City Council - Regular Meeting

Rise for silent invocation, followed by Pledge of Allegiance, led by the Volusia Young Marine. Amen.

Amen. Amen.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Young Marine, before you guys leave, if you guys would take just a moment to introduce yourselves and tell us who you are right here at the microphone. One at a time, please.

My name is Young Marine Lance Corporal Van Orman. Thank you.

My name is Young Marine Private Caldwell. Thank you.

My name is Young Marine Private Van Orman Kay.

Thank you. Thank you. Much appreciated. We appreciate you guys being here tonight. Thank you. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Will the clerk call the roll, please?

Councilman Foley? Here. Councilman Gifford? Here. Councilman Green? Here. Vice Mayor Grubbs? Here. Mayor Stillner?

Here. Everybody is in attendance this evening. Item four, public comments on consent agenda items. I know there are some folks who wanted to speak to item nine. Now would be the opportunity for that.

Robert's got one. Come on up, Robert.

Mayor, council members, Robert Reinhagen, 1425 Dexter Drive North, Port Orange. I want to speak about B11, resolution approval for the YMCA to apply for a Volusia ECHO grant application. This thing says that ECHO grant funding mandates that funded facilities must provide unrestricted public access unrestricted public access you know that is totally inconsistent with the business model of the ymca they're a private membership organization and and now you're going to say that you're going to have this playground that's available to the entire public well i don't think it's ever going to happen What assurance do we have that the Y will create the processes and procedures necessary to reach out and let the general public know that they are welcome to use this facility, this ECHO-funded facility? The Y may be starting out with good intentions, but over time this public facility use will be buried. within the membership structure that they use. So I'm asking you to reject this, reject being a party to this effort.

Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Anybody else wish to speak to consent agenda items only? Consent agenda? Is there Carolyn Denny? You wanted to speak to item nine, right? Okay. Go right ahead. Welcome.

Good evening. I'm Carolyn Denny from Country Walks Up Division, 3432 Spring Oak Lane. My question is simple. On resolution item number nine, utility fee adjustments for the final year of a four-year implementation, when the increase goes in, which I doubt we can fight that. We know money is tight and it's impossible to keep the same agenda for 20 years. When that is implemented, it's a 12.75% increase. for me personally i'm in usage number one um that's about a seven dollar fifty cent a month increase will it be progressive in stages or will it be all at once that is my question thank you thank you and i believe there was a i apologize if i mispronounce alicia trovillo that also wanted to speak on item nine

As a retired civil servant, I'm also a widow of eight years so I don't have the luxury of a second income anymore. With the current economy, I've also found myself having to work two part-time jobs just to make ends meet. If you raise the utilities that the percentages outlined, it would cause a hardship not only to me but to many of my neighbors and friends that live in a retirement community who live on a small retirement budget that doesn't grow as everything else around us continues to rise. We simply cannot afford another raise in our utilities. Please consider the lives you will be affecting before your vote. It will mean food on the table, medication, or paying the water bill. We are already living meager existences. So please consider that as you consider raising another bill for us.

Was there? Hi folks.

My name is Mary and Carol. I am that 4,100 clock tower drive here in port orange. And I just, you know, this, um, utility increase is not huge. I took my own bill. I took the numbers. It's about $50 a year increase. But as one of our members said before, a lot of us are on fixed incomes. And already we've got Florida Power and Light that's planning to really skyrocket. And it's hard. You're looking at $500, $600, $700 power bill, and now you're talking about another $200, $300 on top of it, and then another $50 on our utilities. I understand that we need money, but I do want to make sure that we're doing the right projects and we're doing the right projects for our community. And I also want to make sure that you guys are holding our developers accountable to that too. It shouldn't just go to the community. A lot of the critical infrastructure that we need should be going to the developers who want to develop and build homes here. I'm all for us to continue to grow the environment or the community, excuse me, but I just want us to do it smart and it shouldn't be on the backs of our retirees, low income people. Thank you so much for your time today.

ANYONE ELSE TO SPEAK TO CONSENT AGENDA ITEMS, THAT'S 5 THROUGH 14. 5 THROUGH 14. COME ON.

GOOD EVENING, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

HANG ON TILL YOU COME UP HERE. GOOD EVENING.

I'M THE HONORABLE JOHN MABELSKI. I GAVE A... nine-page dissertation to all of you, so I'm not going to cover that, as well as you, my counsel. Thank you so much for hearing me. What I'd like to discuss here is, does our Treasury have the money to do the improvements that we're trying to do? Or as my sister said before me, is it being done just to cover primarily just to cover the new construction that was here and was tax breaks given to these folks that are the builders of these new properties that house all these people that are actually impacting the community that weren't part of the community for the last 40 years as i i spoke to several of you and um i'd like to uh make it so it's fair and just for all That being said, the only way I know possibly that this can be done is to table this until a future period where we all have what is available in the treasury, the tax structure that is written that for people that have been here for 30, 40 years and have been paying all along and then now these new interests in the community come in, build this new enterprises, and cause all of our citizens, not just the ones here. I've talked to many people. I live right over here in Kingswood. I've talked to many of my brothers and sisters, my neighbors. They all share the same ideas as I do, but Nobody, oh, I'm not going to get involved. No, I don't even want to read your dissertation, John. If we don't all work together, as we should, like brothers and sisters, like I try to promote every day, that puts unity in the community. Unity is strength. If there's a lack of trust It's shameful. We all need to hang our heads. We haven't done our jobs. It doesn't matter what title you have, what seat you sit in, This is for the good of all, and if it's going to be for the good of all, everybody should have a vote. That being said, that's why I move to table this until a future period as it can be presented by the council, all the members of the council, in an orderly manner. Thank you for your time, my brothers and my sisters all.

Anyone else wish to speak to consent agenda items only? Seeing none, we have a motion to approve items 5 through 14.

I'll make a motion. I'm assuming we probably want to pull item number 9 for discussion. Is that your motion? And so I'll make a motion that we pull item number 9 from consent and approve items 5 through 8 and 10 through 14.

I'll second.

We have a motion. In a second, to approve consent agenda items 5 through 14, with the exception of polling item number 9. Will the clerk call the roll?

Councilman Foley?

Yes.

Councilman Gephardt? Yes. Councilman Green? Yes. Vice Mayor Groves? Yes. Mayor Stillman?

Yes. 5-0. That'll bring us to item number 9. We'll start with Councilman Foley.

yeah wayne can you just explain a little bit um obviously i've actually gotten a few emails about this um from some from friends and from residents and can you just explain what we're actually doing here what's being proposed and how specifically speak in terms of this is actually year four of a plan, I believe that we started back in 2022 or 23. Just just some more background for everyone so they know what we are actually considering up here.

