Council Agenda - Regular Meeting

We ask that you watch over our first responders and guide them and protect them as they protect us. We ask that all we do, we do in your name, Jesus Christ, amen. Amen.

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, Mr. Mayor. Kathy, can you call the roll?

Yes, sir.

if anybody has anything that they want to talk about that is not on the agenda please see clerk haley pick out a packet and a form and then we'll get to you later in the meeting Now moving on to Mayor's report and just want to say welcome back, Mayor.

Glad to be back and really like to, I got to say a special thanks to the fire department as they picked up some old man on the first of June and took him to the hospital and he took care of him. So, but very efficient, very good bunch of guys that did that. And I really appreciate the help and getting me there. So thank you. I also like to congratulate Ann. I don't know if they've done it already for the 250th anniversary video that you put together. I don't know if you've all seen that. If you've not seen it, Scott, you should have put it up on the thing. but it's a very moving, it was really well coordinated and she did a great job. So it was really, thank you, Hannah, for what you did. I got a lot of compliments from people that saying it was really neat, very moving, brought tears to people's eyes, but it was a really good video that she put together. I don't know if you can pull that up, Scott, it'd be nice to see it. So while you're trying. I'd go to the city accounts. City of Sebring. Can I show you how to do that? I'll have to get on Jan so I can stalk you. Also, like the 4th of July, if anybody was downtown for Friday or Saturday, prior to the fireworks, Historical Society put together a really nice little event that lasted all day. And a lot of people come downtown. And then also the fireworks were fantastic this year. it's really a great show and really showcased our country and our city um i don't know scott i'll get that up or not or you guys yeah so we'll uh we'll move on to unless you have anything else i'm good move over to the council members comments comment concerns and liaison reports so i have nothing gosh

uh no report except for the firework show was great um and my kids got antsy and we bailed like right before the finale so i had to watch that part on facebook but it was a great show

Only thing I want to say is budget time is over on the state side, so I'm really happy to announce that the city was successful with state appropriations. So we were able to bring back $1 million for the new city hall project, $350,000 towards the Illinois pond weed problem on Lake Jackson. Biggest thanks and shout outs to our state rep, Haley Tuck, Senator Aaron Graw, having the lobbyists too, Ken Pruitt and his team have been just phenomenal to work with. And then Jared doing everything, who again, doesn't want to be recognized, but the guy in the blue in the back, do not say thank you to him for kind of making all this happen too. But there's so much work that goes on that I don't really understand on the state level with the rep senators and lobbyists there's a lot of moving pieces but to have the this kind of result and these funds allocated back to the city it's a really really great thing so a lot of work over the last several months and thankful for everybody on the team to make that happen that's all i got um moving on to the well scott any luck there i'll get there all right we'll move back to that later in the meeting uh we'll move on to the consent agenda do we have any questions on the consent agenda

I'll make a motion to approve the Consent Agenda as presented.

Motion?

Second.

Second. Motion to second. Any comments from the audience about the Consent Agenda? Other comments here?

Kathy, did you call the roll? Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Yes. No old business, so moving on to new business. Let's bring up Mr. Greg Griffin to talk about Resolution 5.617. There are copies of what Greg is going over on the table, if anybody would like a handout.

So good evening, Greg Griffin, building official. Our friends in Tallahassee have been quite busy mixing things up. And this year, it's no exception for building departments. They introduced and was adopted into law House Bill 803, which significantly changes how building departments capture building fees. Essentially, there were two major changes, the first of which is a $7,500 exemption for any work that is not mechanical, electrical, plumbing, or structurally related under a residential permit. The second is a private provider provision which mandates a 50% reduction from our base permit fee if a private provider is utilized for inspections and plan reviews. That has the potential to impact our revenue stream significantly. The city of Sebring has not gone through a rate change since 2014. When we started doing the analytics to evaluate how those impacts would cause the city revenue challenges, we came to the conclusion that we needed to revise the rate schedule. So you'll each have a copy of the proposed rate schedule. It brings it into line with what modern municipalities are charging in modern times. And I'll be completely honest with you, many, many hours of analytics went into this, but because we can't forecast what the private provider utilization will be, it's a wild guess. And that's the best way I can put it. If there's high utilization of private providers, the city will be covered. If there's a low utilization of private providers, there will be excess cash flow. And as you guys know, I function as a private consultant. The city is a private provider, so that would be beneficial to them. Anybody have any questions or any details you would like me to drill down into?

