City Commission Regular Meeting - workshop

Quiet work already in motion. Work continues even after you've gone. The way forward kept ready. Every step, every turn, prepared long before you arrive. When your day ends, others begin theirs.

Every hour, every act, quietly connected.

Most of us don't think about how the city works. I'm on in. Today is Monday, 05/04/2026. It's 10AM. We're in the City Chambers, and I called the city commission workshop meeting to order.

Commissioners present are commissioner Duval, commissioner Stokes, mayor Emeridge, vice mayor Langdon, and commissioner Petro. There is a quorum present for this meeting. Also present are city manager Pledger, city attorney for Weino, city clerk Faust, board specialist lender, is that chief Garrison in the back, and chief Titus? I'm requesting that all commissioners, public participants, and staff maintain order and decorum throughout this meeting. City commission policy 2021 dash o three states that attendees shall refrain from engaging in personal attacks and boisterous, immaterial, inflammatory, obscene, profane, or disorderly conduct.

Thank you. I'm gonna call on Elaine Allen Emerich. Would you lead us in the pledge this morning? Thank you. City clerk, public comment.

Tim Doyle, followed by Jason Margarita.

I bought my 2¢ today. I think you're still allowed to give 2¢. So I'm gonna start out today by talking about the Sarasota County and how they rip people off. They're bigger shysters than, I don't know, anybody in the world right now. So I had to go to motor vehicles and register my car.

They're not giving out change. They are keeping your change. It is policy of the county to steal from the American people, to steal from the citizens of Northport, to steal from the citizens of the whole county. Now, everybody has to go to motor vehicles, pay your taxes, pay your car stuff. So if they don't have pennies to give back to people, it doesn't give them the right to steal yours.

I say we should succeed from Sarasota County. I say we should start our own county and keep all that tax revenue for us or join DeSoto County or Charlotte County. This is the second time I've gone to the tax collector where they tried to defraud me and steal from me. And I believe the vice mayor tried to come console me last time when I brought it up in this room, which I appreciate. She was being nice. The point is there is no law that allows that Morgan dude to steal people's money. They have accounts. They have everybody's name, right? So if you can't give me my $02 then you credit my account for next time I go in there. You credit my tax bill, but you cannot steal.

I am asking the police department to investigate this office right here for stealing from the public. I have called senator Rick Scott. I have called DeSantis. Mister DeSantis, I would like the state police to investigate that building in Sarasota off of Park Road from stealing from the American public, and there is no law that allows any of you to create taxes on your own or because, oh, I can't give you a penny, so I get to keep your money. There is nothing under the law that allows this.

This is called a penny tax now. I've talked about in this room. I brought up solutions to this problem, but no solutions have come anywhere, not from Rick Scott, not from DeSantis. No one's doing anything about this. Every time you walk in the store, someone's getting stolen from.

Every time you go to the Sarasota County tax collector, they try to tell you you can't pay your bill, come back the next day and charge you more money. They keep your change, and they say, that's perfectly legal. I don't think it's legal. And, again, I'm calling on the state police, and I am calling on the local police to have their detectives, you know, to spend 54% of your time looking upon wearing a seat belt. Maybe we should see and go after people who are stealing from the people, And it's Morgan and the city and I mean, not the city, the county government, because they are stealing from the taxpayers of this town. This is another fee. It's another fee.

Thank you.

Joseph Majorino, 2747 Rebel Lane. Looking back and watching everything that happened here over the years, the city manager does have a tough job. Maybe that's why he cost so much and it was so hard to find one because you had to find somebody who was far enough left to go and raise the taxes to pay for things. The problem is you keep spending and you keep spending. The solution to that is fees on trash department, on road and drain.

Everything gets a franchise fee now, which is paid into the budget because we can't stop spending. We want police stations. We want this. We want that. Well, the wants, the police station and the needs of the police station and the wants, the wants got to go. Now what we're doing is we're going to put apartment buildings all over the place Because why? Section eight. Here we go. The government's going to pay. It's his idea. The city man this is all him. He'll violate laws. He has. He violates state laws. The employees violate state laws. He told me he's not in charge of permitting. He's not in charge of the employees. That's his job. I don't know. I've never seen anything like this.

It's a joke. And the three rhinos up there like to just agree because and again, we've, what, doubled in salary, 32 to 34 to 64 since you've been there. So give each other raises. Give each other pats on the back. How about saving the tax money? Debbie McDowell had it right. Oh, we're not raising the taxes.