Our water sewer utility is an enterprise fund, which means that it's funded solely through the user fees that are collected. There's no tax dollars that support the utility. So it is not used through tax dollars. There are impact fees that are collected from the developer. So you're allowed to take impact fees to expand capacity. You can't use impact fees to maintain the existing which you can grow. So we do have impact fees in the study in 22. The impact fees for the utility were increased as part of that as well. So those are there. The last time we had raised fees before this cycle started was about 2014. It had been close to a decade by the time we did that. We had a series of four or five meetings here at council as that study was going through. We had our financial advisor in here who talked about the utility itself, the soundness of the fund. The purpose of the study is they took a look at the cost of providing water and sewer to the community and said these are the fees that are necessary to run it. It doesn't make a profit. It is to cover the cost. It's straight in, run the facility. So we have a treatment plant for drinking water. a treatment plant for wastewater, we have reclaimed water facilities, we have a ton of lift stations, we have the wells, and we have all the pipes in the ground. So it's the largest set of infrastructure we have, the most expensive component of infrastructure that we have. And the study was set out basically to determine what would it cost to run that, to cover the cost of running it. And then as they came to council and laid out what that dollar amount was, council had the choice of doing a one-time only fee increase or spreading it out over the course of the four years. So the council elected to spread it out over four years. We're now in year four of that four-year plan. As one of the speakers noted, it's approximately $10 per bill is what it's gone up. over that time. So there's $100 a year that this is a typical single family house with three people in it. So the fee is structured, there's a base fee, and then there are blocks based on usage. And it's intended to try to discourage like don't use the drinking water to sprinkle. So if you use a lot of water, the higher you get in gallons, the more it costs. So Like any kind of product, if you want to lower your cost, lower your consumption. So it's structured in that way to do so. And so it was a very, fairly moderate fee increase for what it took to run the utility. So we are in year four, a number of the capital projects that we have. So we use this to pay the cost of all the construction and maintenance and operation. One of the questions I think you guys have gotten some of those questions to what have we done to make the utility more efficient? So it's not just a matter of taking more money, but we have had a presentation. Well, you guys have heard a couple of years ago we were issued a 20 year consumptive use permit, which allows us to pull drinking water out of the aquifer for 20 years. We're one of the very few organizations that has enough statewide respect to be allowed that long of a period, which shows how well we take care of the drinking water We had the utilities director come give a presentation on how we handle the treatment process for drinking water and the precision with which we put the components in it that treat the water. So we save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and how we put the chemicals in so precisely we don't waste money. We have an in-house testing lab which saves us tens of thousands of dollars a year and having to pay outside people to do that. We had another presentation and discussion. So part of the water treatment process, one of the byproducts for softening is lime. You used to be able to make money selling lime for people. Now the state laws have changed. Lime is going to be a very expensive byproduct. So we're looking at and running a test right now on switching to an Actina treatment system for water, which would create a sand byproduct. So instead of paying to get rid of it, we would have a usable byproduct without cost. So these kind of efficiencies are going on constantly in the utility to try to find ways to run it. Part of the original study analyzed our fees compared to like 15 other jurisdictions that provide water and sewer. And at the time of the study in 22, we were the lowest. We are still in the bottom end of cost. So it's still a really good deal. I don't wanna call out any individual cities by name, but we have employees who live in other cities. and they routinely say where i live it's way more expensive to have water and sewer than it is in port orange so it's still a really good deal we are still one of the lowest priced utilities in the region and the price is based off the cost to run it all right and i appreciate you just kind of going through that i know that was a lot for people to to digest um i just want to tell you guys where i where i'm at with this um

I think everybody in our community is feeling financial pressures of just everything going up. We had a $15 an hour minimum wage mandate, and that resulted in us having to raise wages across the board for our employees. And we've also had issues when it comes to supplies and materials and everything else. But it's not just People are like, oh, I don't want to hear someone say, oh, it's just $7, right? Like it's not money. Money is money, and at the end of the day, it used to cost me $40, $50 to fill my truck, and now it costs $85, $90, right? That hurts all of us. From my position sitting in this seat, what I try to do, it's not do I or do I not spend money for the city. It's... is the money being spent efficiently when I give it to these employees. And since this study has been presented to us, you know, I've been really impressed by what Wayne's staff has brought forward in terms of finding additional efficiencies and finding ways to provide high quality at a good price. um this is the part four of raising the case we did have that option i know some of you weren't sitting on this council but scott was we had the option to just do this all at once and we thought it would be better to do it in a stair step so it wasn't as much of a shell shock to people when their water bill would go up by whatever percentage it was over four years so um i just want to kind of express how i'm feeling about all those things and let you guys know that I feel your pain. I understand why this is a really, why it's a concern for people. It doesn't get lost on me that we are all paying more across the board in almost every category of our lives. And I think that... While we do need to look for efficiencies, I think that's our job sitting here on this dais. That's our staff's job. I think they do a pretty good job of it. I just don't know that I believe in my heart of hearts that there's any efficiencies to be found in this particular fund and in this particular rate. But I will continue to look for them elsewhere as we get ready to start the budget process, actually with an item later on tonight.

I echo what Councilman Foley says here. When it was first brought to us, I was just a fledgling councilman sitting up here at that point. The meetings that came through talking about these funds was enlightening that it was over a decade that anything had been changed. Inflationary cost, cost of living, everything goes up, but a decade, nothing had been touched with the water plant and the water production. The proposal at the time was almost 20%, one lump sum. Council at that point in time said, absolutely not, we're not gonna do that. So it was spread out over a four year period of trying to be 5%. And I know when you look at The form that came out to you in the water bill, if you add up all those percentages, that's not 12%. I know some of that came out that way. It was 5% overall of what that percentage is. It is about, on a single family household, about 3,000 gallons, about $10. $10 is a lot today. I'm not disagreeing with you. but it is the the infrastructure of making sure our quality of the water the water is taken care of and the sewer is taken care of also so the aquatina that city manager was talking about if you all remember back last year was the implementation of that that's an eight hundred thousand dollar savings to the water plant That's even with the raisings of all this. It was an $800,000 savings. They are constantly evolving and trying to make adjustments and finding ways to get the cost down. Without those type of savings, the question is, is what would the increase be with another study down the road? And I don't even want to think about that. just trying to sustain so we do not have these big jumps leaps and bound like they proposed four years ago being twenty percent um so i i feel for you um and councilman foley's right cast gas prices food prices it's everything making a living it's it's going up And it's inflationary. So, Scott.

Excuse me, Mayor. We need a motion for this item before you guys can continue to discuss it. I thought we put one on before. There is a motion to pull it and approve the other.

Go ahead and make your motion.

Yeah, I'll make a motion to approve resolution number 2026, or sorry, 26-32. I'll second.

Do we have a motion and a second? Sean, go ahead.

