cost of an ambulance, I could have bought a Type 1 fire engine for $500,000. That's what the cost of an ambulance is today. It takes about two to three years for those ambulances to arrive, and I will share with you that we have seven new ambulances in different stages of the delivery pipeline. then brings us to the fire apparatus that i just mentioned of those out of control costs since the pandemic in 2020 we were just under 500 000 for a fully equipped engine today that has uh doubled in cost to 1.1 million dollars fully equipped and It is continuing to rise, but I have been told recently that the manufacturer backlogged from the ARPA funding throughout the United States. Most of the manufacturers now, if you were to place an order today, is about two to two and a half years for delivery. Moving into the benchmarks, this is the one I really want to thank you for, is we've worked through our strategic plan, the acceptance of the SAFR grant. And so this slide is a little bit different and maybe hard to see, but in the Lake County representation of the white snowflakes and the green, that is the SAFR. We were at the bottom of that previously, so we're well on our way to the three people per engine. and we've got just a little bit more to go, but as you're aware, the firefighters are in the organization, they're just in a different field of play, they're on the ambulances, and we're working diligently to get single certs hired and replace those onto fire apparatus. So what was a tremendous challenge three years ago, we've made great strides, and that's truly for you, the elected officials that sit up there, I wanna thank you for the ability to advance the services to the citizens we serve. To get the firefighters back onto the apparatus and stand up five additional ambulances to a total countywide of 30 of about where we need is realistically about 100 additional EMTs and paramedics into the organization. So moving into the proposed budget, we have two main coffers in fire rescue. The first one we're gonna talk about is the EMS fund, and this is the countywide EMS MSTU, as well as the billing for services from the revenue. We're requesting one new position next year, and that's for an EMS billing specialist. uh... we have on the capital side that we had offset some cost of balance last year we have four refurb ambulances that are scheduled next year that's just under a million dollars and our main supplier of our cardiac monitor defibrillator physio control has announced that they are going to sunset the current version like pack fifteen and move into the replacement of our LifePak 35, and it is a significant cost. One of those singular monitor defibrillators is $60,000. But with that comes some tremendous innovations in AI in quickly diagnosing 12 leads, you really have a cardiologist inside the defibrillator of what comes with one. So it's really impressive what it does. But this does show no growth other than the EMS billing specialist. Moving into our fire fund, we have a MSTU for fire, and that's to take a basic life support engine and move it to ALS, as well as the fire assessment fee is the other main one. So the significant cost here that you'll see is the 35 Safer Grant. We do have that funding reimbursed from the federal government for the next three years on a partnership through that. We have 31 of those cardiac monitors that I just talked about, and those 31 cost almost $1.8 million, and we are at the end of life. And it is something that we can't get around. We've looked at other manufacturers, and the price point is similar, but there's so many other intricacies with the striker that we use that it's to our advantage to stay with that model. And then combined, I'll wrap the two budgets up into this, is again, the biggest cost is 36 safer positions that I thank you that has increased our staffing on 10 additional engines that I mentioned. And really, this budget just covers the increasing, spiraling, out of control cost of everything with people and responding of what goes into it. But there is no increase in services in this budget that you see before me. And then the last I always end with a shameless plug is I want to invite you. We have a new engine that we're going to put in service on this Friday in Haster. I know a lot of times the, you take it on the chin that we don't represent them, but they're having a state of the art, beautiful fire truck that's been placed in service up there. And, uh, you will want to see the graphic that's on the side of that with the American Eagle and the county's 250th anniversary logo. beautiful truck and it has about 1,550 gallons of water so it gives a lot of time for additional resources to ride. So that is a huge investment in that community and I want to thank you for that as well. And that concludes my presentation.

All right. Yeah, I was just kind of wondering a little background on the Aster, the fire engine and the decision for that to be in that location. Is this, I mean, you obviously have these long-range plans for which vehicles are getting the most age on them, where you need certain assets, and I just wondered if you could fill us in on how that works.

Right. So the vehicle that was at Aster was a four-wheel drive engine. And looking at, there are a few hydrants in the Aster area, but the population growth, it takes the longest for Volusia County to send their engine as well as the balance of the first alarm assignment from Lake County to arrive. So we elongated the firefight until additional water and people can get there. But the other significant thing is we looked at it strategically is along the Altoona area, along the bombing range and those areas are more of the more challenging impassable, not impassable, but needs a four-wheel drive chassis to deliver the services to those residents. And so that also gives us the ability to provide advanced life support at the Altoona station on that fire truck that we hadn't had previously because it was a tanker without the compartmentation. And so we now have the ALS capability remains in Aster as well as Altoona. But it's just the road network in Altoona was better used for that four-wheel drive chassis that's going to be moved down there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. I got it. All right. So you'll shift that over there, and then it has better access to those sandy roads.