We're not

going to raise the mill rate. We charge more on the water. We charge more on the electric. Yeah, you hit them when they're not, then illegal got to hook up the water lines, doubling the price. Then people up there saying, well, we'll give it to you half price. Oh, you mean the regular price that it was? It's ridiculous. And you think that nobody's watching and you think that the residents are stupid, they see this. I'm gonna see you guys out. You're gone. I'm telling you. Whatever it takes, whatever amount of money, and he's gone because he doesn't wanna change his stripes. He just wants to do whatever he's gonna do. And when it doesn't work, he tries to have you physically removed from the building. He he tries to trespass you from the building.

He does anything and everything. He stares at the wall. He tries to be I really don't care. I'm not the one who's gonna get angry. I'm not the one who's gonna get physical with anybody. I'm just gonna point out what everybody else is thinking, what they're afraid to say. There's a lot of people who won't say something because they're worried about retribution. He can't do anything to me. There's no retribution. He can't make me lose my job. He can't make my wife lose her job. She owns her own business And high profile people in the area. So guess what? You picked the wrong person this time, mister city manager. You really did.

You picked somebody who will now come back and go after you and not stop because you haven't yet apologized or made anything right. Not I apologize emptiness and then have your security

Thank you. Sit there.

That's all there.

Thank you. Moving on to presentations. Item twenty six dash zero six two six. Presentation regarding the twenty twenty six hurricane season and the city's preparedness efforts. City manager, this is your item, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going

to turn

it over to our emergency manager, Ms. Stacy Gill,

the CEO,

for her presentation.

Thank you so much, sir, and thank you, Commission, for your time today. This is our annual presentation regarding our upcoming hurricane season as well as preparedness efforts that we've been making throughout the year based off of lessons learned, what we learned from last season and previous seasons. So I appreciate your time and allowing us to get this information out to the public as well. I wanna start off with talking about last hurricane season. While we didn't have impacts here in the state of Florida, it was still a very significant season.

13 named storms, five of those storms were hurricanes, and out of those five, four of them were major hurricanes, so category three or higher. This is tied for or this in second place for the most major hurricanes in a single year, and hurricane Melissa was tied for the strongest ever hurricane to make landfall. And that made landfall in Jamaica, isn't too far from us. So, we were very blessed last year to not have had an impact. We just don't want people to become complacent because we didn't get hit last year. It was still a very busy, almost record breaking season for the Atlantic Basin.

Good morning. AJ Brown, emergency management planning coordinator. So now for the current predictions of a hurricane season. So according to Colorado State University, they are predicting 13 named storms, six hurricanes, two major hurricanes. So this is just one under the average for the season. So we just wanna emphasize that even though this is slightly below average, right, it only takes one storm. Alright? And so we're always prepared.

So we have made several improvements over the past year that I wanna let you know about. So we have acquired WebEOC, which is incident management software. The county also has this program and so does the state. It's what we use to do our resource requesting throughout the year or throughout the response and recovery phase of an emergency. So when we need something because the city doesn't have it, we ask the county for it.

Now that we have the same software, we're working on getting them to talk to each other. So as soon as the EOC approves a resource, the county has it. Whereas in the past, we'd we'd approve it, and then we'd have to copy and paste everything over into another form for the county. So it just saves some time. It also gives us visibility of the status of our resource request. So in the past, we'd ask the county for something. They'd say, okay. Got it. And then we have no idea where that resource is and when it's going to arrive. So with these updates, we'll now have more visibility of of the resource needs, after we order those.

We've updated our plans and our policies. So we've updated our SOGs for those positions that sit in the emergency operations center so they have better guidelines for where they're going to be sitting. And then we also have updated our EOC activation plan, so when the EOC is gonna be activated, what thresholds, so that we have a better guideline for that. We've coordinated with finance to obtain feeding contracts. So now we'll have emergency feeding, that is a federalized contract so FEMA can reimburse for those costs if we have a disaster declaration.

So when our EOC responders, public works, utilities, PD fire, all of us are working after disaster, and we need to eat. So this will allow us to have a feeding plan for them. And then we worked with IT to automate our EROL tier assignments. So last year, we had rolled out the emergency roll program or e roll program. So each city employee is now assigned.

They're either a first responder, an EOC responder, they're department essential, or their at home on call waiting to be called in to a role after the storm. So now it's automated when we onboard a new employee. Their supervisor gets notified that they have a new employee that now needs to be assigned to a tier. So it just automates that process, makes it a lot easier for us to know who's available to help after a storm. We've also been working with HR to talk at onboarding, to discuss with employees what our expectations of them are during a storm as city employees, and also the importance of family preparedness.