So very well said, Reid and Councilman Grubbs, and thank you, Wayne Clark, for bringing it all back to us. I've looked at the information that the staff has provided us. I remember these conversations in these chambers four or five years ago and the tough decisions that Council had to make at that time, and it was to spread the cost of this out over a four-year period. or foray decreases over a period of time, so we wouldn't all be hit with it all at one time. But, you know, they sought the expertise of a consultant about this. And they came back and said, you need to do this if you want to continue to provide the services and be able to pay for them without it being a lot more down the road. So we've gradually increased this over the years. It's never fun having to pay more. Um, but that's just the way things seem to be moving with this, uh, this, this state, just the cost of living is going up and we have to we have to make sure that we have the financial tools to do the things that are right for our citizens and which is to provide clean water for them and remove it when they use it and we've done a really good job of that that 20 year take permit is typically five we got it for 20 because of all the things that we've done and our staff and all the things that they do to try and cut costs and and do all the right things they have to have the tools to do that as well And we talked about our budgets coming up. Those are the tools that we, the money is the tool. that we have the right people doing the right things for the citizens and we have to make the tough decisions to unfortunately what will be a rate increase for most of our citizens here to use their water but at the same time they'll have those services working we'll have the funds to do repairs that are going to be needed and just to mention lift station rehabs that's very important The reclaimed lake improvements, that's very important. The treatment plant improvements, we just made a decision at our last meeting about our water treatment plant and taking on additional property to save us money in the future. We're doing all the right things to help the citizens make sure that everything's working. Because when it stops working, this room's a lot fuller and they're standing out in the hallway. And we've seen that. And I don't want to see that again. So we've got to do all the right things now. The wastewater force main replacement across the Halifax River, that's something that has to be done. And the treatment plant generator, these are all things that we have to pay for. We're doing it by taking these incremental steps. So I'm in favor of it. Thanks.

I mean, there's no good way to say an increase is good. But again, this is year four of this project. of this program and so again let's unfortunately we're gonna have to get through year four of it and um and you know and and let's and work from here so let's these guys pretty much covered everything so i was the only one on council when this study in 2022 was presented to the council

And the short story of it is that for almost a decade, the city did not incrementally raise rates to maintain a sound fund to not only take care of the existing infrastructure, but also being able to have a fund for ongoing maintenance and replacement of things as things become more and more expensive. And as we all know, Just like it is with our automobiles and our personal homes and our businesses. Whatever you were paying 10 years ago to change the tires on your car is not what you pay today. Re-roofing a house 10 years ago, totally different cost. Municipal government is not immune from those cost increases. We are not the federal government. We cannot print money. We don't have the access to do that. We are all, all of us, us, every resident, all in this together trying to figure out what kind of a quality of life and what kind of a city do we want to have and how do we do those things that are responsible to maintain it. The water in the sewer systems in the municipality here are critical, critical. There are things in your home, I promise you, you don't use every day. You might not watch TV. You might not use the dryer. You might not use the oven. You might not put something in the microwave. But just about every single one of us uses water and sewer in our homes every single day. And it is a massive critical infrastructure. And it has to be maintained. It has to be planned for. Widgets don't last forever. They just don't. And this is a lesson for all of us. Some of us will be up here longer than others, and some of us will only be here for a couple more years. But the lesson here is that if you don't stay up with your funding on maintenance if you do the proverbial kick the can you can only kick it so far before it comes due to have to pay for those things right and so that's reality that is just reality um and so we went a long time as a city maybe we should have incrementally been raising those rates smaller we had the lowest water and utility rates in the entire county in fact some of the graphs had us in a different color because when they did the study they're like this is not sustainable you're going to have a major problem soon if you have a massive critical infrastructure failure or something goes wrong you're not going to have the funds and the maintenance to fix it and you're going to have people without water and utilities and things like that One of the things that comes to mind, and I don't remember the number, but it was shocking when I saw the number of what it cost to replace a generator system for our infrastructure so that when we have these storms and power is lost, And we can still operate, make sure people can get water in their homes and they can get utility service and things like that. Those numbers are massive. They are incredibly expensive and we have to be prepared for that. Our residents expect that. I truly appreciate those that reached out. I truly appreciate those that spoke here tonight. That doesn't fall on deaf ears. We totally appreciate that. We understand all of those. concerns but we also believe that as residents that you expect us to maintain the infrastructure of the city you expect us to make sure you go home tonight and you sleep well knowing that if something catastrophic happens tomorrow we can respond and deal with it And that we're doing what we can to prevent that from even happening, so that that session never has to happen. And that's what this rate was about. And I was on the council and they're right. The decision was, do we hit the residents with this huge increase all at one time, or do we spread it out? we thought it would be in the best interest of the community and most people that attended those meetings thought that too is to spread this out in smaller amounts incrementally over a four-year period of time that's what this vote is tonight is for that fourth year period of time so um I think it's the right thing to do to to invest and maintain our infrastructure and and I can assure you these rates keep us still well in the lower amounts of of volusia county comparatively to our neighboring cities so there are a couple of things i forgot if you want me to go ahead staff remind me so

Two other things we did. So one of the main projects we were doing in the sewer side is lining the sewer pipes. So rainwater is not supposed to go in the sewer system. Rainwater goes in the stormwater system. You treat sewer water. Rainwater leaks in through manholes in the sewer system. You're paying to treat it at the plant. The lining projects that have been done as part of the maintenance to the system have saved us on rainy days approximately two million gallons a day and rainwater being treated. So that saves you the chemicals and the wear and tear on the parts. And on heavy rain days, it keeps your lift stations from being overwhelmed by rainwater so that you don't have problems with them pumping what they're supposed to. And then another large thing as far as trying to leverage resources so that it's not all just our ratepayers. In the last four years, we've got $3.5 million in legislative appropriations, thanks to Senator Leak, Senator Wright, Representative Tremont. for the Commonwealth pipe upgrades and the pipes under the Halifax River. So $3.5 million of state money in addition to that to help us do these things. So those were two things the staff reminded me to add. Thank you.

Anything else, council? I just want to, because of one more short thing, because of one of the comments that was said, Wayne said the word enterprise fund, in case no one understands exactly what that is. You can imagine like a bucket. All of the utility money that we're talking about here in this, it goes into one bucket. It cannot be touched for anything else. Nobody is taking this money from these rates. There's not reaching in for parks. There's not reaching in for fire, police, for anything else. It is to stand alone, and it has to pay for itself. And if you can kind of imagine, it's either toothpaste now or it's cavities later. And so when he says enterprise fund, not everyone knows what that is. We have to have this. It operates on its own. It's its own account. And so there's no way we're taking money from this for anything else that's going on at the city. It is strictly for...

our water and our wastewater okay and i just want to make sure that that's clarified because there was one resident that kind of spoke to that and not everyone knows what the word enterprise fund means so anything else yes sir good good good good amanda can you call the role councilman foley yes councilman geppert yes councilman green yes vice mayor grubbs yes mayor stillner yes 5-0 bring us to the public participation uh fortune lee from uh walmart street Come on up. Welcome.

