Parks & Recreation Advisory Board - Regular Meeting

All right. We're all here. So let's go ahead and call this meeting of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board to order. Roll call. Paul Jackman, chair.

Greg Morgan.

Lori Pyle. Donald Chavis.

Gil Stevens.

Gavin Gray. Omie Patel. Ed Christopher, staff liaison. Does everybody stand for the pledge? Do we currently have any public comments?

Anybody get a look at last month's minutes? I need an approval for the minutes.

I can make a

motion to approve the minutes from last month.

I'll second it.

All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Motion carries. New business. Review and discuss recent and upcoming park and recreation events.

Well, before I get to the list that is provided to you guys, I wanna talk about the DeFi Christmas party tonight. Great. It was a really great turnout and had a lot of donations. Jet's Pizza, honorable mention, sent more pizza than anybody could ever eat. Were 70 boxes he sent over for them.

That's awesome. So it was very cool.

That's great. A lot of giveaways, and the kids seemed to have a lot of fun while we were over there. Everybody got something. Yep. So that was nice.

Two left. That's quite a turnout. Seven to eight. Two boxes left. Wow.

Now, yeah, that's good. Do you know how many people came if you

had I don't right yet. I'll wait because I was over there at the beginning of it, and then I had to get back here. But we will find out. So that was a really nice turnout. And with aquatics department, we have Warm Springs continuing with their grounds refresh project. They just planted a butterfly garden with native plants, and that was all done by our group. So it's very nice. It's looking really good out there. The North Portaponic Center started a refresh of their personalized swimming lessons, which are one on one swimming lessons, and had 16 participants, participants,

which

which is nice because that kind of fades off when we get real busy in the summer. We can't do that when the water park is open. In recreation, they hosted the community yard sale on Newcomer Day, and there was over 1,000 attendants to that this time. Yeah. They collaborated with social services and hosted some budgeting workshops for their November Teen Talk program. So that's going on. And as you all know, we just had a beautiful parade. And thank you for those of you who are there to assist with it.

That was so fun to judge.

Awesome. There was a lot of good floats. And, yeah, was a lot of work, but it's definitely worth it when we get to the end. In parks maintenance, we installed a border around the Dallas white sand volleyball courts to try to give us a bit better of a containment of the sand. We tend to lose a lot of sand. It spreads, so it looks really good out there. And the field is well underway. You can see that it's been looking really good. The hard part about that one is it might be a little delayed because the musco laying that's needed for the additional soccer field compared to what the softball field had, the lead time on that is about eighteen weeks for those new poles to come in. So we're waiting on that.

They also had a renovation of the front sign at the Garden Of 5 Senses. So that looks really good. It's it was kinda getting a little old, and, you know, we have a new guy out there, and he refreshed it all up, and it looks really nice now. We held our Boca Chica groundbreaking, and it is coming along very well. Boca Chica is waiting they're awaiting their arrival right now at the playground equipment. They've got all the the pre bed laid for the trail. And next step is they're gonna start paving that Flexi Pave Trail, and then the playground will go in. It's going to be a quick park. That park is expected to be open. I believe it's late March.

Wow. That's great. There was a bunch of comment. I forget what Facebook site it was on. It was one of the news, so called news sites. And they were discussing it. They were discussing the fact of there's not a lot of parks that we've discussed so many times over, but not enough parks on that side of town. People were saying I said, it's hard. Not saying that I was on this board, but letting people know that it's difficult to get the property. Costs money. Everybody else thinks.

The good part about that is the master plan was approved on December 9. And with that comes the CIP, which has a very nice plan of staging a year of acquisition with a year of growth, a year of acquisition. It empowers us to use our park impact fees in a timely manner before they end up being requested to be returned to developers. It gives the developers who are looking to build here also guidelines because I had, in the plan, built those standards for parks. Now when a developer says, I'm going to put a community park in here, I have a plan to say, well, that's what it has to look like.

Where before, they were like, my idea of a park and maybe Gavin's idea of a park could be very different things. So that's really nice that we have that and we can continue to build on that. And right now, we have two big areas in development. The additional 30,000 acre parcel on River Road for Welland Park, that bottom end, that's called Winchester Ranch Development, and it's going to have needs for absolutely more parks and things in there. So with the master plan including Loveland Park, it's been a really good piece because it gives us that teeth behind telling them what we need them to have for public access, not just what a gated community gets.

