Town Council - Regular Meeting

talk, it's really going to be about you helping us to make some decisions about going forward. Does that make sense? So Erica, can you hear me? Can you start?

Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Yep, you're good.

Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Like Joe said, my name is Erica Harris, and I'm a resilience specialist and project manager with AECOM. We're working with the town right now to develop a recovery and resilience plan, which is an island-wide effort focused on helping guide ongoing recovery and identifying priorities for the town's future with respect to resilience. The effort is funded through federal recovery funding that was made available after Hurricane Ian to support long-term planning and resilience initiatives. Before we get started, I also just want to clarify that the Recovery and Resilience Plan, as I mentioned, it's an island-wide planning effort. And as part of that effort, we're also supporting the town evaluating a potential community redevelopment area, or CRA, which you may have heard of. This is going to include portions of the downtown commercial district. The CRA study is one small component of the overall project, but tonight's discussion is really focused on the broader future of Fort Myers Beach and priorities that are across the entire island. Over the past week, we've been in town meeting with town leadership, business owners, property owners, community organization leaders, and service workers across the island to better understand the challenges and opportunities and priorities that really remain as Fort Myers Beach continues its recovery. And so tonight is our first public open house, and it's an opportunity to expand that conversation that we've been having to the broader community with all of you. And due to the strong interest we've heard this week, we've also expanded tonight's event to be in a hybrid format. So we have project team members and town staff participating both in town hall and then I'm gonna be online. And after this brief presentation, we're gonna transition to some discussion activities. So the team members that are gonna be in the room with you all are gonna be available to answer questions and kind of gather feedback while I'm gonna be online working directly with the virtual participants that are coming online. And I think it's important to note, and I think Joe kind of touched on this earlier, that tonight is really about us listening to you. We wanna hear your priorities, your concerns and ideas as Fort Myers Beach continues to recover and move forward. Just a quick look at the agenda. We're gonna spend the next few minutes providing an overview of the project and explaining how the community input is gonna be used and reviewing the activities that are gonna be available to get feedback tonight. After that, we're going to invite everyone to visit the stations that are around the room, share your feedback, and speak with members of the project team and town staff. And then if you're unable to stay for the full time, or you want to provide additional comments later, or maybe you want to make sure that someone who couldn't be here tonight is still able to provide feedback, please visit our project website, the link on the town's homepage, or you can use the QR code that I've shown here to access an online survey that covers similar information that we're going to be talking about tonight. So let's go ahead and get started. So why are we doing this plan? So since Hurricane Ian, Fort Myers Beach has completed a significant amount of planning, recovery work, and infrastructure improvements. The town has also invested considerable efforts updating these foundational plans like the comprehensive plan and the strategic plan. And this effort for the resilience and recovery plan that we're talking about tonight is not intended to start from scratch or recreate any of that work that's been done so far. In fact, we've reviewed more than 80 different strategies and actions that were identified through previous plans and recovery initiatives and studies and kind of those ongoing projects. And the purpose of this work is to help organize those efforts into a practical roadmap by answering questions like, what should happen first? How do different projects and initiatives support one another? What actions might be needed to move projects forward into implementation? Who needs to be involved as a partner to make these things happen? And how are we gonna pay for this? So ultimately, we're helping the town with identifying how to move from ideas and priorities and into implementation. And I think one way to think of this roadmap is sort of a tool that we're going to use to organize those priorities and identify how they can be advanced over time. Okay, so let's talk about how the roadmap works. So one of the realities of any community is that not everything is going to be able to happen at once. There's not enough resources or capacity of town staff to make that happen. Some projects might need to happen before others. Some might require additional planning or partnerships or permitting before they can move forward. And so to kind of help organize these efforts, this plan is being developed in kind of a phased way. So you have phase one, which is focused on the near-term actions and coordination efforts, recovery needs, and really laying the groundwork for some of those future larger projects that are needed. Phase two, which is kind of the five to 10 year range, focuses on larger investments, infrastructure improvements, community enhancements, and implementation of many of the priorities that are identified by the town and community. Phase three is really focused on those kind of longer term, you know, 10 to 20 year timeframe, resilience, adaptation, and opportunities that might take more time, maybe more coordination or investments to achieve. So as you participate tonight, we want to encourage you to think not only about what's most