They can't give their 100% to the city if their families aren't first prepared because that's really the number one priority for them. So making sure that they have those plans in place for their family as well so that they can come fulfill their jobs with the city. And then the most recent thing is we up uploaded our public infrastructure to crisis track. So that is what we use to track our damage assessment data. So damages to public buildings, to our water control structures, to our lift stations, those can now all be tracked in Crisis Track.

We did an exercise last week on Thursday with utilities, public works, and development services, as well as the planning section and finance section of the emergency operation center to test this out. It went really well. We've got some lessons learned from that. So now we can make some more improvements before hurricane season. So we're ready to go there.

So current preparations. So in two weeks, we're gonna be holding our EOC section briefings. And so we have staff from a variety of departments who serve in roles in our CEOC during activation, and some of that staff will be even new to those positions. So we're gonna be reviewing again the outlook for the season, what they can do to prepare as staff members, and then what their roles and responsibilities are gonna be when they serve in the EOC during an activation. So we we we will be reviewing all of those sections with them.

Additionally, later this month, we're gonna have a communications exercise. So we're working with our communications department, again, for a hurricane exercise, and we are looking at coordination between our call center, our joint information center, and our PIOs. So we'll be, again, just reviewing preparedness and response, and we're gonna be throwing some scenarios their way to see how they handle those situations. And then public outreach, again, we're coming off of a a really great successful hurricane expo. So, again, we'll be meeting with different community organizations and groups, again, just to discuss this hurricane season, what our citizens can do to prepare, what the city's doing to prepare, what response looks like from the city, how they can help, and then, again, some recovery resources if a storm occurs.

Right? We also have agreements with STC and FPL in progress, and this is really important to have those locations in the city where our resources can come in and stage, right, to provide that local response and recovery. So we're working on that. And then, again, streamlining resource request processes. We're doing this with that WebEOC. So we're really looking forward to that coordination again with the county and the states, and we're really encouraged by this this process improvement. So that's what we have current preparations.

Now I wanna talk a little bit about the residents' roles, right, because they're really the first first responders. They see everything and report it back to us so that we can send our first responders out there. So it's really important that the residents all have family plans, have plans for sheltering in place as well as for evacuations. As we know, last minute shifts and traps can happen. So if you're planning on sheltering in place and all of a sudden you want to evacuate, you wanna make sure you have that plan ready to go.

Knowing your evacuation level is extremely important. It is different from flood zones, so I just wanna remind the public that flood zones and evacuation levels are different. You can be in a flood zone and not be evacuated and vice versa. So just make sure you know those evacuation levels. And then sign up for our alerts at northportofl.gov/alerts.

It's the alert Sarasota program. That is where those real time lifesaving updates will come through, where when our shelters are opening, when evacuations are being called, what levels are being evacuated, when our multi agency resource centers are opening, when our points of distribution are available. All of that will come through those alerts, so please sign up for those. And then prepare your homes. I know we have a lot of new residents here in the city who maybe have never been through a storm, don't know how long it takes to prepare your home.

So have a list, know what you need to do to prepare, ask your neighbors for help if you need to. Also, help your neighbors prepare their homes if they need it, just and make sure that you're really fulfilling your roles at home so that we're able to be more resilient as a community. And this presentation wouldn't be complete without a quick EOC project update. I just wanted to show you guys this wonderful timeline of how the project is progressing. You guys have seen the fence.

We've cleared the land, got some filter dropped off. So right now, we're still in the site clear and prep phase. We're gonna be slab on grade in August, topping out in October. We'll have a roof and be all dry, through November, and then, in February is when the power and HVAC come in. And then in April, we'll be doing all of the last minute preparations to be able to occupy the building to hopefully be in by July 2027 for our EOC. And I wanna thank you guys again for your support for this project. We're really looking forward to it. And that is all that we have. Do you guys have any questions for us? Happy to help.

Yeah. I I have a question. Back in the day when I was employed with the city, the city offered training to all of the staff members. Mhmm. I can't remember what the training was called, but there was multiple levels for going out there working working situations. Is that still being done now?

So we do, the FEMA classes, the 100, 200, 700, 800 classes, we teach those.

Yeah. Because I I went all the way. I did all of them, so I was certified in all of them. And it and it's good training. It really is.