The other developer that we're working with currently on Parkland is the Toledo it was called Toledo Villages at one time. It was called Star Farms at one time. It is on the North Side Of 75. So it would be Northeast where they're looking at developing another one in there. So it's nice because we can kinda use them to get some community park access in those areas, and we don't have to buy it. But now we have standards that they have to follow. So that's

good. Sounds good?

Yeah. In administration, again, after Boca Chica, we had a number of our staff, our administrative staff, presented educational topics for the FRPA Southwest Educational Center. I believe there were six of us presented for that. So it's become something pretty standard that Northport gets called upon when FRPA are having these education sessions, FRPA being the Florida Recreation and Parks Association, that they're calling Northport to say, hey, can Devon come out and talk? Or Trish, can you come out and talk on these topics?

So that's been nice. And then we have Swim with Santa coming this Saturday, and that'll be fun. We have the Rock, Run, and Roll on January 17, all of which are in the new playbook, which I just gave you hot off the presses. It is being reprinted because the printer has two errors in there that I found today and I wasn't happy about, but that's okay. So if you see errors, just know Trish has it.

And then we have a movie on the green for January 30. Coming up on the commission agenda items will be a presentation to our assistant parks and grounds manager, Tom Brown, who just achieved his certified parks and recreation professional certification, making now our department we have six of them and two certified parks and recreation executive positions, which is really nice to have, especially with CAPRA. The more of us that are certified, the better it is for CAPRA. And that is it for me.

Well, you got both of our new business ones done there. Yeah. Does anybody have anything they would like to add?

Yes, ma'am. Sure. It's not it I don't think it pertains to parks and recs, but just, like, maybe an exciting update. The Boys and Girls Club for Jean and Matthews will hopefully open up in the 2026. I would love to provide further additional information when the time comes, and I hope to see you guys there during the opening.

I think it's something that we should go to for a new chapter for Northport. I know we've had this club in the past, but I'm going to take initiative and lead a few of their youth programs and hopefully get Northport High School, Wellington Welling or Heron Creek Middle School and all of the youth members into community service. So that's a milestone for the youth from my end.

Very good.

I had a question. So the commission turned down voted down the purchase of the property on '41. Is

there

any way that we, as a board, can appeal that?

As a board, we can request that the commission we can recommend as a recommendation from us that they relook at it, but we can only make that recommendation.

What does

that entail? So first of all, we want to put it on a new business for the next meeting to call it out as an item to discuss, which would then have everybody be able to be prepared, look at the property, look at the past minutes because I would attach them all to that so everybody in here could see what the conversation was, what was put forward. And then we would open that up as an item for possible action. And then at the end of that, you would make a motion to say we would recommend that the commission reopen the opportunity to purchase this land. And we just submit it with our monthly memo the same way as a motion to go forward with that. So

we would like to have that put on.

Okay. So when we get to future agenda items, we'll Oh, yeah. We haven't really gotten

there yet. That's true. Anybody else? All right then. Future agenda items.

Well Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the one thing we were going to talk about, we said it last time, is bikes, some of the bikes in the Oh, yeah, the e bikes. Yeah. I tell you what. It was on the TV today. Bayshore is having the same situation up there with the bikes and some of these powered bikes and the walkers and the runners. So it's not just us, that's for sure. But the problems are around here. We've all seen it. We've almost hit somebody. And unfortunately, accidents are going to happen.

So my recommendation with that was that we reach out to PD traffic, and we ask them to come in and talk to us about the existing laws and what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to I

think there's going to be a lot of these bikes as Christmas presents here. There's going to be a lot of them right after Christmas. I got another thing. The Dallas White, the boat ramp. What's going on with that?

So the Dallas White boat ramp was damaged during Ian with the the under support, basically, underpinning of it letting go. Because it's in a waterway, it we had to have engineers come out. So we've just received back a quote. There 's two different quotes that came in. One is for a repair, one is for a replacement, and one is for removing the ramp and not having it as a boat access. So that's gonna go to commission because I don't have funding for it. They will make a decision. I have one more question.

Being that we just finished the parade, how is the that's going to be going in right around City Hall, how is it going to affect, like, next year, the parade and parking? And is there any plan to move it?

The new EOC? Yeah. So where you see Station 81 currently? Yeah. Where it's gonna that Station 81, the EOC is right here. It is gonna be built in an area that will not affect the actual freight. If anything, we might have a little more hardscape in that area, but it it parade route at all.