important, but also maybe when it should happen. You know, what actions are needed now to support future improvements? And then what should the town focus on and kind of work towards over time? Your feedback is really going to help us with refining that roadmap and identifying those priorities that matter most to the communities that we know what to focus on first. So tonight is really just one step in the planning process. We're currently gathering input through, like I mentioned, stakeholder interviews, focus groups, surveys, and then this community house, open house. And following this phase of the engagement, we'll review the feedback that we've received. We're gonna continue refining those priorities and further develop the implementation roadmap. Later this year in the fall, we're going to be returning to the community with draft concepts and visualizations that show what some of these ideas could look like in different areas of the island. These concepts are really going to help, I think, with illustrating potential opportunities and providing additional detail on some of the implementation strategies that are being prioritized and really giving you all another opportunity to react and help us with refining those recommendations. The final plan, which we're hoping to have wrapped up in February of next year, is going to include, as I mentioned, a roadmap of the priorities, implementation actions, so kind of the steps that you need to define for how you're going to carry out some of these projects, the partnerships that are needed, and then potential funding opportunities to help guide this future decision-making and keep this plan actionable. The last thing we want to do is make a plan that just sits on a shelf. We want to make sure that this is actually going to be able to help town staff with carrying out those highly prioritized projects for each one of these phases. So the room that you're in now, it's organized into five different stations that focus on different aspects of Fort Myers Beach's future. So you've got beach and natural systems that are focused on coastal resilience and flooding and shoreline protection and environmental resources. Getting around the island, that station is focused on obviously transportation and parking, safety, evacuation. Places to gather, shop, and dine, that's focused on community destinations, public spaces, redevelopment, and really maintaining the economic vitality of the island. We also have a station that's focused on what comes first. So this is about prioritizing and phasing. If the town can't do everything at once, then what should it focus on initially? And then finally, we have a Big Ideas station. And this is an opportunity to kind of share your thoughts that may not fit maybe so neatly into the other stations. So this is a place to capture the opportunities and concerns and ideas that could make a meaningful difference for the town, but weren't necessarily captured in the boards that you saw tonight. So we encourage you to visit each one of the stations around the room now and provide feedback on the options that are most important to you. And for those of you that are joining online, we'll walk through some of these same topics together So as you move through the stations, you're going to find there's different ways to provide feedback at the different stations. You can add comments and participate in voting exercises, speak with members of the project team and town staff that are there, and complete the online survey if you haven't already done so. Again, this is that same QR code we started with at the start of the presentation. So this is a code that links you to the project website and survey if you want to provide additional feedback or if you want to share it with others that were not able to be here tonight. A couple things to keep in mind. There are no right or wrong answers in this. We're really here to hear from you. We were interested in hearing from a range of different perspectives and experiences. We wanna make sure that this is a plan that represents the town as a whole. So we wanna make sure we're reaching as many people as possible and hearing all of those different perspectives for what you value and what you wanna see So as you visit the stations tonight, we really want you to think about what's most important for Fort Myers Beach moving forward. You know, think about what challenges might still need to be addressed, what opportunities should the town be pursuing, what actions would make the biggest difference in the island over the coming years. Just think about questions like that as you're kind of moving about the room and talking with people and looking at the boards and kind of interacting with them to provide good feedback. And with that, I mean, we really appreciate you taking the time to participate and we look forward to hearing your perspectives.

And again, thank you everyone for being here. You can see, and if we kind of took the, from the door, the arrangement of boards as Erica explained them, it doesn't mean if everyone's at the first one, you know, the second one is just equally as important. Really, the end ones were start now and big ideas. You know, if you want, you can begin these middle boards. We want to really facilitate tonight. So thank you, Erica, for your explanation. She can stay online with the online people. But any questions from anyone before we get started? Makes sense? Seems reasonable? At least practical? Again, I'm not going to sit here with the mic. That's more for the benefit of the people online. But we're here. Please come up. Let's talk about the things. Yeah. Have what?

A heat map been done in all the vacant lots on the property that have been destroyed by EM.

I don't know. Okay. So, yeah. So let's. Sorry, I just didn't understand that. Okay, thanks. Okay. So, again, I'm going to stop talking. I welcome you to come up. If you have individual questions, we're going to do whatever we can to try and answer them. Perfect. Okay, thank you.