Exactly. Yep. That's what it is. It's just sugar sand Florida.

Yeah. Yep. All right. Any other questions?

I got a question. Yeah, just a comment. Again, just want to express my full support for what you're doing in Lake County. The men and women of Lake County Fire and Rescue appreciate it. Trying to get the staffing up, I think, is super important. What's been happening in Claremont, I think, is great. And the defibrillator that you mentioned, I think that's worthy of worth telling people, our constituents about. I don't know too much about it. I know enough to know that it will save lives compared to the devices that we have now. So that upgrade, you know, $60,000 is a lot, but that's a life at least. I mean, so I don't know if you want to get the word out about that. We're transitioning to that as well. I think that would be worth letting people know that we're trying to get the – the latest and greatest equipment too that will save lives, so I appreciate that.

Well, I had the opportunity to see one of the demonstrations with one of the reps, and again, our personnel are trained to recognize in a 12-lead cardiac rhythm of diagnosing what's going on in the heart as far as blood flow and where it's diminished and how the heart responds in an electric cardiac rhythm on that. This just backs that up is it will confirm with the paramedic of what they believe to be going on with the ischemia or lack of blood flow in certain parts of the heart. And it's not only for the pre-hospital setting. It starts a chain of treatment to prepare for the arrival of that patient for a cath lab, a cardiologist, getting the surgical team up. it truly will save lives with this new defibrillator.

And that goes to the discussions we've had with Claremont where that has been brought up as every second counts, which we agree. you know, those questions about that and then the stroke at the same time and everything. So I just think this is great, and please get the word out about it.

Yeah, we're doing great in the Claremont area. There's some hub centers in Leesburg and UCIS that we still have some work to do, but we are meeting the industry standard on our UHUs in Claremont, and so our strategic plan is working.

On the hub center in UCIS, do you have a location that you've honed in on?

We do. It's at Witt and 19. It's an old two-physician office. And really, the exam rooms are beautifully set up for crew quarters, very minimal. It's had a new roof and new AC units put in. A little bit of work, but we still have a CUP to go through with the city on that. The church of our longstanding little building there has given us notice to vacate. and so we are working diligently with the county attorney's office as well as real estate to fast track that but we do have a plan in place that we may put an ambulance temporarily at the lake tech or 72 until that is finalized and allow us to get in there but really a good location for future growth needs if just ballpark when you think you might be able to be in place there six months possibly

Okay.

We're going to have to put in a fire suppression system because of the requirements of the code. So that will be, I don't know the timeline and costs associated with that. But, you know, that protects the investment of not only the building but our people as well.

Thank you. All right. Great. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right. That ends our discussion.

workshop items any commissioners have particular reports anything they want to bring up while we're still in a sunshine super brief the budget in Tallahassee will be done today which means they'll sign it Friday so maybe we can reach out to our lobbies and just have them give us a little small update at the next meeting just what got through what data and what big budget changes affects us etc

Sounds like a good plan.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't had the time myself to look, and the budget, of course, is thousands of pages.

We can have him put together. He also does one after the... Governor has signed off on the final budget. He typically comes in like July and that way he'll give us an update on all of the legislative changes as well as the budget. So if that's good, we can schedule that for the July timeframe.

The other thing is if we do it earlier pre-veto, then we can probably send a nice letter to the governor saying, hey, the board is in support of this thing. Please don't veto it. If there's something good in there we like. Just a thought.

