Parks & Recreation Advisory Board - Regular Meeting

Have to see.

I'm I'm I'm Today is November gonna the twentieth, Thursday at 06:30, Room City Hall 244. Roll call. Paul Jackman, chair.

Jordan Morgan, vice chair.

Laurie Baio. Gail Stevens. Donald Chavis.

Amy Patel.

You don't need to pick that up on me. Any public comment? All right. We got to oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. Everybody stand for the pledge, please? My bad. 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. Ami, Ami? Your Yeah. Your mic is off. Yeah. It needs to be on. Got it.

Thank you, Mr. Shakimon.

Okay. Approval of minutes from last month,

October 16. Yes. I move we approve the minutes from last month's

meeting. Second.

Yeah. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Motion carries. Okay. Discussion and possibility of regarding an election of vice chair and chair motion. We're move it to the January meeting from today. Okay.

Can I make a quick okay? Okay. Don, you're new with us this time. Okay. He second the motion to approve the things. I don't think he can because he wasn't a member in October. So just to make sure that we have the record. Correct. Someone else has to approve. Somebody has to Okay. Laurie, because you weren't here yet. Okay. Hey. How are doing?

Can stay there, he can just go beside you. You just move the microphone, please. Good. You have that? You're good.

I'm good with the moving and then we're good with the moving of the election of the chair and vice chair till January?

I second that.

K. Then, discuss possible action regarding and recruiting volunteer judges for the annual poinsettia parade. I would love to, but I can't, boss.

Okay. I need some judges for the parade units. Yeah. I will do

it unless you wanna some others wanna do it. So because I've done a few things. I three. So It's fun.

You get you get it.

What what when is it? It is December 6, Saturday the sixth.

Oh, I got SAT that day.

Uh-huh. Also have a Well, SAT good

it's late afternoon? Evening.

I believe to

be there four last year,

I think.

Yeah. Three Oh. The festival starts there at three. Okay.

Omie Patel. Do you think mister do you think Dominic can do it as well?

He can't because it's board members that have to participate in this. But you're welcome to come and see what it's about.

What day is it?

Is the first Saturday in December.

I can if no one else

wants to it. I'll do

Unless if you want to do it, Lori.

No, it looks like he might want to do it. Don't know.

I did.

But I was you said it's six to what time?

Usually show up around three It runs until about 07:30.

Oh, absolutely. I'll do it.

Alright. Awesome. Then I'll

Back out.

Joan, Donald, and Omi? Okay.

It's a lot of fun. I would have done it if I didn't have something coming up.

We did it last year with

Paul. So

we got a lot of freebies.

We got a

lot of free stuff. Candy.

Gift bags.

Oh,

yeah. I get free gift bags.

Yeah. The people try to bribe you as they know.

The problem is they're also good that you

really do not want to put anyone down.

So what are we judging?

So we'll provide you with the criteria. There's certain criteria in each one of the different trophies. One is the float that's most on theme. One is the one that's the most festive. There's different criteria on each one that you'll have. There's usually award winners. Whoever gives me

the most Christmas cookies. Yeah.

You're gonna be a great judge. That's it.

All right. That's good.

Moving on. Discussion of possible action regarding and reviewing the endorsement of the Park and Recreation Master Plan to the City Commission.

Alright. So I'd like to introduce Kristen and Amy. They're here with us from GAI Consultants. They have worked very hard and diligently on all of my demands. And with that, we were able to come up with a very great plan. So they're gonna do a summary report. You have a copy of the full draft version attached to the meeting minutes for anybody who wants to look more in-depth. But this will give you a high overview. Turning it over to the ladies.

You have it in there. Is that a three inch binder? That's giving me high school vibes. PTSD from high school.

Rachel had it all set up for me.

We definitely still have those.

Yes. Thanks, Trish. Good evening, everyone. Super excited to be here tonight. This is now going to be the sixth time that this presentation has been given this week, five by me, one by one of my colleagues. We have did one on ones with all of the city commissioners this week to go through it. Really happy to be here with you all tonight since you are the people in touch with what's going on in Parks and Recreation in Northport. We've been working on this whole year. And this is going to go on December 9 for city commission approval. So tonight, we're going to be looking for you all to take action to recommend approval commissions.

So happy to be here, answer whatever questions, concerns, anything that you want clarification on. The presentation takes about forty minutes. I should know because this will be the fifth time I've personally given it. Free. I just want to let you know how long it's going to take. So if you want me to stop and explain something further on one of the slides, let me know. Happy to do that. Or we can get through it and talk about it at the end. Amy Zengatita is parks and recreation planner who works with me at GAI. I think I said I don't remember.

I'm Kristen Cavorn. I'm the project director for this project. So Amy and I both came from the public sector and have been working on Parks and Recreation Master Plans in Florida. So we're really grateful for the opportunity to get to work here with you all in Northport. You've got such a professional staff here and just really active programs and public who loves what's going on here. So, oh, boy. Now it's real. All right. So next slide, Amy. Trish, please. Trish, now I have to be polite about it.

Next slide. It's good. I'll try to stay with you. I think I have the drill.

Yes, probably. So tonight, I'm going to give an overview of the master plan, where we've gone to get to here. We're going to talk about the park system in Northport today, then the opportunities that we've heard from the public and based on the existing conditions, and then look at the vision and toolkit to implement it. So the purpose of the master plan is to understand the needs of the community. So we spent quite a bit of time, doing public input.

We also spent quite a bit of time. We've been to every single park and inventoried all of the park infrastructure in all of the parks so that way we had a good foundation of understanding what you currently have. So when we took comments from the public, we could truly understand their frame of reference. And all of that moves forward to creating a blueprint for the future. So the life of this master plan is about ten years.

So we're looking ahead between now and 2035, which is really hard to believe. It sounds so far away. But then ultimately, the goal is to improve the sustain of nice quality of life for the people who call Northport home. So in addition to that, you all probably know that the city, Parks and Recreation Department is accredited through the National Recreation Parks Association. That accreditation is called CAPRA, which stands for the Commission on Accreditation of Parks and Recreation Agencies.

And one of the requirements of CAPRA accreditation is an adopted Parks and Recreation Master Plan. That's why this is so important tonight that we, get your recommendation to move forward to City Commission with an adopted master plan. Not only can you get, you meet some of the criteria for cap or accreditation, but you also it helps with grant applications and moving the department forward with a vision that is publicly supported through the public input process. So, really loved the opportunity to learn about the evolution of this department, over the years. So it started as the recreation division and the general services department.

That is very typical for public parks and recreation departments. A lot of them started under other departments. Oftentimes, it's public works because you think of ground maintenance and people who are mowing grass. Over the years, that tends to evolve and specialize, which is what has happened here. In 2018, the division assumed responsibility for parks and ground maintenance from neighborhood development services.

This is a really important key change because the needs of maintaining a park system are very different than the needs of, mowing medians and filling, filling potholes and that very different technical skills. So having a dedicated parks and recreation department and people who specialize in athletic turf maintenance and all that helps elevate the department. From there, they became their own department that same year. And then in 2019, expanded with the beautiful aquatic center that you all have. Most of our public most of our public sector clients would give their arms, their legs and everything else to be able to get an aquatic center like you all have here in North Port. So very fortunate to have that. Pardon

me? We almost had to give all those parts again.