Yeah. So that is actually a requirement through FEMA that we continue to do those. Currently, with the shutdown, FEMA doesn't have access to those tests right now. But usually, during normal time, we're we're doing each class once a month for everybody to take. It's also an, independent study class, so people do take those on their own, but we do offer them in person once a month.

Yeah. And we also had other trainings too that was like on-site training to where you went out and you had a situation and you if you were the first one there, you know, you looked at the building, this, that, and the other. And it was good hands on training, and it was good for especially public works employees because, you know, I know y'all are limited. So we send our workforce out there and to get the proper, you know, feedback was always excellent.

Yeah. And that was part of what we did last week with our exercise was public works went out and did damage assessments and came back with some great information for us. Yeah. That was

great. I'm glad that y'all are still doing that.

Thank you. Yep. Mhmm.

Commissioner Stokes.

Yeah. Thanks for the presentation. So this is going through this season and pretty much hunkering down the same way we did using much easier. Yeah. Alright.

With the WebEOC software, like, has what conversation, if any, has gone on with the county as far as if we get hit in South County, Charlotte County, and us and they don't, are they gonna open? Are they gonna operate? Are their resources gonna be available to us? I mean, it's one thing to, you know, we got still got another year or so to be self sustaining, but it still doesn't mean that we're not gonna interact with them. Ian was the perfect example of, you know, getting left high and dry and and it's costing us a whole lot of money now to stand on our own two feet, but what are they gonna be doing for us if anything?

Yes. So we have had those conversation. That's a great question. So the county, if we're the only municipality impacted, they will send their people down to us and embed with us here to allow us even more streamlined, access to their resources.

Which I guess we didn't get any in.

We have no. No. That was an interesting situation. They've had they've both of both us and the county have had a lot of changes since then, a lot conversations, the relationships are much stronger now.

The other question I had is we have over 70 HOAs. What is going to be our policy with regard to debris removal for these private communities? Are they going to be required to go ahead and contract on their own? Are we going to take care of those non HOA that do not have the resources available on their own first and then move to them? Like, what kinda you know, what's our plan and how have we communicated to these 70 HOAs?

I believe just believe director Spiek has already been on top of that in communicating with the HOAs, but I'll let him speak to that.

Thanks, Chuck. Thank you.

Chuck Spiek, public works director. So we've sent notices out to all the HOAs on our list in the city to explain to them that, one, we don't pick up routinely in private communities. It would have to be a declared emergency or a public threat for us to go in and do that. We recommended that they they look into a debris management company of their own to handle those services, because there's no guarantee that we can get reimbursed for that. So those letters have been sent out along with with with that the information on how to get registered. So if they are if we do declare that emergency and we get the green light to go into those neighborhoods, we have all the paperwork in place to do that.

Are we gonna we gonna prioritize areas of the city that do not have that capability first and then move to the HOAs? Because I remember that was an issue. We had a few communities that complained about, you know, when are gonna get to us? When are you gonna get to us? And the response was, we got neighborhoods throughout our city that don't have anywhere else to turn. Your community has the resources to be able to go out and contract contract or should have been able to prepare better than

Yes, sir. So we'll do a push for emergency services. We'll push it clear those main roads to allow emergency services to get in and respond. And I think what we had that that question last time was once the debris was stacked in the right of way, when are you gonna come get it kind of a question. Yes. They will if it's declared emergency and we get the green light to go in and Centimeters tells us to go in, we will go in there. That does not prioritize those neighborhoods. We will work through the the city owned streets first, and then we move into the private owned areas.

Alright. Thanks. Thank you. And the only other question I have, and it's semi budget related, but it's in the event we get in, I mean, as a Board, should we not have some discussion about how this Board wishes staff to handle the utilization of reserves to address debris removal and other things. I mean, Ian was an example of I mean, an enormous amount of resources were devoted to debris removal.

We were probably the quickest on the spot. We did a great job unlike most of our neighbors down in this area who for months and even years had mountains of debris, but we exhausted our reserves. God forbid, we had been clobbered a second time. We would have been in a real bad fix. Is there any staff policy procedure idea that they wish this body to think about?

Because, you know, I'm concerned about the same thing happening again and and us going ahead and overextending our reserve resources. So that is a discussion I think this body should have and decide how far or at least what process might be in place for us to review how much money we are going to devote to do this.

And with Hurricane Ian, FEMA reimbursed at a very high percentage. They only, by policy, reimburse, I believe, by 50% normally that they have to. We got up to 90%. I think for the first for the first amount of time, it's a 100%, then they went down to 90. So we got a lot of that money back.