So as you all know, every one of you, I think, received an email from me regarding the whole CAT community that I didn't sign up for. Wanted to know the status. Has anything been rewrote? I assume not. So on that at the end of the ordinance, it mentions cats creating a nuisance as defined in section 10. Three, per your all's definitions, disturbing the peace and quiet of any person by habitually or continuously barking, meowing, crying, whining, screaming, or cat fights every night outside my bedroom window. I can't sleep. I didn't sign up for this. or causing damage or destruction or threat of damage or destruction to any property existing in an unsanitary condition. I've picked up three dead kittens out of my driveway. That's sick. I didn't sign up for this. They've destroyed my truck. They've damaged my house. So I want to ask you guys, who's liable? The city for the ordinance. The person doing it illegally got caught, now does it legally. or um yeah i mean the the person doing it the business that approves it now or the city who's catching that bit somebody's gonna pay for it so hopefully y'all can point me in the right direction thank you thank you i'm sorry i did not get his name lee lee lee lee yeah

All right, that'll bring us to comments and additional items. Council members, I'm going to start tonight. Received this letter tonight from the president of the Royal Palms Homeowners Association. Just a really nice complimentary letter that they wanted to to have us recognize some city employees that were involved in water distribution services, of all things, in their community, and the repair of 27 fire hydrants. And apparently these employees left an incredible, favorable impression on the president of the World Farms Homeowners Association. Specifically, she wanted to mention Keith Gunter, water distribution service supervisor, Wayne Reed, Michael Unuchko, Daniel Lund and David Tillman. So great job by those guys. I'll pass this down here to the city manager and make sure copy ends up in their employee personnel files. So great job on that. Also great job this past weekend. The Port Orange Community Trust hosted an event here at the city center facility. Great job. Well attended. Nice concert. A little warm, but there was a breeze, and so they do a great job with their events. A lot going on this past weekend, so I'm gonna probably guess the attendance may not have been as much as it is sometimes, but there was a lot, and they got some favorable weather this year, so that was good to see. I also wanted to say congratulations to Vice Mayor Tracy Grubb and Councilman Lance Green on being re-elected to the City Council unopposed. So congratulations to both of you. You know what you'll be doing for the next four years. And I wanted to say a special congratulations to Stan Schmidt, who's in the room this evening. Stick your hand up there so everybody knows. The good news is that... Councilman elect Stan Schmidt has been elected to fill the district one seat soon and to the benefit of the community he was going to do campaign signs with his picture on the sign so we appreciate that that didn't have to occur so he was he was also elected unopposed but I in all seriousness I want to just say this about Stan is that He comes to a lot of meetings. He has involved himself in the community in a way that I think deserves credit and recognition. A lot of times, people all of a sudden, just for the wind blew a certain way today, they want to run for an elected office. And that's fine and great, and there's a process for that. But when I see people like Councilman Elect Schmidt who come to meetings, learn the process of municipal government, which is pretty complex, and goes through that process and then puts themselves, as they say, in the ring to be considered for an elected position in your city. I just think that deserves some congratulations and thanks. So thanks, Stan. We look forward to your service in District 1 here on the City Council. Lance, we'll start with you.

I'm good tonight. Thank you, sir. All right.

Very good.

Sean yeah just congratulations Lance Tracy and Stan looking forward to working with you a couple things in reference to the issues with the cats the feral cats we all got that email and I can't recall we talked to staff about that is there something being done about that because that that is a it's a real nuisance something's got to be done I just I'm trying to help you so let me help you And I didn't realize this was going to be a topic of conversation, so I hate to hit you broadsided there, city manager, but...

The chief can update. What I understand is there was a neighbor behind him that was feeding the cats that animal control told him to stop, but I don't have more depth that chief can... Yeah.

Thank you, sir.

good evening chief marino port orange police department yes that's the last update was as well they went back out to the property evidently there's more than one structure originally the complaint was that the person from the colony was feeding the cats on that property it turned out to be the neighbor directly behind him our animal control officers did go over there advise them they needed to stop i believe sergeant harrison was out there but that's the last update i received as well so i'll follow up and

Thank you. Thank you. And I appreciate you bringing that to our attention. Thank you so much. We can do the other thing. It was brought to my attention that in a particular area, there was a accumulation of yard debris piled up that waste pro did not pick up. And then they tried to go on our civic reporting device that we have, which is awesome. And then it got directed to waste pro and it got beat around the bush. But the problem, uh, is, and I think everyone needs to understand in our city is let's probably pick it up. If it's in front of your property, I put debris out on a weekly basis. There's a lot more probably coming as we get ready for hurricane season and trimming trees. But if you pile it up down at the end of the road with everyone else, they're not instructed to pick it up. They're not going to go right by it. And it becomes a big problem. So we just want to make sure everybody is If you're taking debris out of your yard, put it in front of your house so they have that opportunity to pick it up because that's what they're contracted to do. I know in my neighborhood it's on Wednesdays. Sometimes they'll do it even before Wednesday. So trucks going by, they'll grab it. So I've been very happy with the way they've done it. And I just want to make sure our citizens know, put it at your address and make it as high as you want. They'll get it. But if you put it out where they're not supposed to pick up, it's going to sit there. We noticed out on Taylor Road for a while and finally that's done. I think they know now not to put it there. So thank you staff for that. So we had a pile growing out there and we removed it and put another pile out there. I was like, you got to be kidding me. But it hasn't been there, so thank you for that. And that's all I've got. I've got a long agenda.

Just a quick comment on the Waste Pro. One of the nice things is most, if not all, of their trucks have video cameras in them. And so one of the things I have found over the years is that as we get complaints and stuff, we look into them. Sometimes it's not always what came back, but it is nice that they've taken the effort to respond to our concerns and having those video cameras definitely helped. Tracy, what you got?

So I had a citizen reach out to me dealing with cameras and dual barrel cameras and cameras on the back of the house. We had some intruders at night that were going through and trying to pop locks on car doors, backs of houses, cut screens out, trying to steal stuff and things of that nature and neighborhoods. All I'm gonna ask is call the police department first. You want to put it on Facebook, that's fine. But the police department's not Facebook. And I hate to have to have to say this. I mean, if you want resolutions, police department first, then we can get with our neighbors on neighbors and Facebook to help out and be able to police it better. But you have to get law enforcement involved. So please help that out. The individual was caught. um he has been charged um so policing does work when it goes the right appropriate channels so just help us in that aspect um st john's river uh the sea loop has now been opened up um that trail is those that don't know extends from south florida all the way to maine and there's sections of it that's still broken and whatnot we had one of those sections here in our our neighborhoods of port orange some of the beauties of this is that the florida department of transportation's funding was 1.7 million dollars putting that together inside our city for the citizens and it was only 51 000 cost to the citizens for that area so 1.7 million came from florida so When you're looking at these things, wondering where the funding comes and why things take so long is we're trying to get the fundings from other areas. It's not coming off the taxpayer's burden of the city. And then one of the beauties of last week was the county soil and water conservation meeting that I had. Y'all would know Chris Cunningham as the environmental chair for us. She's also the chairman or chairwoman for the soil and water conservation of the county. They have a reforestation program that's coming out that is funded in grants by the county. The reason I bring this up is with all the properties that we're acquiring through FEMA and Transform 386 and Resilient Florida, all these things, we have approximately 44 properties that the city's going to have to maintain that we can't do anything with. We could come in with grant money from the county and be able, and it's an 80-20 match, 20% to us. But 80% of all the trees and everything else provided by the county to replant these lots. Does a couple of things. First off, it puts micro parks inside areas that would just normally be grass that we have to maintain and mow. But we now have shade trees inside these micro parks that you put a park bench on, just food for thoughts down the road. That now is a lesser ROI for us to have to maintain because the trees grow and the grass will slowly be dissipated down. At the same time in the forestry division is what the trees do to the property is then allows urban sheltering of heat sources. we've got shade but it also allows water to be mitigated into those trees and soaking it out of the ground so it's it's a huge project that is available through grants so that information will be coming along to you guys shortly passing it along to wayne and robin next week with all that information so you'll be seeing that come up in front of us so Just a way to take care of our community and beautify it so it's not a patch of grass and help out the neighborhoods that we have now.