Yeah. Was there ever any thought of starting the parade at the high school, middle school, Morgan Center, and going down that way, where there's more staging area?

History, it used to go

It was Dallas White. Dallas White. Saw a Dallas White. It was on Appomattox, where we had them going down, and it went down Northport Boulevard and into Dallas White. And in fact, before then, the original of the original started over and went around Phase one and Phase two at Holiday Park, which would not be the place anymore.

I remember in high school doing it, and we actually went across 41.

Oh, yeah.

They're at Northport Boulevard? Yeah, absolutely.

I'm the one that got DOT to give the permission, and that was a pain in the

Charlotte High School actually came up in March. The ROTC program marched in it.

So I tried to get Publix to Publix, Sumter to Toledo Blade, because it would have just been a great long straight stretch. The problem is on Sumter, we have the ability to shut down one whole side without affecting traffic moving both ways because we have that whole other side that we can connect north and south. So that is why the police, roadway engineers, all of the people who create that have that approved. We don't really have another area that we can do that, where we can actually shut down we would have to close off that entire access Yeah. So that's why that one has been

I just thought that it's a perfect place to stage, because right now, stages in neighborhoods and Yes.

Well, and this

year was an extreme challenge because of price being shut down, having that reroute all the way through Elavon. So we had we I'm going tell you, there was many hot, hot meetings on how we were going to do it and how we were gonna get it to where it was. At the end of the day, all we did was shorten it, and we had to get everybody in there in a shorter area. Because normally, we went from La France higher towards 75. And we couldn't this year because PD wouldn't allow us to go through that intersection because nobody would be able to come through that. So we would have blocked the detour, basically.

That's not an official detour.

Yeah. But if you're at Salford and you're trying to come to Sutter

I've actually stopped using it because it's I've actually I've it took me sixteen minutes to get from North Cranberry price all the way up to 41 and around to here. That wasn't bad today. When I leave, I would go out to 75 and go up because it's

Yeah. So that's that's why the route is where it I mean, as we expand and price gets wider, that might be an option later on in years because we would with five lanes, we would be able to do the same thing. The problem is with a road that's all not split like ours is, it would be very concerning for the people that we're trying to watch from the side with the traffic. Yeah. So there's a lot of considerations, but, yeah, we're always looking for something. The other piece is everybody likes to end here. It seems to be the you know, our only real center town center area at this point.

Another thing for the print that we talked about before is maybe charging for the bounce houses and that because there's so much expense on you. Now that it's a year away I know it was always too short, but now it's time to look at that because, well, actually, they seem to be a little bit nicer about recreation right now. Right now, they're a little happy with us. I know. It is amazing. Never mind. But anyway, but until they get back to the other mode saying how much money is being spent in that, is there any talk? Or do we need to put any bugs in their ears about possibly $5 and you can do all the bounce houses or something?

So that will come up in February when we bring the fee schedule forward. We will make the recommendation that it gets added to the fee schedule because that's an ordinance that we have to follow. And right now, we don't have a means to charge for that. But it will be a recommendation that it goes in there. The other recommendation that we are working on right now is that a company can sponsor an amenity. So if somebody wanted to just provide the kids zone, bounce houses, a company could sponsor that and could have the presented by a company. So we're working on that sponsorship opportunity as well, which would highly reduce those costs to

us. Because they're expensive. They are expensive. Yeah.

They are. So can we get just clear direction on the agenda items you would like from that?

Well, talking about bikes and that Yep. And also

We had Laurie's

Yeah, about the property.

They're revisiting the property on 41. Yes.

We're doing the property. Yeah.

Would the PD come here and present to us?

Oh, yeah. If I if I can get it on like, it might not be the first month that I ask them, but if I can give them a couple of months option, they'll they'll come. I actually just arranged this week, for a training for our staff on how to deal with vapes in the park, how to deal with the e bikes in the park, and, to review the trespass process with them just so that, you know, everything's fresh in their mind for the new coming year.

Yeah. Future agenda items do not need to be motioned. Correct? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Another thing too,

we said too that maybe we should have Kevin Mace here, who's our new DeFi director, and have him explain the program because he's really doing he's doing a phenomenal job. And I think the rest should really know what he's doing because it's going to benefit everyone.

And today, for the youth council, I'm pretty sure Northport's legal team reviewed it today or around this time period, they will. So next time Kevin Mace is here, I think that's a great idea for him to also talk about the youth council because he's going to play a pivotal role in it.