It's based on your reasonable assumptions of what may come. I mean, there's no crystal ball, but...

Correct. So for methodology, and I'll get into that very quickly, what we did, we looked at five years of trailing data. We forecasted and annualized the current year, and we threw out the highest year and the lowest year. We ran median rates of... of each individual sub-permit trade, so residential air conditioning change out to water heater change out to electrical, carrying that all the way up through commercial types, which are also slightly elevated from residential fee, but there's also typically more work associated with it. We took the fee schedule that we had that was based off of a $90 per square foot residential rate and $150 per square foot commercial rate and tied it back to the International Code Council rate. And that is a flat rate that's set by ICC. ICC is what Florida Building Code is based off of. We utilized regional modifier .915. And then there were three multipliers that we looked at for us. The low was .003, .0045 was the mid, and then the high was .006. The .045 helped us reach a sustainable level of revenues. Again, construction and permitting is cyclical. So if there's a year where there's a lot of commercial construction, a lot of residential construction, revenues will be up. If there's a flat year, the building department will still be sustained. We also looked at this for defensibility. They're very, very specific language in House Bill 803 about how fees can be calculated, and it's a cost-based recovery system. So we reversed engineered it based off of the numbers that are historical numbers.

Josh, I would like to kind of lean on you on this one since this is your lane, if you want to kind of go over maybe on your side. Okay.

So I'll tell you, one, the city is in a unique position because of how we operate and how we utilize REG as a private provider to be our building official. Building department is essentially a net-zero department. It pays for itself. Any extra revenue there can't really be used anywhere else. And so essentially Greg is paid off on the excess of what comes in through permit fees, right? Which is what makes this challenging. I've gone over these numbers, I feel like, exhaustively with Greg. And to some extent it is making the best assumption that we can make about what's going to go forward. If suddenly across the state, everybody is using private providers all the time, then this is going to be a huge problem. If nothing happens and everybody keeps just using our local building department and no private providers, then it'll be higher permit fees than we've experienced before. I think that these numbers are pretty good. None of them give me heartburn from a building contractor side at all. I think we'll be higher than the county right now. The one flip side of that… uh we are offering a significantly higher level of service than the county does i'll tell you it's much easier to pull a permit here it's much quicker to pull a permit here plan review is quicker here inspections are quicker here part of that is the benefit we get from the model with greg is that as a private provider we can scale if he gets busy he can send employees to do those things and work under his license instead of having to have staff you know that are licensed inspectors internally I don't have any heartburn with this. I think that our service level is excellent, and we're trying to set a rate that is sustainable depending on an unknown future with private providers. I think the intentions of the state in enacting this was basically to allow people to build quicker, because there are some building departments that move really, really slow. And the idea of this is to incentivize people to use private providers so that they can go faster. I don't think we're gonna have that problem here, because we don't. We don't go slow. Our building department's very fast. But I do think probably a lot of the commercial will trend towards private provider, because they'll use the same one statewide, and it'll be easier for them. Pretty good summation?

Absolutely. A couple things. It's largely a reallocation and redistribution piece. As Josh said, there are developments in service general contractors as well throughout the state. Orlando, we've had a nine-month permitting process for a modular home that we were building for the state. So the driving force was to push building apartments faster. The irony in all of this is, in our experience, 75 percent of the time the building department is at the hold up it's regular the other regulatory agencies the zoning department the the water management district or the dep but the building department's the last line of defense so that seems to be where they're starting so it uh it will accelerate in some cases the the processing speed it does change how we process if we receive a set of plans by a private provider we have to have that turned around within five business days So as soon as we get it, we turn around. By and large, we turn our projects around very quickly anyways. I would be surprised if even a large project sat on our desk. If it was permit ready, in other words, all the zoning was ready to go, and other entities inside the city, besides buildings, as fire, it would be turned down within a week or two. So our turnaround time is very quick. You know, I think, and Josh and I have had this conversation, if people continue to utilize us to do the work, it's a reflection of our level of customer service. One thing you'll notice now, we've talked about private providers. Don't be surprised when you go home if your Facebook page shows a private provider advertising because it's going to be a billion-dollar industry for the individuals who are running these companies through private provider work. It's gonna get very interesting the next time a hurricane comes through as well to see how well they paid attention to all the scrapping.