Okay. Reed, what you got?

I also want to say congratulations to Lance and to Tracy and to Stan. Stan, I have no doubt you'll do a great job here. filling in for me, and I'm looking forward to watching you from home a little bit. Spending more time with my kids, no. It was a hard decision not to want to run again, but my work schedule hasn't allowed that. But it was awesome to see you three get elected unopposed, too. I thought that was really a testament, I think, to the city and our council and to staff and everyone that – No one felt the need to oppose this, so that was really cool. Quick little note here. Our county councilman, vice chairman actually, Matt Reinhart reached out to me and he's been talking to me about this project that he has going on that I'm personally getting kind of excited about. It's called the Volusia County Domestic Violence Database Transparency Initiative. That's why I got this email in front of me, thank God. People don't realize, but actually the state of Florida ranked, or Volusia County ranked number four for domestic violence incidents in the state of Florida. And there's a... The state of Tennessee actually has a persistent domestic violence offender registry. And Matt got word of this. Of course, he worked in the Department of Corrections for many years prior to his service. And he reached out looking for, at first, my opinions, but then secondarily, our support possibly as a council and as a city, maybe a letter of support for this. The proposal is to create a dedicated public database that would contain basic information on domestic violence offenses, making it easier to access and more public, specifically for repeat offenders. It's quite an interesting initiative and I would encourage you guys to... I will forward the email he sent me to all of you and let you read it and if you want to reach out to him to questions that you might have. But I believe his heart and his mind are in the right place with this and I think that it could be of a great service to our residents to be able to access that information in the way that he's proposing to do so. And so... I'm not sure what the process would be or if there'd be any will to possibly draft a letter of support eventually, but I'll send this to you guys via email for consideration and bring it up again in council comments at another time.

That's it? That's it. All right. City Attorney Matt Jones.

Nothing for you tonight.

Sir.

Mr. City Manager. The Riverwalk update is substantially different than the last time. We do have a meeting coming up next week with one of the groups that showed interest. They're going to bring conceptual plans. We're going to talk about some of what they plan to do and what they might hope our part of the deal would be. uh after that we will likely do a call last time you know this is it in some date july is the cutoff submit your offers to us and then we'll bring them to you later in the summer so hopefully there'll be a couple of options this time going forward what we've seen so far at least has been promising i know we talked about at one point there were a lot of proposals for apartments we weeded those out so that they're we're really only looking at mixed use projects As far as the stormwater projects go tonight on the agenda, you had a an item for the FEMA grants, we're now starting to see that Ian and Nicole money come in here, we always said that once the hurricane hits, it's usually two to four years before funding starts coming in from FEMA to help. So there were 14 homes tonight that will be elevated 13 elevated one demolished and rebuilt at an elevated level. So we're now starting to see that money come in, in addition to the larger scale projects of stormwater moving forward there. As far as the Transform 386 projects, Portona and Powers, which are the two of the smaller ones, so the DePond and the North End and Powers over there by FBL, both of those are sort of on the same path. So they had kickoff meetings last week. The county who's in control of those projects with that funding is doing the mandated HUD assessment because that's the funding source for that money. And then they will start property acquisition in the summer. Once they have the property acquired, the design starts. So it looks like we believe they will be finished with the design of those projects next summer and construction would start next fall on those two projects. So those are the first Transform 386 projects moving forward at this point. Moving to the parks bond projects, pre-construction on the city center sports complex expansion is next week. We are close to doing the CMAR process similar to what we did with utilities building and as well as what we did tonight on the utility crossing. Request is coming up on that soon. That may be a conversation we need to have as we go through the budget process as to what you want to do before we actually sign on to doing that. And then the Karasi part that's existing has some water issues. The fields get wet and the soils underneath them don't drain very well. And so when they get rain, they're sometimes out of service for a couple of days. It doesn't dry real quick. So we're working on a process to, and you've approved this, it's come forward. Right now we're getting ready to do, I think within Next week, we're gonna be out there doing a test. So we're gonna go into the outfield in one of the fields and run a test with this new drainage system to see if we can't pull the water out of it. We won't quite get to the level of the Augusta National Greens. but to the ability to get in there and do some work to pull that water out so that when we have rain, you can get back there and play and you don't lose day. So that's the first part of the Karasi improvement that are going on out there. And we're still working with the landowners who are here tonight on the purchase of between the school district that owns 25 acres and the 75 for them. So we think we'll have something to talk to you about in the next couple of weeks related to those purchases as well going forward. And that's what I have for those updates. Thank you.

All right, brings us down to board appointments, interviews, and reports. Item 18, citizen advisory committee for the TPO. Bobby Ball. How are you, sir?

Bobby Ball with the CAC for the TPO. Normally I'm really good at rearranging my schedule and avoiding meetings, but I couldn't do that this week, so I don't have a, I wasn't able to attend, so I don't have a report for you, so I apologize for that. But if you've got something, I'll take back and pursue.

Hey, listen, you got to get to know the boss. You got to look in the mirror. Working hard. Right? Yeah. Working hard. No, I get it. You got your hands full so you can catch yourself. Thank you.

You got a long meeting anyway.

Yeah, we do.

Hey, Bobby, what was Ian's score I saw on Instagram?

Three under. He qualified for the next round.

He's warm for Saturday?

Yes.

Yeah, that's pretty solid and awesome. I've already made space on my mantle for some hardware. Break a leg, Bobby.

Brings us to the public hearing portion, item 19, first reading of ordinance number 2026-8.

So the ordinance of the City of Portland Volusia County, Florida amending the land development code chapter 17 zoning district regulations relating to updating the PCA zoning district regulations in response to changing market demands by revising locations of where certain uses are allowed within the PCA district while keeping consistent with the current plan community west side future land use designation. relating to minor revisions for clarity and developmental standards, removing redundancies to improve consistency in the application of the code, providing efficiencies in the development review process, all in support of future development within the PCA district, providing for repeal of conflicting ordinances, severability, and an effective date.

Can I get a motion to approve and a second of ordinance number 2026-8?

Ordinance number 2026-8, approval to approve.

I'll second it for discussion. Thank you. Sorry. We have a motion and a second. All for it.