Well, yes, yes, for sure. In 2021, following the termination of an interlocal agreement with Sarasota County, the department took over 19 athletic fields. So that's a lot. That's a lot of maintenance. Athletic fields are very high maintenance.

So that really increased the responsibilities of the department. 2023, all got more Mineral Springs, one of the really cool vintage Florida attractions. And that brings us to 76 year round employees, which almost double in the summer with adding in your summer camp counselors, your lifeguards, that type. So what has been really great for us as part of this planning process is at the very beginning of the project, we, looked at the city's strategic vision, which highlights these four bullets, quality of life, environmental resilience, sustainability, growth management, and then the importance of quality infrastructure and facilities. We use that as a frame of reference going through the Parks and Recreation Master Plan.

But everything we heard from the public further supported the overall city vision, which is really nice that there was a lot of reinforcement of the values of the city overall in what this Parks and Recreation Department is doing now and the vision for the future. So looking at the overall process, it's basically been three steps. The first step was looking at the parks today, where we looked at all of these existing documents that influence the overall Parks and Recreation Master Plan, like the strategic vision for the city. We did an inventory of all of the park infrastructure. So our team went to every single park.

We do this in GIS. What we do is we have our phones and iPads, and we go and we actually take GPS points and photographs of every playground, every pavilion, every ball field, every dugout in the city and we assign a quality to it. So what that does as we get further along in the planning process is we create maps, which is, what we use GIS for. We can create maps for the condition of the existing parks. And it gives us a very quick at a glance view of the parks that have been loved so much over the years that they're due for improvements before some of the, parks that might have some newer infrastructure.

The also really cool thing about doing an inventory like this is we are now at, ten days away from the end of hurricane season, knock on wood. But now the city has a complete inventory of all of your park infrastructure. So in subsequent years, if there is a hurricane and the city's in a position of having to get FEMA reimbursement for damage to any park facilities, we have the documentation in place for that. So that's a great, kind of bonus for having a full inventory. We looked at the existing programming as well as the level of service.

So level of service is a regulatory planning term that refers to how the city's comprehensive plan talks about parks, the required acres of parks per population in the city. So there's a recreation open space element in the parks and recreation or excuse me, in the city's comprehensive plan that's adopted. And we want to make sure that the planning department and the parks and recreation department are working hand in hand to make sure these two documents, make sense together. From there, we look at the opportunities by talking to the public, hearing what they have to say. We also look at the programming needs and opportunities that the public is going to that the public talk to us about, what's offered at the recreation centers, what they'd like to have offered that might not be offered right now.

Also, two kind of nuanced things that were very specific. One was the uSports demand analysis. When we first started talking to the city about this, they were aware of how many reservation requests there were for athletic fields that they were not able to fulfill because the amount of need is not, equivalent to the amount of available space. So we have a group in our office called Urban Analytics, which is just a fancy name for people who do a lot of data and research. But they actually took and I'll go over the findings of that.

But they actually took the reservation information and looked at population growth and the amount of households that are anticipated to have children now and in 2044 and extrapolated that out to how many athletic facilities are short. So that's a pretty cool part of the project. And then we also looked at ecotourism with, more Mineral Springs kind of being the catalyst for that discussion. We took a deeper dive in ecotourism opportunities throughout the city. So I'll get into more detail on that.

And then finally, the vision and toolkit. This is, from what does all of this mean? So you've done all this research and spent all this time. What does it mean? So we're looking at, the guiding principles for the future of the plan, the land acquisition strategy where the city might be missing parks because the geographic distribution of parks in the city, leave some holes throughout the city, park type standards, and then ultimately, the capital improvement plan and how much all this costs. So we'll cover all of that today. So parks today, you have a snapshot of what parks are

you can flip it.

Yeah. Sometimes it's a little slow. It's going. So we have a snapshot of the map of the city. So just to give you all a little orientation, the lighter areas are the city limits. So everything that's kind of grayed back a little bit is outside the city limits. So on the left side of the screen, that's going to be the west side of the city because north is up on this map. And then this rectangle that's kind of going from left to right is also the city limits. So all of the green spots on the map I'm going to get up because I think I can. It might be a little easier.

So these green spots are all city parks. And you can see the the bulk of the concentration of the existing city parks is here kind of in the Western central part of the city. So over here on the East Side of the city, the number number one up there, that's your existing Atwater Park. And then number 13 is Italy Avenue, which is vacant land right now that the city has acquired to be a future park. And we'll talk about Italy Avenue more in-depth.

But those two are really critical to providing service to the East Side of the city because that's really all that's out there right now. And then over here on the West Side of the city, these two parks that are green with some little slash marks through it, those are parks that are in the Welland Park development. So we'll talk about that a little bit more too. So when you take all that, we've got a list here of 32 facilities. And, actually, the gutter is kinda cutting off the bottom.

Yeah. Do you

wanna use this?

A pointer? Oh, a pointer?

Yeah. You gotta have it sit right there. You can do it that way. Yeah. That way you can sit.

I don't know. It's kinda fun to stay.

Whatever you wanna do.

I had an espresso before you came here. So we've got a list of 32 facilities here. The city actually does not have 32 parks. So this is 32 parks and facilities because some of these are on the same they're on the same site, but we've listed the facilities separately. And then the A and the B at the bottom, those are the two parks that are in Welland Park. So they're not city owned, but they're contributing to the City Parks and Recreation Services. So does this flip too?

It's a PDF. It's a PDF because we couldn't get there.

That's why

I'm jumpy on you.

I see. Okay. So here's an overall snapshot of the amount of parks in the system in Northport. It's really cool because it's a very diverse system. You've got a lot of offerings for a lot of different interests. You have 29 completed sites. Two are under development, which is Boca Chica and the Circle Of Honor. One is in the master planning phase, which is Italy Avenue, and I'll show you that master plan. There will be a big unveiling later on in my presentation. And that breaks down into multiple park types.

There's three community parks with one in the master planning phase, eight neighborhood parks with one in development, 13 special use facilities with one in development, two greenways, one open space and two conservation. So this map, I

love

it because I'm a map geek, but it does take some time to digest. So I'm going to tell you all what's going on in here. So all of the darker yellow area, everywhere on the map are existing houses. These are where people live. There are actually roofs. And those are all residential areas. So Northport is primarily residential, very, very highly residential. Everywhere that is the lighter yellow will have potential residential. So these are areas of the city that are not zoned for commercial or retail or anything else. So we want to make sure that we're planning for the areas that are going to be future residential also.

So then you look at these green kind of turquoisey teal colored blobs. So this is looking at neighborhood park geographic level service in the city. A neighborhood park is a park that is smaller acreage that are near to people's homes that they can ideally walk to. So what we heard through the public input process is walking to parks is really very important to people. They really want to be able to walk not only to parks from their house but between parks.

They want parks to be connected to each other also. So that generally translates to about a half a mile or a ten minute walk. So once you get much past a half a mile or a ten minute walk, people are not going to walk anymore. They're going hop in their cars and drive, especially because it's 100% humidity and 98 degrees eleven and a half months out of the year here. So what you have in these green dots are all of the existing neighborhood parks in the city and a half a mile walking to those parks.