That might not be the case moving forward. They might only reimburse us at 50%. So that's something else that I think we need to that we are thinking about, with as as FEMA, with all of these unknowns, how are we gonna how are we preparing ourselves to better be positioned moving forward? And we're following that with Val with the grants team. Pima actually has a meeting this week that's public that we'll be attending, to get some updates of what's going on with Pima.

Alright. That's all I have, mayor.

Vice mayor.

Yeah. Thank you, mayor. Also a web EOC question. Now that we have software that enables us to electronically connect with the EOC in Sarasota County, will that preclude our sending a person to sit with them, or will we still send a representative of the city to sit within Sarasota County's EOC?

We will still send a representative.

Okay. Mhmm. Do we pay refresh my memory. Do we pay overtime to city employees when they are activated to provide emergency response? I can't recall.

Yes. For certain for certain emergencies with city manager approval.

That's at the discretion? Of the city manager? Okay. One more question. Last year, FDOT's Metropolitan Planning Organization denied the city's request to do a feasibility study for extending Toledo Blade to Clark Road, or I think it's Route 72, which would have provided an evacuation route for residents of the city to get into the middle of the state.

We all know that during an emergency, seventy five and forty one are impassable pretty much impassable. In our planning, are we working on identifying slash improving additional evacuation routes for residents of Northport? And here comes mister Speaks.

Yeah. I believe he was, very instrumental in that road extension project. So

And what are our options? So if, MPO, you know, they denied that request, Do do we have an option to go it alone? What's your update on that?

So, Petz Peak, public works director. We're I don't know if it's by design, but here we are. We're we're boxed in Northport to to the Northeast. The the North and the West, we're we're kinda boxed in. So we've got access south and and to the east.

I don't I have seen no movement, and and I've tried a few times both going west and going north, and and it's been shot down every time. Because of the sensitive lands on both of those sides, I don't know that there's an appetite because we don't own that's not within the city. We don't own that property. So our options are are pretty much extremely limited at this time. I know that the county does not wanna hear about those options.

I was told that pretty clearly. And they're, you know, they're the ones that are have more control of that property than we do. So the best thing we can do is try to make our connections within the city to provide some some extra pathways out because what we've seen before, sometimes our neighborhoods can be isolated through road failures. Price Boulevard being rebuilt with the hardened crossings should help, and then our neighborhood crossings that we're working on now should help connect and provide some east to west connectivity to provide some other you know, for our main routes, Sumter and Toledo, to get to that south and and to the to the East side of the city. But going those other two directions, I'm all of my options are pretty much shut down at this point.

Thinking long term, would the new interchange at Yorkshire provide a better alternative? Is is there less need to progress across conservation area in that location?

That's surely gonna help. Right? The the the interchange out there will help get people access to 75. It will also alleviate some of that pressure on Kings Highway, which will give another route for our people that are on that other end of town.

Any any option to connect to 70 or 72

Yep. In area? All of that area to the north is is all sensitive lands. I I'm pretty much hands off on that that property for now unless something drastic changes.

Thank you. One last question. When we do approve overtime payment for city employees who are responding, to an emergency, are those reimbursable by FEMA?

Yes. Okay. Thank If we're under a declaration.

Okay. That's it for me.

Alright. But I just wanted to address commissioner Stokes concerns and city manager. We had discussed prior to about carving out some of our reserve funding to put into an emergency declared bucket. And I believe we were gonna be discussing that again at budget time. Is that still the case?

It can be, but I remember talking about it. I don't remember what exactly the amount was that we discussed about it. But, yes, we can definitely bring that.

Yeah. Because we have, like, 52 in reserves, and we had to keep. We're keeping we have to keep 10, I believe, but we're keeping 20%.

That is correct.

And we were looking at I know the discussion was we were gonna put possibly half into an emergency declared emergency bucket. And then if that ran out because we wanted to have other reserves still available in case a second storm came Mhmm. We had the discussion on possibly using city properties to go ahead and stockpile stuff until we could get rid of it. So, yeah, if we could regenerate that conversation according to commissioner Stokes so we can have that conversation again. I I thought it was gonna come up in budget, but it we didn't declare that for sure. Sometime, can we have a discussion on that, sir?

Yes, sir. Thank you.

I see nothing else. Thank you all very much. We always appreciate the update and it looks like we are prepared and I can't wait for the building to get open to where we're a full fledged prepared community. So looking very forward to that. Thank you all.

We are too. Thank you so much.

Thank you. City clerk.