Go ahead, Tim. Tim Berman, Community Development. Just a little bit of background on this area. So this is the PCA district that we're talking about for where the LDC applies for the changes that occur here. It's based about 1,200 acres. That's located on the west side of I-95 between Kamoka Farms Road, and then you see the FPNL easement below there. That's basically what we call the PCA district. And in the land development code, there's section 17 of zoning there applies just to this area. Back in 2002, this area was adopted through a series of agreements that were reviewed by Lusha County, Lusha County Growth Management, and the City of Port Orange. It involved an interlocal agreement between the county and the city regarding the eventual annexation of this 1,200 acres in Port Orange, also establishing the future land use for the property and the zoning. Within that future land use and zoning that approved and also the interlocal agreement, there were a number of standards that were established for that property which still apply today and are not being proposed to be changed with this code amendment. Just for kind of the key developments of our standards that were approved in 2002, basically allowed for a maximum of four dwelling units per acre for the 1,200 acre property. Maximum trip capacity for average daily trips of 62,600 in that 1,200 acres when it's developed then. It also established basically a mix at build out in terms of the percentage of the land that could be developed with different uses such as a maximum 60% of the PCA district can be developed with residential up to 25% commercial and so on. It also required a development pattern of having a town center roadway network and also too having a, concentrating the more intense uses near 95. Again, all these items that were approved in 2002 are not being changed in this code amendment and are still effective then. And also the changes to the proposed code also align with these parameters that were established in 2002. Also part of the PCA district in 2002, again, it established basically four different categories of where certain uses would be located on the property then. You can kind of see the green area is called the neighborhood. This is your traditional single family subdivisions that go from single family up to multifamily. For the most part, this whole entire area has been built out between 2004 and 2013. We also have the purple area, which is the workplace district. This has been developed in the southern end with Bylight has been developed there. Thompson Pump has purchased the property in front of them to eventually build on there. We've had the senior apartments complexes built there. And also, too, the Aldi's at the commercial area at the south end recently been developed in. For the most part, the northern portion of that purple area has remained vacant, along with the areas that were designated for residential and a west town center, which is a mixed-use concept then. So again, in 2002, this is how they envisioned in the future this property would be developed there with these types of uses it also envisioned a connection from shunts road out to i-4 which would allow for better access into those warehouse office areas for truck traffic there again 2002 that was a plan fast forward 25 years from now or 25 years Things have changed in terms of basically how things have developed, specifically along this area, Daytona and Port Orange there. We've seen a lot of that industrial use that we had envisioned to go there, kind of that transportation into kind of the Amazons and delivery services. That has all gravitated toward the I-4, I-95 interchange area due to accessibility. for the most part, if it was developed in this area, we're not gonna have that direct access to I-4 through Shunts Road. And also too, the development of those uses would require them to travel through residential neighborhoods, which would not be beneficial then. So we see that kind of a market change in terms of those uses that were envisioned there. going up to that i-4 corridor and you can see those being built right now so the applicant is proposing a code amendment to adjust some of the land use category land uses in here to basically adjust to the market conditions then and what that would mean basically is about 240 acres of the office industrial area which is the purple area would become the community district and that is more of a residential development district along with commercial that supports it then so And this would be the new map that would basically replace that then. So you can kind of see that long stretch between McGinnis and I-95, which was the office warehouse, would be going to more of the residential community district. And then the West Town Center was shifted slightly over there. So that mixed-use center is still there. So that was the main shift in the code amendment, was basically kind of shifting from the... sorry, the workplace district to the community district then. The code amendment also gave us an opportunity to look through the text that was provided there and clean up some of the redundancies that were there in terms of basically making the code more efficient then. So again, that's the proposed, the main proposed change is basically going from the workplace to the community. Again, the limits that are in place in terms of the amount of residential that can be built and the trip cap does not change with this. Also too, the percentage of area that could be developed as residential does not change either then. uh the applicant's also here to further discuss one more point than two the applicant has also requested to amend the lot width requirement in the community district which i believe we indicate there is a discussion item from the current lot width in the that district is 50 feet and the applicant is requesting a 40 foot minimum lot width in the community district then so the um that's the the main significant changes to the code amendment

Any questions for Tim? Not yet.

Yeah, Tim. I'm sorry. Go ahead. You didn't have anything? So first thing, on the new map, the first thing that's pointed, that I look and see is this is not consistent with what the previous map was, was residential units up to 16 units per acre.

Yeah, there's one area here that they can propose that could potentially be up to 16 years per acre in that area.

And 16 acres per 16 units per acre and how many acres?

7.4.

And how many units does that put there?

It's basically a full-size apartment complex that we would see out on Williamson now. Well, I mean, full-size complex would be like 300, 330 then, along Williamson then. So this would be, you know, close to that.

Close to that, yeah. And then... The other thing that I saw, that was the big one that we just approved a huge apartment complex on the corner of Madeline and Williamson that's going to be built, which I don't want to see. I don't really care to see another one. There's plenty of them being built up in Daytona, and I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of them built in the Daytona side of Williamson north of Madeline Because that's all they're doing up in Daytona right now is putting one one huge apartment complex after another and We're gonna have you know the Innovation Center up there on Williamson and and basically bevel coming down towards us. And then we have a potential huge residential opportunity that we have no control over because it's Daytona. And I've seen what Daytona has done. They have no problem building hundreds to 300 units on land up there. They have zero problem with that. So I don't want to see another apartment complex, especially in this area. Right now, today I went and I looked at a house that's over in Westport that the house itself is 40 feet wide, sitting on a lot right on top of another person. so we're not we're going to go from 50 to 40. that house is only 40. so i i this is not what i envision towns west to look like back in 2000 you know in 2004 i actually owned some of the property that we bought through a group on the corner of towns west boulevard in williamson I hadn't, that's not what I envisioned. And then the homes that are out there now, I know they're, they, they came in, they're affordable and they sold out every, every single subdivision in port orange sells out. There's a few that are several million that are probably a little slower, but eventually someone will have the worth all to be able to build the $2 million house over in King's landing. And certainly this council as well, just ran a local developer through the ringer. On a development, he wanted to do about 113 homes. Now he's down to 58. So on 58 acres. So I want to be consistent and this isn't consistent. 50 is, I wish we didn't have that. So that's my feeling on it. And the feedback I've received, leading up to me being on this council was just that that the citizens in this town are tired of it and well There's plenty of green space out there and we've done a good job of green space in neighborhoods and actually we're putting more trees out on the 58 acres than are there now. So we're pretty good about trees in Port Orange. That's not ever been a concern of mine. What I'm concerned of is slapping houses right on top of each other for whose benefit. It's certainly not to the benefit of this city because I've driven through just today towns West Boulevard. I'm not thrilled with it. Um, I know there's, we need places for people to live. We don't have a problem with people wanting to live in Fort orange. And we don't have a developer coming to us begging us to do 50 foot lots or 40 foot lots. This is going to be sold to a developer and it's going to look like something that we're going to regret.

Remember, Tim's not the applicant here. Tim's just presenting it. So you probably, some of these questions would probably be better.

I just want to, I just want to share something with you, Tim. I'm more than impressed with what you do for our city. We are, you're a huge asset to us and I don't want anything that I ever say up here for you to think any differently. You're a phenomenal planner and we're thankful to have you and you're just doing your job. Thank you.

Tracy. Nothing for Tim at this time.

Reed.

O-H. I-O. I-O. I want you getting off that stand with a smile.

I was going to comment that in 2002, that was the year that Ohio State was undefeated and beat Miami in the national championship. I kind of go back, but I decided to hold that in. But just for our references, then we won two more championships.

Do we have a community where the single-family home lot widths are only 40 feet?