So what that means is all these other areas in yellow, especially in the central kind of southern part of the city and North Of 75 and then over here in Welland Park, none of these areas have a park within a ten minute walk to their neighbor from their houses. So when we look at these service areas, we do because we do it in real time analysis in our mapping program, GIS, anywhere where there's a road or a water body or anything that would obstruct you being able to walk, it will cut off that service area. And that's why you don't see circles around these parks. So it used to be that you would see circles around parks with a half mile radius around them, and then you'd say, oh, you can walk. But we live in Florida.

And unless you're, like, running from alligators in the pond, you might not actually be able to walk there. So that's why these service areas are cut off a little bit because there's a reason why you can't walk from a specific direction. So the next map is going to look at community parks. Community parks are a little bit bigger. They typically have more facilities, and they're mostly drive to.

So the time that people will hop in the car and drive to them because we still want in a very highly residential area, we still want community parks to be a relatively easy drive. So for community parks in Northport, we looked at a three mile radius, which roughly translates to a ten minute drive, course, depending on traffic and time of day and all that other good stuff. So the story of your community parks, obviously, is much better. You've got much better coverage in the city, from your community parks to be able to drive to them. It doesn't leave as many yellow areas that are underserved, but there's still some opportunity.

The other thing about community parks that are really cool is because they're larger acreage, they can serve double duty. They can also serve as neighborhood parks. So if somebody lives close enough to a community park that they can walk there, they're getting a neighborhood level of service from a larger park. And we made sure that we planned for that in the overall master plan. So from there, we moved into visioning. I just keep going. I know. I love it. It's like rolling. Rolling.

We did the public engagement. Saw many of you all there this summer, in primarily June and July. We had a statistically valid survey, an open link survey, several public workshops, focus group, and met with you all. And

this is

what we heard. We are very conscientious through the public input process that we take the time to read every single comment that comes in. And that's important because people are taking time out of their busy schedule to talk to us, and we want to make sure that this is your plan, not our plan, that we we've taken the time to understand what we've heard. But to take all of those pieces of information and put them in a digestible form, we start to group them into themes together so we can make recommendations that that make sense and tie together. So when we look at the themes that came out of the public input process, it was primarily these five.

And this is what we move forward through the visioning. So we had connectivity and trails. I've already talked a little bit about how it came up very important, very highly, that people wanted to be able to walk to parks, walk on trails, get to parks safely and walk between parks. Same thing with equity and accessibility. Park distribution was really important to people and having a park close to home.

Sun relief, in addition to additional shade, also having expanded park hours. It's 06:55 right now and pitch black outside, but it's a beautiful time of year to be outside. So being able to go and shoot hoops or play at a playground or whatever at 05:30 and 06:00 at night from November to March and April when we have the best weather, was really important. Providing programming and recreation amenities, looking at unique offerings, much more active recreation. It's like the department is, almost a victim of their own success.

They've got such a good thing going. The public wants more of it. And then ecotourism, nature based tourism and the opportunity to get out in nature and experience nature was also very high. So diving in a little bit more into programming needs and opportunities, the type of programs that we're most that we heard most often were senior focused, team focused love that you all have team advisory members here science, technology, engineering and math programs as well as additional nature based programs. All of that providing additional space in the new community center on the East side of the city at Italy Avenue.

We'll talk about that a little bit more, too. So youth sports demand analysis. This is where our, data people I won't call them data geeks because they don't like that. But our data crew really dives in and looks at all of this stuff. So they looked at the population growth in Northport.

So right now, about 19% of current families are engaged in youth sports. And with only 19% of the population engaged, there's still not enough space right now currently as it stands. So in 2044, there's going to be almost double new family households with children who will engage in organized sports. So over the next nineteen, twenty years, the amount of participants pressure on the current system is going to almost double. So what that translates to are 34 new sports facilities by 2024.

19 new sports court, the highest unmet need was outdoor volleyball. But a sports court can be translated to anything pickleball, volleyball, tennis, basketball, paddle, whatever. It might be think hard court type thing. Eight diamond fields with softball preferred over baseball. One of the reasons why softball, a softball field works better than a baseball field is a softball field, has what's called a skinned infield. That means there's no grass on the infield. It's all clay. So if you're looking down on it, everything is clay. And you can have flexible baselines when it's that way. So for the younger kids like coach pitch and tee ball, you can move the bases in closer when you don't have any grass in the way.

So softball fields are preferred for that. And oh, and rectangle fields. Where's the other one? Those are the football lacrosse soccer fields. I think there were seven, if I recall correctly, were going to be needed. Seven. No, I remember. Yay. All right. So then ecotourism.

If you ever have the opportunity to go out into the wilderness with a wildlife ecologist, I highly recommend it because we got to we learned so much about birds and things like that. So we looked at the ecotourism across the city. There's a lot of opportunities. This is one of my favorite pieces of property up here in the Northeast corner of the city. This is Orange Hammock Preserve, and it's a huge land area, and there are a lot of birds out there to see if you're ever interested in bird watching.

But lots of opportunities for, ecotourism in the city limits. Of course, you all are spoiled to have state parks and state forests adjacent, and then you've got Warm Mineral Springs and Myakahatchee that the city owns. And then on the next slide, we're going to look at more ecotourism opportunities directly adjacent to city boundaries. So on the North Side and then wrapping around the West side and the East side of the city, there's a ton of green space. Residents don't tend to see city boundaries as something they can't cross to go recreate.

So, a lot more opportunity directly adjacent to the city. And then my very favorite is you all have two state parks within 10 miles of the city limits, and I just think you're so lucky to have that. So you have Myakka River State Park and then Charlotte Harbor. I just want to note this shape. This is another one of those GIS mapping things.

So when we look at the 10 miles of the city limits, this map indents here or this 10 mile radius indents here and indents here because it's actually following the shape of the city limits. So 10 miles, lots of opportunity. So all of this wraps up into some of the recommendations of how the city can leverage not only what you have, but partnerships with other conservation landowners in the, direct area to increase your ecotourism opportunities. So the top recommendation, really using Warm Mineral Springs as a hub for environmental information in the city ties to the bottom recommendation, which is the new, hiring a new park sustainability manager. If you ever go to a national park and walk into the visitor center and there's a ranger there and that ranger knows everything.

They can tell you where to go, where to hike. They know everything about the wildlife. That's what this position is envisioned to be able to do. So, with the park sustainability manager and utilizing Warm Mineral Springs as kind of the hub, if you've got a person there, they will be able to exponentially expand the offerings for nature based and ecotourism in the city because they'll be able to be focused on that. People will have a direct resource on where they can go to find out these, nature and ecotourism opportunities in the city.

And they'll also be able to work with city staff to leverage some partnerships with some of the, private landowners and other conservation tracks that are around the city. So everything else from there is, like expanding on the current Go Green with Parks initiative, add additional infrastructure enhancements for ecotourism opportunities, bird blinds, things like that for bird watching. Okay. So what is the vision of, for North Port Parks and Recreation? This is how Where we're coming to, what does all of this mean?