This is

public comment on this, right?

This is Yes.

General.

No.

It's It's on this topic.

You've got another one after this.

I got my $02 right here. I love this topic, and I hate this topic. I love this topic because of what you're doing about it. I hate when it happens. Okay. I will tell you that, I will criticize anything I don't like around here. You guys know that. The one thing I can honestly stand up here and say, the hurricanes I've been through and the job that the first responders and everybody who donated the time was amazing. So I have nothing to say up here to criticize any of that. You brought up overtime.

My better half is an essential worker and had to go to the, shelters. Okay? Not in this town. They pay double time. I have no problem with paying double time if they're gonna be away from their families for seventy two hours. It was also offered that family members could go with them and stay at the shelter. So if you you set up shelters, any of the family members should be able to go. And again, I think the cleanup and I can only speak for my little area. I lost power for, what, nine, ten days. And we cleaned up the street, meaning the neighbors went out.

They just picked up, threw it on the side of the road. And my neighborhood didn't need people like that per se to come in the first or two days. You know what I mean? You should go the other part of town that was flooded and you're trying to get people out by boats. That's where they should be. So please don't get wound up if there's some trees on the side of the road because that's really not what's important, especially for the first two weeks or something. You know what I mean? So that shouldn't matter. Okay? But again, they've done an outstanding job.

I didn't realize until they start speaking that you wanted to move the road to 72. I am 1000000% in favor of that. There's a new EPA. So the EPA isn't doing this stupid stuff through wetlands like before, and you can build roads. And I'm going to tell you why they don't want you to have a road to 72 or 70. That's DeSoto County, right? Arcadia. That means we could switch counties. You have a direct line. That's why they won't let you put in the road.

The jails over there, last time I drove by it, it was the crept. I don't know if they did anything to it. Part of the problem with the police station is they have to drive all the way to Sarasota, the county jail. If we joined to Sarasota County, we could fix some of our roads, get access to the interior, the state because we'd be part of that county. All you have to do is take that land like you're trying to take the land someplace else in town. Just claim the land and build the road. The APA will let you do it. Thank you. But they did a great job during the hurricane. No complaints whatsoever.

Thank you, sir.

Is that it?

There was

a comment.

Okay. And now we're moving on to general public comment.

Here's my 2¢. Morgan should be arrested. Morgan is a thief. Sarasota County tax collector is stealing from every tax payer in this city who pays in cash. They are not crediting the bill.

I had three sheriff officers come because they were called by the rent a cop because I was walking, not talking to anybody, walking around because they still have these COVID laws where you have to have an appointment. You have to do this. You can't even come here because you have to have an appointment. These are all COVID laws. None of this stuff existed before COVID, but they're still enforcing it. So I don't wanna sit next to 20 people, so I kept my six feet difference from everybody. The running cop called the sheriff department because I was just walking around. Didn't have a conversation with anybody. Didn't yell at anybody. You see me all the time sit here.

I know how to keep my mouth shut, especially when I'm mad. I've had, what, 30,000, 40,000 people work for me. They knew if I was quiet, they screwed up. When I get excited, I'm just excited. You guys think I'm yelling. It's not yelling. That's me. When I'm really mad, I don't say a word because I know better. So we gotta do something about this penny thing. All these businesses in town are ripping people off, and it's the corporate businesses. I'm gonna say that again because I can go to mom and pop places, they have pennies. I go to the corporations, they don't. And you know why they don't? Is I ran a business. I ran a penny business.

The business I ran made, what, dollars $0.02 to $05 per dollar coming in. So they know if they get an extra $04 every time someone walks in the building with a couple thousand transactions, that adds up three sixty five days a year. Do the math. Rick Scott has destroyed this country by getting rid of the penny. Did the deficit go down? No. They took the money from this penny to spend on the bombs for blowing up the rest of the world because they couldn't pass a budget. So they reorganized the money. They took more money from this department and put it over here for the wars. That's what they did.

It's BS. And DeSantis, you want to be president, DeSantis, you've got to do something about the Sarasota tax collector because you will not get my vote. None of you guys will get my vote if nothing's done on this. And the other problem with all this, they put up their name, Morgan, the Sarasota tax collector. The sheriff puts his name on everything with my name. So why am I paying to promote these people? That's a waste of taxpayer money. And where is this money going? In his pocket?

Thank you. Alright. It's 10:39, and I adjourn this meeting.

Maintained roads. We call when there's an emergency. We assume someone's keeping it all running, and they are. Northport University gives residents