Okay. Yeah. No, I like that idea. I did have something to bring up. Did you have something? I got it. Okay. I just wanted to follow up on our meeting the other day on the joint planning meeting and the different maps that we gave to each of the cities and the suggestion. And I think there was a consensus that kind of doing one-on-one meetings between our board and city commissioners or councils could make sense at this point. In particular, I was very interested in the Eustis map and the possibility of getting a meeting set up soon with Eustis to look at the old JPA boundaries and those densities in relation to coming up with a new agreement with Eustis that could address rural areas. conservation preservation areas so to speak you know all of the things that we've been talking about but in particular there's a pending issue in Eustis and I don't know whether it's something we can roll into this because I think there's a limited time period but there could be an opportunity here and I just hate to miss this opportunity There is a pending, I believe it's a preliminary site approval for a property that is known as the Eustis Airport and it accesses 44B. That's its primary access. As we all know, 44B is very constrained and we've been working with DOT trying to move up the timeline on some of the widening and capacity you know, situations and I felt like it could be helpful if we reached out to Eustis and we let them know sort of what those timeframes are. But the one thing that I noticed is that the land, there's pretty significant amount of frontage on 44B to the extent that that is a location where perhaps DOT would be interested in some sort of a traffic enhancement or traffic. I know they're redesigning, DOT is redesigning the 44B widening. I don't know what they have planned, but there's a good chance they don't even know that this airport property is being looked at by the city And there could be an opportunity there if, whether it's a signal, whether it's a roundabout, if it's a way for, for example, the traffic that's coming from further north, like let's just say Park Place, they're trying to make a left-hand turn to go north and they can't. But if you had a roundabout where this particular location is, you could go up, loop around and come back the other direction. Same thing could occur if you were coming out of Loch Levin, you're trying to get out, if you can make a southbound turn and then go to say the roundabout and loop back around. It's just I feel like if we don't at least explore it or let DOT know that this is coming through, let Eustis know that this is something that would be beneficial if they could get a pause on this so that everybody could take a look at this property in relation to what DOT is doing. considering as far as their redesign of the 44B widening. I just hate to miss that opportunity. The other thing I'm really concerned about when I look at this airport property is the issues with drainage that we've already seen happen with a parcel that's under development right now. Everyone calls it the Hoffer property where they had so much water accumulate that it was actually spilling over into the swales on 44B and then the developer Um, their contractor started pumping water out into the swales. Those swales were completely full and they were flowing down to Lake Joanna and the untreated water was going straight into Lake Joanna. The water authority had to intervene. A boom was put up in the lake. You know, it, it's a really sensitive area that has a lot of constraints when it comes to drainage. So that would be another issue that I feel like if we could get the city to, to get the developer to pause on their. I mean, people say things like, well, it's a preliminary site plan. The problem is if you approve a preliminary site plan, you've pretty much locked in what they will consider the entitlements to be and what you may be able to actually get changed or modified in the future. So this would be the perfect time to try to have these discussions and this, you know, this oversight and maybe brainstorming on what could be done. I know the Water Authority is looking at a parcel that would give them greater storage for water that's going to Lake Joanna. This is something we talked about for a number of years being able to do. And I think an application was put in by the Croson family to the Land Acquisition Committee as far as possibly buying some property they have that's right next to the canal that goes to Lake Joanna so you could create a water retention area there. So again, those are things that if those were going to be able to get put into place, then they could affect this particular property, the airport property, as opposed to if this is approved, it moves forward, You know, they get another intersection on 44B. We just compound the traffic problems, and we don't do anything about the drainage. And I understand that this is, you know, it's not in our jurisdiction. It's in the city, but it's going on to, you know, a road that, you know, we should be able to have some input on all of this. And I think that if we try to interject ourselves that maybe something good could come out of this.

I support that.

Yeah, I have a comment about the JPAs just in general. So certainly support individual discussions with the cities on JPAs slash ISBA, whatever we're calling it, to make everybody happy. The important thing for me, though, is still going to be a line that's on a map in our comp plan, rural growth boundary, urban growth boundary, again, whatever we're going to call it. Cities will be able to grow through a organized plan of growth into certain areas and then we would also uphold to keeping those areas outside of that line rule. You do it in a way that doesn't take away current entitlements. That's how you draw the line and respect that. But that's just a part of my, as we move forward, that's gonna continue to be what is gonna be a big focus for me because I think that's important and a lot of people when I think about where we're gonna go over the next 25 years, that line, I mean, it's just a line on a map, it actually could be very important for us, so.

But you're, I mean, you're identifying it as either calling it one thing or the other, joint, I think we called it at our meeting. Yeah. Rural protection areas. Joint rural protection areas. Yeah, it would be clear. Areas or boundaries.

So the cities, because we go back and forth with cities, From their perspective, it's also, okay, we'll agree to stay within the plan, but also for us, outside of the county, it's the next 25 years not making exceptions and things like that that go beyond that as well. What we already have in place in the county with some urban areas has been planned for many years, but it's what happens outside of those lines after that that's gonna be important that we also uphold that.