Everything we saw, everything we heard, what does it mean? So we have five guiding principles that came out of this. We talked about a few slides back the five themes that all of the public input translated to. What we do is we create guiding principles out of this. And the guiding principles become a north star, if you will, for all of the recommendations.

So when we make recommendations at the end of the plan, each one of them tied back to one of these five guiding principles to help everything coalesce in a direction. So providing for today, this is taking care of what you have. Providing for your current residents, what are their needs, what are the what can we do to make sure we're taking care of not only what do we have existing, but the people who currently live here? Well, we plan for the future. Northport population is going to grow, especially when we're talking about Welland Park on the West Side.

So how are we going to smartly plan for the future and make sure that the department has the resources that they need to move the department into the future and provide additional staffing, programming, and infrastructure? Enhancing overall user experiences at parks. Again, this ties back to some very simple things, making sure that there's adequate shade for walking and for playing. Connecting people to the parks. People want to be able to walk to parks. They want to be able to walk in parks once they're there for exercise. So looking at the connection and then having parks close to home. And then finally, expanding access to nature. Here's another one of our maps. This map also requires studying.

Feel free to go home tonight and study it further. What this map is basically telling you is where the city of Northport should target acquiring land, going out and buying land for new parks. So there's a lot of circles on this map. What we're trying to do is to prioritize areas that are underserved or have no service from parks. And because there's, remember from the earlier map where we looked at the access, the walkable access to neighborhood parks and the drivable access to community parks, we're not trying to say, go out right now and buy everything you need to fill these gaps.

We've tried to take a conscientious approach to phasing it in. So the first thing that we're doing, for neighborhood parks are looking at filling in mile service gaps. So we're making progress and then we get to half mile service areas. So, if you're looking at different circles, you'll see, if you look at the legends, some of them are acquisition areas for neighborhood parks with new development. Some of them filling neighborhood parks by acquiring community parks.

As I remember, I said you can have a community park serve dual function. It can have neighborhood park amenities within a larger park. So we are looking at some new park acquisition. And just because there's a circle here, this is not meant to say you should find a new park right there in the dead center. This gives the city just a generalized area marching orders, if you will.

Go out, see if you can put together like, look in here, see if there's a couple of lots out there available for purchase that the city could buy some vacant lots to put together to get to two acres for a new neighborhood park. We never say we never look for specific parcels as part of a Parks and Recreation Master Plan because we don't want anybody to think the city's after their property. So this is, one of the recommendations that does put some responsibility back on the city to work on over, over many years. So community parks, there's four areas, but there's some there's some land acquisition to help fill these gaps, what we affectionately call park deserts. For those of you who have never seen the Welland Park master plan, we put this in here.

This is not our plan. This is what Welland Park has going on. This is a very different pattern of development from what you've had in Northport to date. Northport for to date is basically been you can see here individual lots. So a house gets built and it goes up. Welland Park is a planned community. And when we have planned community, there's roads, there's wetlands, there's parks, there's everything is integrated and they're mixed use. So you have residential with commercial and retail and all that mixed into the same area. So, if you've never heard the numbers before, Welland Park's going to be 22,000 homes and approximately 60,000 new residents. Don't shoot the messenger.

I'm just telling you what it is. What's great about Welland Park is they've been very good partners with the city in communicating. They helped fund part of this master plan, and we have met with them through the process. So they have agreements in place with the city. Their post annexation agreement, they've already agreed to 15 acres for a sports facility.

So through the Parks and Rec master plan, we work to figure out what that actually would how that would benefit the city best. And the way that it would benefit the city best is to reallocate those acreage as a 10 acre community park and a five acre neighborhood park within Welland Park that would be city parks, and then also adding a new multi use tournament complex to meet some of the needs from the youth sports demand analysis. For them, that would be a win win. At least from my perspective, that would be a win win. Because when you have a tournament complex for youth sports, that has people eating in the restaurants. And it has some economic development associated with it, too.

Just so you guys are aware, the additional acreage for that is part of a second annexation agreement for the Winchester Ranch portion where the high school is going. So that would be a different set of acreage than the 15 already addressed.

Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So the next I want to talk about are park type standards. Park type standards, this is a diagram of a neighborhood park and a fictitious neighborhood park in Northport. This does not mean that every neighborhood park in Northport

in

in neighborhood the

So what happens is we're recommending that a neighborhood park in North Port to be defined between two and ten acres. The reason why we say two acres as a minimum is you can see on the diagram, when you have two acres, you have open space. When you get much smaller than two acres in a neighborhood park, it gets to be a little bit crammed and the thing that sacrifices is typically open space. And open space is really important parks because if you essentially pave paradise and put up a parking lot, you lose all of the free space. So when we're showing open space that's kind of flanked by picnic pavilions, if there's a birthday party in this picnic pavilion, those kids are going to be running around in this open space.

You can kick a ball in open space, lay out in the sun, read a book, whatever it may be. The other advantage to having a little bit of a larger start on your acreage for a neighborhood park is your parks you can be more efficient because you can have fewer parks that are larger acreage because you can get enough into doing them. So when we're talking about a neighborhood park, obviously you do have currently have smaller parks and that's fine. That's no problem. But for targeting new land acquisition, negotiating with developers asking them for land, this gives you some negotiating leverage and saying, no, no, I don't want your half acre in the back of your development that can't be developed.

If you can't develop it, I can't either. So this helps with this. So some of the key elements, open space, sports court. Again, we don't care what the sports court is. The neighborhood that it's going into can have say whatever they want.

If they want pickleball, tennis, basketball, basketball is shown here for diagrammatic purposes. We're also pulling in crosswalks, sidewalks, making sure that, even though it seems like it's obvious, but making sure that we're really being conscientious about having safe crossings. When you get to a community park, minimum standard for a community park in Northport, 10 acres up to 50, but it could be larger than that too. What's a little bit misleading on this diagram when you look at it and you're like, wow, that's 10 acres. All it is is a quad of baseball fields.

They do take up a lot of space for sure. But we also still have our neighborhood park amenities in here. Where you are losing something on a 10 acre community park is you're losing some of the open space. So it would be nicer if they're a little bit bigger. But when you're working on backfilling with some ball fields, you can do ball fields with neighborhood park amenities in a 10 acre community park. What's also added above this, above the ball field complex in a community park, By the way, this could be rectangle shaped fields. We're just showing the diamond shaped fields here for illustrative purposes. And this shows the skinned infield. See how this is all clay? On a baseball field, you would have clay baselines only, but this area would all be grass.

So you can't have flexible base distances on a grassed infield. Okay. So you also add in restrooms and ball fields when we're talking about community parks. I'm getting there. You all are being a good audience. I like the nods. All right, so Italy Avenue. This is your new park. This is, really exciting. And hopefully, this will, move forward into the future.

So, we mailed postcards to everybody who lives within a mile of Italy Avenue and invited them to come talk to us at a public meeting. I don't know why they didn't all show up because it's so exciting. But, we we did get some participation. We had a specific station at the public input meeting to talk about Italy Avenue and what people wanted to be able to do at their new neighborhood and community park. The program statement is basically the summary of the amenities that people wanted to see at Italy Avenue.