Yeah. He's going to be the liaison to the youth council for

The presentation

that they did, again, the same one we got was phenomenal, and it was very well received by the commissioners.

It was. Yes. Well, we had done one on ones with all the commissioners through the presentation prior to the commission meeting. We answered all their questions. We had the consultants with us. One thing I will say about the consultants is they they very they were very happy with our department.

We

have a lot of accolades from them. And so when we were in with commissioners, they sang our phrases at every point in their presentation. So that helped a lot, which is, I think, where somebody from the outside saying, hey, they're doing a good job kind of turned them on their happy side that they're on right now.

It's amazing how happy they were with it.

All

right then. Other public

Yeah. It's it's it skipped over. It was the second. Oh, we missed it. But I'm on that item.

Is it the paper?

No. No. It's the annual report. It was the second item. We just missed it. That's okay. We can go back to it. Yeah. Yeah. Got this for you, Randall. Discussion and possible action regarding the review and approval of the draft annual report. So My bad. When Shelby was here, she spoke to you guys about brought forward last year's report that I created for you. You had some input. This is what I have created for this year's report. So I will just go through it with us and get your approval or non approval so I can submit to commission for point 20 '5.

Sounds good, boss.

PS, we're three months ahead of schedule. We don't need this till March, but we're gonna have it for changing. So there's some good pictures of this year. Top picture is of our Northport University program and how we set up to make parks come inside for that. Our new playground that was it seems like forever ago, but it was the 2025 over here at GMAT. Some more Middle Springs and Oak Park images. This is just a a list of all of you and your current positions and myself. Joan and her run over there. I have I have so many pictures of Joan, guys. You guys need to get some pictures.

I went through so many pictures trying to to find more of you, and there were not allow you. Thinking back to early twenty twenty five, that bottom picture is also we reopened the gym at the Morgan Center. It was such a big to do, and it seems like a lifetime ago now. And then there's been some renovations to the field, so we have that field up there. So I'm trying to put some relevant pictures in for this year. This one is just the standard. It's exactly what you guys sign on. It talks about your authority, what your what your roles and responsibilities are. And that didn't change other than I just updated it to match exactly what we have on our current website. So if there was any clerk's office changes, that they were included.

There's our groundbreaking for the circle of honor with the flag and our groundbreaking for Boca Chica images. And then we have this year's initiatives, supported goals and objectives board. I'm sorry. Implementation of affordable fees for select events currently offered free of charge, enhanced community access and equity by supporting the need for expanded neighborhood and community park access for all residents across the city, supported the integration of drug for youth program under the parks and recreation department and supplied volunteers to assist with program delivery, enhanced inner board coordination with the approval of a joint meeting with the environmental advisory board, postponed parkland acquisition discussions to ensure that they align with the forthcoming parks and recreation plan. That's because at the time, this is written for 2025, so we won't be actually talking about the acquisitions until January because now we just got that one approved.

And then we go into goals for 2026. The integration of the parks and recreation master plan into board initiatives and goals. So we'll talk about that. We'll add that as an agenda item where we pull stuff out of the master plan to make sure when we're talking through them that we're integrating the things that they're saying are are what best for us and whether you guys endorse them or not. Revisit park the past.

Of We've in supporting policies and operational practices that strengthen future CAFR accreditation readiness, prioritize strategies that expand neighborhood and community park access for all residents, continue supporting the drug for youth program and other youth serving initiatives to promote safe, healthy, and prevention focused services to our community. That is it.

Great. Yeah. This is awesome.

Yep. So everybody's good with it? Is there anything that I missed? Is there anything that you want to add?

Do we do it those in favor? Say aye.

Okay. So we would request a motion first.

Motion to approve the Parks and Recreation annual 2025 plan? Report. A report. Those in favor, say aye.

You just make the motion. Sorry. Yeah. You just make the motion.

Yeah. I'll second that.

Joan will second it.

All in favor?

Aye. Yes.

Can you repeat your motion, please?

Motion to approve the 2025 Parks and Recreation annual report.

Perfect. And it was seconded by Joan Moore. Awesome.

Second motion in my time here. Yeah.

Everybody have a great holiday.

Yep.

I'll see you next year.

It's perfect. Thank you for all

your time.

Thank you. On your way out. We have

some people.

Is this just for