We have a few within Port Warren. We have the Battle of the Commons has a number of lots that are 40 feet. That's what we would be looking at. In that case there, and there are some of the lots within the Royal Palm community? have the uh smart lots there and i think you know some of our older subdivisions too like riverwood we have some there though and most like those are you know the longer the houses are very you know long there and narrow and kind of how they're configured then but there are some of theirs not relevant um you know development pattern here in port orange be 40 feet though yeah okay and again like kind of the same energy okay that was just the applicants request then um and they might have more information to kind of support why they made that request for the council

Actually, Tim, then I do have a question. That 40-foot, does that apply to all residential in this entire...

It would just be the blue area, the community?

So the one that's tucked in between McGinnis and 95 and Williamson?

Yes, this whole area right here.

Okay. But that would include the ones on the outside there as well. So anything in blue is what I'm saying. Any of the residential. Correct. All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Tim. Would the applicant like to speak for this? I'm sure they would. Yeah, that's great.

Thanks, sir. Okay. Good evening. For the record, Mark Watts, the law firm of Cobb-Cole, 231 North Woodland Boulevard, DeLand. It's good to be back and to see you, and it's been a minute since I've been over here. Jessica told me I had to speak tonight. She was supposed to be at county council, as was I, but we both got out early, so... In any event, it's good to see you all. We've got a handful of folks with us as well. I want to introduce Jonathan Fox with VCOR Property Management. They're the owner of the properties. Claire and Chris Rowley and Mallory Tatum with Zeb Cohen and Associates have been working with us through the process here. And then Jessica Gow, my partner. who's also been really instrumental and has driven a lot of the work here with your staff. And I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Tim and Penny. Sean, I'll echo your comment that you've got a phenomenal staff. I'll tell you a secret, years and years ago, I tried to get Deland to poach Tim, but it never worked. But in any event, you've got a phenomenal staff here and we appreciate the work that they put into kind of updating this with us over the past year or so. One of the things that, you know, I'll play the gray hair here tonight. I remember when this, you know, I came back to Volusia County and started practicing land use law in 99. And I remember going through with the PCA district being amended. And I remember being impressed as a, you know, kind of someone who likes planning, someone who has been involved in land use through college and law school. that you had a city and a large property owner that were willing to work not just on planning for the large scale future of the city, but also for the infrastructure and everything else that goes along with it. And as with any plan, every now and then you've got to come through and you've got to update to see how does the plan need to be adjusted based on what's occurred. And that's really, 25 years is probably a little bit of a long period to do that. We used to be required to do it every eight years when DCA was still an active agency with the state. But I think what we've really tried to do is go through, and as Tim mentioned, take into account how market conditions have changed. I mean, I think when the PCA district, think about it this way, when the PCA district was adopted in 2002, Amazon didn't exist. And so our economy really has changed a lot. And I think one of the most relevant things that we looked at as we were working through this update was the comment about now if you've got this workplace district in an area where the truck traffic has to go out Williamson or make its way out to Tomoka Farms Road and go north to get to that interchange where that traffic is going to want to go, you really start to create some inconsistencies in the land uses. And so we felt like the overall shift and change was entirely appropriate. as far as kind of updating things with regard to current conditions. So I won't go into detail on a lot of the cleanup changes because I think that was another thing that we saw an opportunity here working with your staff to get rid of some duplication, to make the overall code efficient. with regard to how they have to go through and look at it and apply it as you get individual projects or property owners coming in to move forward with development. But the key things were obviously kind of changing some of the allocations around on the map. One of the early targets that we set in our conversations with staff was to keep all of the land use allocations the same. So we weren't changing that mix of uses that was always envisioned. We weren't changing the maximum amount of development that would occur out there. We're keeping all those caps in place with the proposed amendment that's in front of you. The one tweak, and we had this conversation with the planning board on the 28th of May as well, because we heard a lot of the same comments about the 40-foot lots. And I'll tell you that I have seen a lot of jurisdictions struggle with those proposals where you come in and you take an entire neighborhood and you just make it 40-foot lots and nobody has a place to park. You've got pickup trucks that are sticking out over sidewalks and keeping people from being able to walk by and things of that nature. So I want to walk through a little bit more of what we envision here, because I think it's a little bit more targeted than that. And it's aimed at creating something that I think would ultimately be an enhancement, as long as it's deployed and approved in an appropriate way. So we put together some examples for you to look at and consider. and these are all from other places within Central Florida so the community district is the area that we're you know kind of looking for that change to be applied to and so the purpose of that district is really to serve as a transitional district between your town center area that's part of the core part of the plan and the neighborhood districts that are further to the south. So that community district does have a mix of things that can occur there. Residential, commercial, civic space, all of those things. And so we tried to look around and give you some examples. So for example, this is the area down in Lake Nona where you've got civic space, you've got parks, you've got some of the smaller lots. Again, these are set up with kind of green space along the backside to the civic area, and you've got some town homes also in the mix. So you've got kind of that variety that ultimately is provided there. And one of the comments we heard from the planning board was, you know, some of the members said, I don't like it, I wouldn't live there, but somebody would want that in our community. And so it does serve a purpose to serve some element of the community and provide that housing opportunity. This is another one, Lake Baldwin, or Baldwin Park down in Orlando. For those of you who have been around for a while, this is the old Naval Training Center and the redevelopment that occurred with the Naval Training Center back, you know, in the early 2000s. But again, here you have a mix townhomes, park space, larger lots, smaller single family lots, all kind of mixed in together in that area that's transitioning kind of between uses. Here you've got that village center, that town center type use. So I think this is really the standard that we're asking to be included in the update so that we can accomplish things like this as we move forward. This is just an example of what some of those smaller lots look like when done well and done appropriately. And one of the things I'll point out to you is in the change that we're requesting, we're not simply saying, let us shave 10 feet off of the lot. We're asking to keep the lot size consistent with what your current standard is. We're not asking to reduce the lot size. We would actually be making the lots deeper as a minimum standard. That'll accommodate things like rear alley access, where you can have a garage behind the home. the front of the home closer to the street. Those are actually specifically some of the goals and purpose and intent descriptions in your community district explanation or definition in your land development code. So trying to kind of lean into that overall characterization and that overall design. A couple of other examples. This is another one over kind of in the Winter Garden area. Again, you've got park space. We know and we've been working quite a lot with your staff and your legal staff on the expansion of Karasi Park. There's a great opportunity here to be able to front some of these clustered smaller homes and home sites adjacent to that green space, which I think is important. So here's an example of that over kind of in between the celebration and Winter Garden area in Orange County. And then Avalon Park, again, you've got that mix where you've got some commercial town center areas, you have town homes, you've got some of the smaller residential lots that then kind of tear down and reduce intensity as you leave that town center core area. And this is one that, this one always kind of surprises me a little bit. This is one that I've worked on for the past 10 or 12 years over in Deberry. And if you've been over there, if you've ridden Sunrail, this is just across the cooling canal from the power station from the Sunrail station. These are actually 30 or 32 foot wide lots. that are part of the the rivington development rivington layout that have alley access that front onto these muse and and dedicated green spaces and parks that are part of the overall design and so um you know um councilman gefford to your to your point i completely understand the desire to to want to stay away from constant you know concentrating houses like this lots like this you know and having everything develop in that in that way but i do think it does provide a good opportunity to provide that mix um whether it's you know some of the areas adjacent to the park areas or intermixed within um you know within the overall developments that occur and it occurred to me that i kind of you know when we were putting together all these examples of newer things around central florida that gave you examples of this i can probably give you a much better example just in my own neighborhood i live two blocks behind the courthouse in deland in an old you know historic neighborhood We have lots along our street that range from 32 feet to 150 feet. We've got a mix in there. I've got 55 plus condos and town homes that abut my house on three sides. So I think that mix, and if you think about it in the context of that traditional neighborhood development, that traditional how do you build a city, where you've got that town center like downtown DeLand and you transition from that to a civic use like a courthouse and then you transition into the neighborhoods and we've got a tier of commercial along the front part of our neighborhood and then we go into the smaller lots that are there behind the commercial and then we transition as you continue to move away from that traditional town center area Really, this is I think an opportunity to emulate that and to include that, again, not as the entirety of what would come back and be proposed within the community area, but as an element in it that allows for some of that design flexibility. And so that's kind of what we're proposing. Again, we're not asking to change caps. We're not asking to change allocations. We're just updating the plan and asking to include consideration of a standard that would let us do some interesting things like this, particularly in and around the civic spaces that I think we're all working hard to try and bring forward in Port Orange. I'll stop there. I've got a whole lot of smarter people behind me that I can bring up if you've got any questions that I can't answer. But I appreciate your time and the opportunity to be here this evening.