So we have nature trails, a new community center, serves the East side of the city, very, very important. Rectangular youth fields, potentially putting in synthetic turf. Of course, that is an advantage to, not having to have downtime to rest the natural grass. Playground, dog park, and then support amenities. So we're going to look at a little bit of a zoomed in perspective not perspective, a little bit of a zoomed in graphic.

So this property right here oh, what's coming down the hall? So this property right here Do you mount a little bit to 100? It's Okay. It's fine. It's close enough.

You think I'm doing

No, it's fine. It's fine. So this is the San Mateo property. So this right here is the same as right here. So this graphic is basically chopped in half. This is the north part of the park. This is the south part of the park. So when you're driving in the San Mateo property, which would be the road right here and right here, you get to a roundabout. So if you're driving in, we're going to go left and go to the north, which would take us up here. So this north part of the property is envisioned to be your neighborhood park, neighborhood park amenities.

We've got a dog park. We've got a playground. We've got a sports court. Another really fun thing about being out in the field with an ecologist is he was able to look at the land and what's going on here. This is an existing wetland, so we, plan to preserve it, offer some nature interpretive opportunities and walking around it. This area down here is a beautiful existing tree canopy, so we brought in some nature trails through there. So this open space this is a trail right here that crosses the canal, and you can follow this trail north to Atwater Park, which is really exciting. So you can walk between the parks, never have to go on the street. Pretty fun. All right.

So then if you're going to go on the roundabout from the San Mateo property and go south, you end up in the community park side of the park. So we've got the new community center. It's about 35,000 square feet. I'll walk you all through that on the next slide. Some open space parking and then your, four rectangle fields for soccer, football, lacrosse.

Again, you've got walking trails through the entire site, lots of opportunity for exercise and just taking a stroll in the park. So really a beautiful, beautiful opportunity. So community center program statement, we worked with an architect partner on this, take our public input and matched it to required square footage for a community center. It basically wraps up to be about 35,000 square feet with an indoor basketball court, indoor walking trail, multiuse classrooms, fitness areas, senior social areas, just really, really a fun, truly multigenerational community center that can offer activities for lots of different interests. And then the next slide is the floor plan, conceptual floor plan.

We've got a double gym here, basketball, volleyball, indoor pickleball, whatever people want to do. And then an elevated walking track. Elevated walking tracks are super, super popular in Florida because it is too darn hot to walk outside in the summer. So this is like the evolution of the mall walking club. So you can go and watch people play basketball and walk on the track.

We've also got locker rooms, the storage space, support space that you need for it, large multipurpose center, some group fitness classrooms, rock climbing, media lab, cafe, senior social space, word I makerspace. That's the makerspace. I knew that. Makerspace. So lots of really great elements in here. Reason for people to drive from the West Side if they're jealous. But certainly, we'll be able to serve the East Side really very well. All right. I'm almost done. We're getting there.

Capital improvement plan. We're going to ignore the numbers at the bottom. But we I just want to tell you all how this comes together. So I mentioned earlier that the life of a Parks and Recreation Master Plan is about ten years. So what we recommend is every five years that there be an interim update of the master plan. Couple reasons for that. Number one, to celebrate the accomplishments. So from 2026 because we finish up in 2025 from 2026 to 2031, what are you all going to accomplish for your short and midterm goals? So short term short term, short term improvements sorry. It's kind of late for me.

Short term improvements, one to two years. Those are the things that came up first. We prioritized based on public input, existing conditions, and what this city could actually feasibly tackle in one to two years. Mid term is two to five years, so that brings you to the update of the master plan. So at that five year update, it's not a complete redo starting from scratch. No new inventory. The city will be keeping the inventory up to date in GIS. It's talking to the public again, celebrating the accomplishments of the plan, and finding out what the city didn't get to if it's still a priority and carrying that forward. And then the long term things, if any what's the status of these? Are these still priorities?

Do we need to start to work on some of them sooner than later? So what we end up with is, again, short, mid, and long term recommendations and then grand totals. Of course, if you're looking across, you can see where your big numbers come in. A new community center is very expensive, 30,000, 35,000 square feet costs a lot of So that's where you're getting these numbers at the bottom. So what we do is we have broken up each of the recommendations for each term. Short term

is Short

term is about $10,000,000 and we have broken up into park and facility enhancements. These are existing parks and facilities. And there is a big breakdown in the back of y'all's trapper keepers that shows a matrix of all of these. Every single park has an individual tab, and every single tab dives into what the recommendations for each of them are and what they cost. So each park, each facility has a nice, much more detailed breakdown.

And then we have other projects. So other projects are expenses not tied to a specific existing site. So they might be system wide enhancements like replacing pavilions throughout the entire city. Or they might be land acquisition. So starting to acquire land for new parks.

So land, of course, is never going to be as cheap tomorrow as it is today. So the city has a map of where they need to look to acquire land. Ideally, they'd be acquiring land for two new community parks and three new neighborhood parks over the next two ish years. But if there's a land boon and there's more that can be acquired, buying land and doing what we call land banking, just sitting on it for a while, is a very valid thing to do because then you have it, you're getting it at the best price, and you can move forward. So that's short term.

Midterm is going to carry us to the five year mark. It's a little bit more expensive, actually almost triple, dollars 26,000,000. And the reason why we're starting to tick up, we've got the existing, facilities that we're looking at enhancements for. And then we're starting to move in the design and engineering of two new facilities. So we're looking at the design and engineering for Italy Avenue and City Center Front Green, which is, for some reason, that alliteration of city center is hard for me to remember.

So we've got those. And then we've got the we've got other projects that, again, are not tied into a specific site right now. And then finally, long term. Long term is a very large price tag and that's because it includes the construction of, Italy Avenue, City Center Front Green and Warm Mineral Springs Park. So that's a pretty big number.

And there's still, again, maintaining adding in improvements to existing parks and continuing to acquire land and expand the system as it goes along. So funding sources and opportunities, we don't just want to say do all this and not include some strategy to do it. So, we've included some ways to accomplish this. One way is not going to work. There's got to be multiple ways.

Alternative financing mechanisms, that might be bonds, general obligation bonds, or, dedicated millage rate to parks and recreation. Enhanced agreements, and that's probably the one that would be the most financial impact all at once, the ability to get more done all at once. And then from there, we go down, enhanced agreements, working with developers, trying to get developers as they develop to go back and donate the two acres or the 10 acres for new neighborhood parks and new community parks. Tiered impact fee structures. One thing, you all get impact fees, they need to be spent.

They expire if they don't get spent. So as they are coming into the city, very important to spend them. Impact fees can only be spent on expansions to the system. So they can't be used to go back and renovate any of your existing facilities. But when you're expanding, the idea is that impact fees are used to offset growth.

So when you're bringing in new developments, you're expanding your residential population, you expand your park system to go with it. Very important to use that money as it comes in. Looking at user fees, pay to play type of things, and then expansion of interlocal agreements with other government entities like schools, continuing to, have good relationship with the schools and being able to access fields and things like that after school hours. So this is my actual my last slide. Another thing that we look at our grant stacking grants are very valid ways to, be able to leverage city funds.