Any other questions or comments for Greg?

The only other thing I would mention too, you know, this was prompted by that Florida bill, but to Greg's point, we haven't updated this fee schedule since 2014. It was time, even if that hadn't happened, but this was the impetus to push that forward.

I completely agree.

One more quick addition. In the rate schedule, I was going through and I was actually running some analysis when I was sitting here on a couple of commercial permits that we just ran. I inadvertently left out the commercial fee when I was doing it for fire. So we'll add that back in. It's simple, it's calculated like all the rest. I just want to make sure that we have that line included in it. So that'll be the fee schedule in terms of adoption date and will that be effective today? If furthered on today, yes.

A motion in favor of that should include the change that you just recommended, the additional change that's good.

Greg, I know you put a lot of time into this and making it fair, equitable, and not having to first of all know in the future, but I feel really good about where you went for all the work that you put into this and the due diligence.

Any other thoughts?

Any comments from the audience about this or questions? If you wouldn't mind, state your name for the records.

I just picked this up from the table so I don't have time to study. First page of fees. First block, bottom one. Expiration, renewal, that's the code cycle. Bottom one and the first page of fees. general fees exploration renewal after the code cycle if a contractor pulls a permit today while they're building the project it's changed they build it by the code in effect at the time of affirming so why is there a fee for plan review when they've already planned review permanent

Greg, would you wanna answer that? The schedule that's below that, you see the permit expiration. So if they pull the permit today or up to December 31st of 2026, that permit would be valid one year beyond that. And typically when someone performs an inspection, that adds six months of time to it. If the project's completely dormant and they go to January 1st of 2028, so they're outside of that year permit for 2026, that lands them in another code cycle. Instead of charging them for the entire permit fee to start over, and this would be a permit that's been dormant, there's been nothing on it, they would pay 50% of that permit fee, but they would have to provide updated plans because the code has changed. So we often accept an engineer's letter. If an engineer says that it's acceptable, we'll take the engineer's letter, consider that our plan review and apply it. We try to work with people, but this is a state mandate as to how they'll recite the expirations of permits first. when we define a little bit of the delay so you get an inspection within what's been shortly utilized 180 days when you get an inspection we take the expiration date out of 180 days so that provides you ample time if what building that is, that's nine years. I mean, that's, we can't be married to the same code for nine years. We have to be, we have to .

This could change, because theoretically you could never finish that building if you keep changing code.

You could never get to see how fast you can have that.

Anybody else have any comments, concerns, questions? Okay. Would you like to entertain a motion?

I'll make a motion that we approve Resolution 2026-17 as presented, including the added commercial plan review fee verbally mentioned by Greg Griffin. Second.

Motion second. Any additional comments? Kathy?

Yes. Yes.

Yes. Okay. Let's see. There is no business from the audience, I see.

So moving over to City Attorney's Business. Agenda Item 12A is Proposed Ordinance 1575. It's on your agenda for first reading, and it's entitled, An Ordinance Annexing Approximately Four Acres of Land Located in Van Villa Subdivision Lying in the Southwest Quarter of Section 4, Township 35, South Range 29, East Highlands County, Florida, into the City of Severy, Florida, and Establishing an Effective Date.

Any questions on this?

This is the property behind the Sebring Diner.

No questions, no concerns. Anybody from the public want to talk about this annexation? I don't have any questions on it.

I'll make a motion that we approve ordinance number 1575 on first reading and schedule second and final reading for July 21st, 2026. Second.

Motion second. Comments from the audience? None up here? Nothing?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Moving on to City Ministry of Business. Scott, what do you got for us?

There are no material changes to the project report. So if you don't have any questions, I'm gonna have Hannah just play that video. Okay.

Hannah, while you're setting that up, can we pay some bills?

Oh, yes, Councilor, please continue paying your bills, please.

So moved. Second.

Motion second. Anybody have any questions about paying the bills? Nope. Not that up here. Kathy?

Bishop?

Yes.

Kolkata? Yes. Stewart? Yes. Henry?

Yes. And the long-awaited video.

I guess you're right. Maybe we need to go back to the stuff that I do. So,

. . so Good job, Hannah.

A lot of time, planning, organization went into that. Unbelievable. Thank you.