No, I think that's important. I think, though, that you do have to continue to look at things on a case-by-case basis. But you've got to figure out, you know, like, what some people look at and they go that's rural and other people and we may already have on our map that we have things like I have this issue in Mount Dora where people were upset about the innovation district but the innovation district has been on the county map called something else for 30 years. So I think it's just important to us that we're looking at what's actually on the existing maps

And that's where I think the line, you know, there will be, you know, there'll be cases where you have to look at where that line is specifically based off of some history.

Totally get it.

A lot of areas around the county, it's probably going to be pretty easy though.

I think so. I think it's certain places. It should be super easy in other places. It's a little bit. Yeah. It's a little different.

Well, I'm glad you brought up the city uses because the city of two areas has the same situation off of Shirley Shores Road with a huge horse farm leading out of 448. So I guess those two would be the first two that we would have to discuss to see what we can come up with boundaries for. Because I am a true believer in our transitional zones and our agricultural zones. So we need to keep them that.

All right.

Oh, can I just say one other thing too? Just want to thank this on the record thank the cities that did all the Memorial Day events and Kerry Baker who did a fabulous ceremony sunrise That I know the chair was at as well That he's done for years, but it was the first time I've been to that one So I thought it was really good and I want to call it out as something special for the county as well as what the cities Did my case Mineola and Claremont? wonderful job acknowledging such an important day of remembrance for us, so, yeah.

Yeah, and the one at Cary, at the Peterson Gun Shop, the only problem is when you go to the Sunrise Service there, then you smell like smoke the rest of the day because they do a flag retirement, and so they have the flag burnings, but it's a great ceremony. I was able to go out to Pembroke Fairways, and they have an incredible veterans organization there, and they put on amazing program on the They do this on Veterans Day as well as Memorial Day, and it's phenomenal, and they go all out. And also a shout out to Eustace on the amazing job that they did on their Veterans Memorial that they just unveiled a few days ago. It is really nice. So anyone that's over in that area, it's Greenwood Cemetery. They really did a great job. I understand it's been in the works for many, many years. And it finally, they were able to bring it over the finish line. So that was, um, really great job.

Oh, I got one more. Can I just bring one more thing up? So what we always did the, uh, annexation zoning overlooks, and I liked that a lot. It's very good. Um, another sort of corollary item is the cities who have annexed the property, um, and. It's unclear what exactly is going on. One example of this is the city of Tavares, they've annexed all that land north of 48 and there was a bunch of talk online that they've already gotten all these types of entitlements. I think there's a conflict.

You're talking about the far reach?

Yeah.

Yeah, they have an old like it's an old PUD, I believe, that when they annexed it or at least the annexation agreement itself had specific things in it. So they do have certain things that are already in that ordinance.

Are you talking about Far Reach Ranch? Yeah, the problem that they had, they were trying to shift some of their density closer to Shirley Shores when it should have been over there by 561. They do have a putt agreement there, an old putt agreement. And really, back in the day, it was supposed to be AFCON, which was a manufacturing facility for airplanes. So it had originally had an airport there with some surrounding houses and businesses and it's changed over the course of a couple of ten years.

So what's the city trying to do now? They're modifying it?

I don't know but there is a current desert. There are entitlements for property there. It's just where they're placing them. It's supposed to be over toward the Shirley Shorts area that have larger homes. And then as it gets closer to 561, the density gets smaller, or density gets more, because it's more in line with the developments that are right next to it. But that project has fallen through.

So the thing, what got a lot of attention was that one application. That one application.

That actually. That hadn't even. The problem is someone puts an application and there's a bunch of assumptions and hadn't even gone to council yet. So right. Um, but the one I'm talking about is across the street from that, which is the old horse farm and it has an opportunity, um, to be rezoned and we need to get ahead of that before it even happens. It's already been annexed. Um, but I don't think there's been any designation like.

Like the Far Reach had things in place whereas the Horse Ranch did not. That's correct. And I think your request was that we look at the possibility of meeting with Tavares over what can we do in the realm of an agreement with them to designate these certain areas to remain low density even if they're inside the city limits.

And I can tell you the city of Tavares is on board with the transitional zones and agricultural zones as well, so.

Okay, all right, everybody. Well, we stand adjourned.