We work with a company called RMPK Funding who specializes in grants in Florida. And basically, they, help with this grant stacking strategy. So this is a project we at GAI did with them for the city of Claremont up in the Central Florida area. And basically, we're able to get over $2,600,000 in grants by using the initial city match required for one grant to get a grant and then using other grant using a grant to as the match for another grant. So you've stacked all of these grants on top of each other and using each grant it's completely legitimate using each grant for the required match for another grant.

So that ended up you can see this was a big list of grants that the city got for this project. But that really helps with both acquisition projects and development projects. Again, it's not a solution for all of it, but it is a very legitimate thing to continue to use grants.

And I'm

done. Thank you. Yeah.

That was great.

Very good.

Lots of information, I know. Trish, we can roll back to any slides you all Questions, need to

comments, concerns?

Yeah, I have just so you have the short term plan, right? Just want to be clear. One to two years is the short term plan. Three to five years is the midterm plan.

Yeah. Okay.

What about does a private public partnership exist in this process?

It would be one of the recommendations. Did you have a specific project or something in mind that you were thinking?

No. I was just putting it out there.

So do you all have any public private partnerships right now? I can't no.

Yeah. No. We had a proposal for one for Warm Springs. It didn't come to fruition. But we don't have a currently enacted one.

They can be tricky for Parks and Recreation because typically the mission is a little bit different. Private entities want to make money and Parks and Recreation wants to serve their residents. So sometimes you'll see it where the city might build a pickleball facility, but they don't want to run it. And so they'll hire a private entity to run it. If a private entity is running it, they're going to charge enough money to make a profit. So you can see that can be a challenge to providing public recreation services to a community.

I've worked with them in the past where a private entity has built a field, for example. But then their field is used for their primary uses, and then the city can pick up pieces afterward. So it becomes difficult because when you're trying to have equitable access for everybody, the field might only be available three or four days a week and at hours that are not conducive to the age groups that we would need them for. So it can be tricky, but I've seen successful ones as well. This

was interesting to me because the oversight committee for the Sarasota County Schools, which I was on, they just finished their thing too. We just voted on it Monday. Anyway, yeah. And it was good. And Diane Kaminacci and Amy Anderson were very appreciative of Trish and everyone else working with them constantly on it.

But it's interesting, the co currency and that and the usage, utilization of all these places. And what was interesting is Northport is growing so quickly and everything else and the numbers we all know, we're going have $250,000 blah, blah, blah. But on the other hand, right now, Haring Creek, one of our big problems is underutilization, where they have five sixty sixty two desks because they all go by desks, not used. And the same thing with Venice Middle School. And it's kind of like with all of this extreme growth and everything else that's going on, how can we have underutilized schools?

So it was kind of interesting what we've studied in those committees compared to this. We're getting there and see how we can work with the schools and whatever because we all have the needs. And the more we work together, the better off. But as you say, the schools will want them for a lot at the same times that we would want.

One thing just to clarify on the numbers as well. There's a lot of different funding that's built into these numbers already. Impact fees

Grant funding.

There's some things with grants. Like you'll see in there we have Legacy Trail, which is part of our planning system. We're waiting on grants for that. There's impact fees that are already in there with allocations. There's some of the things, even there's a recommendation about replacing of benches. We use that as an operational expense. It's already funded through our operational budget. So this is not additional monies from what Parks and Recreation is doing today. So it's just it's kind of all encompassing when we get

to these numbers. And it's also a spreadsheet. Sheet. So when the city has an actual spreadsheet and can move money around and update pricing, very I didn't say this, but I should say this and then I'd be happy to take Omi's question. Very planning level. GAI is a full service design firm. I have civil engineers who sit down the hall from me. Are on top of our company as a whole is on top of construction trends. We're bidding out projects and all of that. But there's no construction plans as part of this.

So these are estimates for planning level, how are we going to get to it. If in five years, that's when Italy Avenue gets bid out, it probably will be more expensive than that. We include inflation, but it probably Escalation is hard to tell, right? Yeah.

The other piece is there's opportunity. I was talking about Winchester Ranch building something. Something. Well, Well, if Winchester Ranch takes on that sports complex and they build that, that funding in here comes out of the money we spend because they're building it. Toledo Blade Village is another one.

They're looking at our input. And this type of master plan allows us to give very good concentrated input with research behind it instead of just Trish saying, yeah, I want two more fields out there. Go ahead and build me that. But when they do contribute that way, again, that comes out of that dollar money because they're providing it for us. But this is the oversight, the big picture to say, if we don't have anybody else do it, this is what we have to be prepared for to meet the needs.

Questions that I had about grant stacking, on the last slide it says careful selection of grants can result in one grant providing the matching funds requirement for another grant. Are grants being allocated by the city itself for us to or is that by the state? That's a great question. And grants so I'm going

to answer that by grants come from a lot of different sources. They can come from the federal government. They can come from the state government. They can come from water management districts. Independent foundations. Independent foundations. So just looking at this list right here to help you understand. Florida Communities Trust is state level. It's a public funded grant. It's out there. It was passed by legislation to help buy parkland in Florida. This is St. John's River Water Management District Cooperative Funding. So the state of Florida has, five or six water management districts. It's also a state agency.

So this is state money. Land and Water Conservation Fund is a grant that is from federal government money from the National Park Service, but it is given to the states. So the grant money comes from the state of Florida, even though it's federal funds. Section three nineteen non point solution grant, I don't know what that is, actually. This is not my project, so I can't tell where that one came from. Florida cultural facilities grant from the State of Florida, two Land and Water Conservation Fund Grants on this one. So again, federal funds to the state. Recreational trails grant program is for funding trails. And then the Urban and Community Forestry Grant, I believe that's a local grant. So lots of different sources.

One thing you can look at as well is in the back of the full master plan that you have as an attachment is a full strategic funding plan in the very back, which this is one example. But this breaks down all of the available grants and gives us a really great resource to be able to continue to go back to and see where and what we fit in to be able to do that.

So basically, the best thing that the Parks and Recreations master plan can do is try to outreach to as many grants as possible so that we can get, I guess, more acres of land for parks, right?

That would be helpful, yes. And Cindy has a grant writer to work with, too. So she, right? He.

Well, we have a man and a woman. But for parks, it's Mike Davies. And he takes care of if I say, hey, this is what I want you to go at, he gets in there. He forensically goes through it, says, do we qualify? What do we need to do to qualify? And then he does a lot of that writing for us. Now, the master plan gives us a roadmap to those grants, but we have to do that work to get there. They're not doing the work to say, here you go, I'm going to give you all these grants. These are just proposals. They're just, here is a roadmap you can

do to get that. Yep. And we actually because I've given this presentation five times now, I don't say the exact thing. It's unscripted every time. So thanks, Trish, for mentioning that there's a full matrix. The other thing is this grant stacking, we actually did this specifically plan for Italy Avenue Park and for

City Center City Center Center Great. I can't say it.

So there is a specific strategy for those two projects cause they're big projects. I got a

question, and maybe we're not supposed to ask this. You said you gave it individually to all the commissioners? What was the response? They were positive.

Collectively, they were positive. There were some questions. There were some clarifying things. But they were supportive. Good. Good.

All right. But on December 9, when I go to city commission and present it to them, I'm presenting it to all of them at once. So we'll see what that but if they've individually seen it, then

their reaction shouldn't be totally different.

They all have a hard copy, and they have seen the presentation with Sandy and I, and Kristen and Amy and their team to have any questions and clarifying

points. Excellent. So What what we could

is the process after it goes before the city commission?

So the process from now is tonight, I would hope that you all would endorse it as something that you believe is beneficial for us to move forward with. And you would make the recommendation to commission on your motion to approve the master plan as presented. That way, when they get it, they have your endorsement behind it. And any questions or things you want to be addressed, we can talk about.

So is it either a yay or a nay? Or is there a possibility that they go back and say, well, with improvements or change this or change that?

They've seen it. We're hoping that if there was suggestions, we did have one alteration from one commissioner that we added. That was the only additive that we had. We're hoping that they have enough time to understand it more, ask the questions prior to so that we won't get in that place, that these one on ones were where that should really have taken That way, it gives all of us the amount of time that we would need to refine and get the things in there that they want. We also had to clarify to them that when they endorse this, it doesn't mean they're committing $100,000,000 because all of those items come up every year at budget time.

And they have the right each year to say, no, we don't endorse this or this has to wait. And it doesn't change the plan. It just shifts the plan. But it still gives us that road map.

Got it. Thank you. And they understand that.

Master plan is a road map.

Yep. Yep. And hey, a hurricane can change that road map big time. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Ten

more days.

Absolutely. Excellent.

I think this is phenomenal. Thank you so very much, all of you

who have worked

on It's been so fun. This is always it gives me the chills. This is always the really And fun part of we hope that you all are living, breathing advocates for this, moving forward. And you all are appointed by your city commissioners. So talking to them and staying in front of them, we thank you all.

I hope as many of us as possible that can be there will be there on the night. What time is that meeting? Is it 06:40? It's a daytime meeting.

It's meeting. A Ten. If you can't be there, your public comment is just as valid. So, you know and

No

more questions?

I would just like to just commend everybody involved in this. It's a lot of work.

It was.

You know what, though? It was a ton of work for staff, too. So I want you all to understand how dedicated and professional you're so lucky to have We

know it. We know it.

Okay. Just with you Capra last year doing all that. Yeah.

Yeah. So I just your staff has getting to the end because Welland Park did fund part of this, and that money expires on December 31. So getting to the end, it has been staff has been on it. We would send them something to review. They had a really, really hard press to the end. So they're amazing. We

know that. We're very appreciative of them.

You. Kudos. Kudos.

Hey, is there anything else before I'll make a motion that we approve this? Any

I mean, this is really just a, as I said, masterful plan, no pun intended. But it's it it includes everything, statistics, a lot of ethical things, ways to gain finances for these suggestions. Because I'll tell you, some people just like to say make suggestions about how to improve it, but then don't go in detail on how you can get the funding to improve it. They just assume you can easily get the funding to improve things. So having that financial part is definitely really good, and I really and I just really think that this was a great plan. I mean, hey, we even got a shout out on it. Where was the photo? I even yeah, even know they took a photo of me. I'm scared now.

Fire away.

Okay. I then make a motion that we endorse the master plan for the city of Northport to go to the commission.

I'll second.

And make a recommendation for the commission to approve. I second.

All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Motion carries.

All right.

Thank you all so much. Thank you. And hopefully,

get to

see a lot of you all in the ninth. And you have beautiful and joyous Thanksgiving to everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Moving on, ladies and gentlemen. Discussion and possible action regarding and approving the amended twenty twenty six annual meeting schedule. So we're going to go to every other month.

Yeah. So that came up last month. And I think initially, it was just an oversight between two boards. That is how the other board, our ad hoc committee for the Veterans Park motioned to move to the every other month because they didn't have a lot of topic right now. It is open for discussion.

You guys are the ones who get to make that decision, though. With some of the concerns over participation in some of the citizens' items and illnesses and things like that, I'm at the will of whatever you would like to do with that. But I do want you to just know that it's whatever you choose. So if you want to do that and I believe there's also an amendment for the January date. The fifteenth. Yes. So we need to just be aware that the January date will need to move to January 15. And if you're happy with the every two months, that's fine. If you are not, we can open that back up.

I think one of the things that we had mentioned was that doing it every other month, but then also having the option of if something comes up, throwing

To do it a special meeting. Yeah. Always have the option of a special meeting.

I do not see an issue with that. I don't think it is. If something comes up, we have

As long as it's convenient for everybody, I don't really have a problem with it every month, every other month. And as we said, we can always convene if there's anything important to talk about. So I'm fine with it.

And so then we'll just need a motion to approve the January date to be changed to the fifteenth? I can't.

Somebody else wanted to make Okay, I'll make it then. Okay, you.

It's you. It's Laurie. I

make a motion to change the January meeting to 01/15/2026.

I will second that.

All in favor? Aye. Okay. And then we need to approve the meeting schedule for the year.

Okay. I'll move then that we go to every other month for our meetings, but we also have the opportunity to put on additional meetings if necessary.

I'll second.

Favor? No. Aye. Mr. Carries?

Alright. Updates. Oh, that's okay. Review and discuss recent and upcoming parts.

I feel so weird that I didn't talk all night tonight. Usually by now, I've talked out. But I had the ladies doing it, so it was great. So we have obviously hit the ground running. We had the groundbreaking today for Boca Chica Park. My park coming online. I'm so very excited. And I hope you can all make it there for the ribbon cutting. It's going to be sometime in February. The part will be done by then.

So I'll let you guys know before. With aquatics, we've had a record number of participations at the pumpkin fudge. We had over two seventy participants in the actual pumpkin patch portion, which equated to over 700 people on the pool deck that day with their parents and their families for it. We're in the current process of resurfacing the relaxed Ahatchee Lazy River at the aquatic center. It's kind of had problems from the day we opened it.

It was not a great surface. And we kind of got into an eleventh hour rush with opening the facility because it was delayed so long. And so we're getting that fixed now, which is really great. And that was actually funded out of savings from last year from other general fund departments. We kind of pooled and were able to do that. So it didn't really hit budgets too badly. In recreation, we hosted the trick or treat at City Center Front Green. We had 45 pumpkin trail partners. Those are businesses and local organizations that support and hand out candy at the same time. There were over 6,000 children that attended that event.

So over 8,000 pieces of candy went through the hands and it just keeps growing and growing and growing. We're really happy to see the way that that flows.

Especially with the way with transportation with price

I being was so worried that price was going to really affect us because just coming into this area is not so fun anymore. But it really didn't affect the participation this year. So that was good. Our adult basketball league started with 91 brand new players taking the courts this year. They're very happy to have the Morgan Center Gym back open.

And we had actually a waiting list of three teams as well. So that was a ten week program, and they're looking at us trying to do it twice a year now instead of just once a year. The Go Green with Parks program, as you heard a little bit about it today, has had 53 attendees learning about sustainable gardening practices, including composting methods, water conservation, food waste reduction, and planting of Florida native species. The ladies talked about that sustainability manager. That would be a huge asset for the entire programs that we offer, to have somebody who can tie in those things outside of our city to what we do inside the city with those programs.

So I'm really looking forward to the growth in that program. Our maintenance team has set up all of the fields utilizing our brand new robotic painter. This

is

a very exciting thing. This robotic painter was actually purchased as an efficiency because before it was taking so many man hours, it would take one person and his crew about three hours just to do one field. And the amount of paint was crazy. So with this robotic planer, basically, it's all done from their iPad. They put this little man in the middle of the screen. They put a field. They plug in what they're doing. They can say it's a 99 soccer field. And the guys can go off and keep doing cutting grass or doing what they're doing. And in fifteen minutes, with a quarter of the paint, the field's done.

So yeah. So it was a huge asset. I won't take the credit for it. Tom Brown, our assistant parks manager, was pushing me and pushing me. And I was like, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. And he was like, but Trish, but Trish. So I said, you come back with all the stats, I'll do my best. So we were able to find at the end of the year the money and the budget to do it. And we did it. And he's saving dollars now, especially when you add in the manpower. So that was a huge advance and they're very happy about that. We planted a tribute tree at the Garden Of 5 Census for a former employee that worked with us for many years that we lost this year. And we have that going on. It looks really nice in there.

We completed a cleanup of the park entrances and rules signs in many of the parks. And upcoming, we have the Poinsettia Parade and Festival on December 6. We now offer our three judges. Thank you. And we have the eighth annual Rock and Run and Roll, January 17.

It for January what

was that? When is that?

Seventeenth. Okay.

January 17?

January 17.

And that's the eighth annual?

That is the eighth annual rock, run, and roll.

Nice. And that's January 17?

Yes.

Alright. Review and discuss Parks and Rec Department agenda items for recent and upcoming City Commission meetings.

So as we said today, on December 9, we hope to see you all there with the adoption of the Parks and Recreation Master Plan. That day, we also have the approval of the Aquatic Examiner Service Agreement. That's where we have the Red Cross come in and they do unannounced audits of our lifeguards to make sure that we're meeting all of our policies, procedures. They come in. They do two assessments. Nobody knows they're there. They pay admission just like a regular person. They do assessments. And then at the end of it, they come in. They pull all of the documentation to make sure that everything is done the way that it was supposed to be done and that our staff are diligent in what they're doing.

On the eleventh, we have the presentation of the Trick or Treat People's Choice Award, which Parks and Recreation won this year by a resounding double the next one under us with our Toy Story display. So I'm very happy because we are dethroning PD. PD has won it for the last three consecutive years. And Deputy Chief Morales himself will have to hand me that trope.

Ah, that's beautiful. Humble pie.

Yeah. And then on the eleventh, we also have a presentation, which is probably going to be pushed out because I believe that Mr. Brown is going be on vacation. But we were looking he is now our sixth certified parks and recreation professional within our ranks. He just wrote his test and passed. So we have another CPR.

Very good.

All

right. Does anybody have any future agenda items?

I got some stuff. Okay? Alright. And they are, first of all, welcome, Don. Glad to have you aboard.

Good to be welcome. Thank you.

Okay. Okay. I just want to say the bathrooms at the Myakahatchee. That's kind of neat to see coming up. Now if we can jump up, we can get to them because they're up there.

We're waiting on the that was an environmental rationale. Because of the environmental sensitivity of the area, we had to go higher because the tanks for the restrooms.

That's what

I figured. But their ramps

are going in. Good. Well, they have to. I have a problem. Okay. D5, they want to come and talk to us because Kevin is is phenomenal. And and thank you so much for hiring a coordinator for DFI. And he's doing so many things, and he wants to expand it not just for the drug testing, but other stuff. And he wants to talk to us sometime. But I don't know if he can be here for December 18 because D5 is gonna have their Christmas party then. And and and they are planning on elaborate stuff. That's gonna be a really nice time and and a good thing for the kids because, you know, they'll realize it's more than just drug testing. It's a way of life and it's a good way of life. And so that'll be great. Okay.

I'll work with Kevin on getting us on an agenda.

Okay? Okay. Talk to the commission. Last time I was up there about when we have three absences and what happens and all the stuff and Paul is a perfect example of that, that they need to that's something they need to do. And also talked to the commission.

I've talked to several commissioners personally about the fact that more students because every single board has vacancies. And especially this board, we have students who want to be on, so we should be able to have more students on it, but that's, again, something they need to do. Another thing which I don't even want to bring up because I know this is going to be a problem in the future, but these e bikes are causing more and more problems. There have been, you know, on the Greenway, there's been a couple situations where people have reported to me that they've just about gotten mowed down, okay? And even in Myakahatchee Environmental Park, they're starting there.

And that's not just our city. I mean, they're becoming a very big problem. I mean, all of a sudden, everyone's and I can't even imagine how many are going to be getting e bikes for Christmas. A lot

of the teen court cases that are coming through are actually people with e bike incidents, like running away from the cops or recklessly driving in the middle of the night, especially near 41 or the highway. That's actually a problem I'm seeing now that's going on in team court. So I wanna say that.

Yeah. I know some people that are not doing the Green White Trail anymore because they're afraid of the e bikes, you know, because you got people there with the dogs and the little kids and then an e bike comes through. And usually, those people don't announce themselves. So that's going to get worse. And as I say, that's not just going to be a Northport. That's a problem. It's

going to be a state issue.

It is a state issue already. It's ordinance based, and that's the problem. There's a lot of leeway in the trail use and prohibiting of e bikes because they're not classed as motorized vehicles. So I know our community policing unit has definitely struggled with it. If you would like, I can reach out to the community policing unit to come and speak with us and see if there's anything we could do endorsement wise to help them out with that. And again, going to commission about that is an important piece.

Yeah, I think we need to because I think there's going to be more injuries. I hate to say it. There could be more deaths. I mean, there have been deaths since

I just saw a video today, Pinellas County. They were showing you can see the green light is already there. And then here goes the e bikes and multiple videos of it happening.

Yeah. It's Airlifted a youth out of Butler Park two weeks ago

On my way here over by the soccer fields, there was two kids. One had a light on his and the other one didn't. And of course, could see the one with the light, but the other one I there was cars that didn't see him. He was getting ready to cross the road.

I had it happen to be coming out into Publix.

Me too. I went to

turn left, and two of the kids cut diagonally across all in black clothes. Of course. So it was nighttime. And I didn't like, just out of the corner of my eye, caught this, and I I stopped, but they cut right in the middle of the road in front of me.

Same. Yeah. That, like, happened to me. I was at a what is it? Like, crosswalk. A It was green for me, and they had a stop sped right through

We're going

have to

move on

from another Carl Marquette.

Yeah. We're going have to move on from this.

So if you would like, I can get the community policing unit to come and talk to us about what steps

we can do for an enforcement. I think we need to. So we'll

just add that for a future agenda item. I

have one other future agenda item. When we had our joint meeting with the EAB, We saw them put it on where I'm supposed to speak in reference to the EAB to us and us to the EAB. It's going on next month with EAB where I'm going talk to them about us.

Let me look back. I think we did it, but you were out.

So I

think we've already approved that as a board.

But I'll go and check that one.

So just the EAB correspondence, and I'll check on it.

Fair enough. Okay, then. Any other future agenda items? Is there any other public comment? Then I call this meeting adjourned. It is 07:53. Thank you. That is the question.

That