Thanks. Anybody have specific questions for the applicant at this point? We'll hear from the public and we'll give them a chance to come back up in the end. Thanks. Anybody from the public wish to speak to this? I'm sorry. Come on up. No, no, no. Yeah. Okay.

Hey, listen, man.

For you, you can come up now.

This is kind of absurd. This is one of the funniest things I've heard in a long time that we're going to go from... Oh, sorry. Adam Dovey. Am I in there? All right, sorry. Port Orange resident. Everybody resident. That's lipstick on a pig. That's the most mind-numbing thing I've seen in years. To say going from a 40-foot lot or a 50-foot lot down to a 40-foot lot or maybe a 30-foot lot because we did it years ago in DeLand. Correct me if I'm wrong, do you have 4,800 houses on your street? This is a different scope of scale. All I say is for what we're destroying Port Orange for, no matter where you put it, you're cramming this many people into a city that's already packed. Just alone, think of the traffic at Williamson and Taylor. I can't fit there, and I have to go back the back way, which is now going to be overwhelmed the other direction, trying to go down Madeline or, God help me, Willow Run. This is the strangest thing in the world, regardless of how we're destroying the aquifer and all this stuff I've said before over and over again. But to use Lake Nona as an example, my buddy lives right behind the new VA clinic in Lake Nona. it is garbage he has 30 lot 32 foot or 35 foot lot lines everything is soaking wet all the time and they did the same thing they extended it to say hey we'll get a little more square footage we're not losing square footage we're gonna you know take it from here get it from there and he has a back alleyway that nobody can fit on that cars are sticking out his kids don't go outside because when it's said and done they got a little kind of a pee pad version for kids like when you take your dog out in the city It's not a real city. It's a way for developers to milk everything, extort our city, milk our lands, and leave. It is mind-numbing what this is. And the fact that 25 years ago, some slick-talking attorney came in and said, hey, we're going to do four houses per acre is absurd. Why don't we put our foot down and say, for what we did, and by the way, I think you did the right thing with the previous development from earlier this year. Go the other direction. Have some wherewithal. Have some gumption. Say, that's no longer a thing. It's ridiculous to say we're going to They could have planned or seen how congested Port Orange would get or Dunlaughton would get or Williamson's now going to get in all directions or Clyde Morris with the overflow and say, you know what? Two houses an acre. I still think that's way too much. But why are we not going the other direction? Why are we trying to concede and give up more for what? The developer, the banker. And the attorney. All they're going to make a lot of money. Everybody else, all Port Orange citizens are going to sit here and scratch our heads why our water infrastructure is stressed. Why everything floods more? Why do we have to do so many crazy things to offset this a lot of stuff? So I thought I had two weeks to plan for this. This was two minutes. But this is kind of absurd to say we're going the other direction. Please don't destroy the last little bit of Port Orange that we have out near Karachi Field and develop it somewhere. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Adam.

Anybody else from the public wish to speak to this item? No, but once, twice, back to council. All right, Reid, comments? Oh, boy.

Might be a Tim question. Might be for the applicant. But you're talking about how the overall structure of this is to keep the caps that were there before. and to keep the same ranges. So same, I'm assuming that means same residential per commercial, per et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Why would you not want to change some of those percentages? The world is not what it was in 2002. I get why we're here. I understand why we're saying, hey, look, let's move this part here and that part there, etc. That makes sense to me. You have all this big land and you're going to build a shed here and now you're going to put the shed on the other side of the house. I understand that being part of the ask. What I don't understand is Like you said, Amazon was not a thing. The amount of industrial that's needed now, especially here in Port Orange, we're mostly a residential community that likes to go out to restaurants and go golfing and things like that. Why would you not... want to adjust some of those percentages spread out the number of units per acre and the lot size and then you know and not be forced to have this property sitting there that's gonna for industrial that'll probably never sell anyway like i don't understand the thought process there and you're welcome to speak to that you know i'm sure you're going to want to hear everybody and come back up here and answer some questions um The problem that I see, you know, sure, you go down to 40 and you add 10 feet to the back. I mean, I understand where people are saying that. From where we're at here, the current residents of Port Orange are voicing to me that these new developments coming in are not providing any value to them. and that they feel like they're being just completely ignored so that we can continue to add more residents. And we both know Williamson is not ready. Now hopefully that bridge gets widened, we get four lanes, it's gonna make everything better for all residents. I like to envision and try to think 10, 15 years down the road. But the thing that I'm hearing from residents is that we're not doing enough Not that they don't want to see anything ever get built ever, but they want it to be something more inclusive and provide more quality and they want to feel like it benefits the city as a whole. And from the first draft of this proposal that I'm seeing here tonight, I don't know who I can look in the face and say, I truly see that yet. But I also, I believe in you, obviously. We've worked on things before in the past. I think we've gotten a few good projects. I believe that you guys can work on this and get it somewhere a little more acceptable. But for me, I'm really having a hard time with it coming out the gate right now. Crazy.

Yeah, looking at what 2002 held, you know, you had 610 acres of about 610 acres of the 1200 acres was set aside for conservation. Now I know that was in 2002, half conservation. So when you're looking at this land flip and putting things where it needs to be and whatnot, my question is right off the bat, where's the conservation? It's not in there. So that's a problem right off the bat. And then you go into the 40 foot versus 50 foot not to name a community, but I got a community that's behind me that is on 40 foot lines and short driveways, and you cannot drive through that community. It is absolutely horrible. And I think Port Orange deserves better. I do not believe that should ever be built again, like the community that I'm referencing to. Some of us know it, and it shouldn't be. It's, in my mind, when you go down that road, and you make the mistake of turning onto that road, I can just see fire and police having issues because there's cars parked on both sides going all the way down it. Cars get mirrors knocked off of it. I hear that phone call and emails every now and then. So to say that and make things smaller and shrinking in those natures, for me it's an absolute no. The community that you guys have brought forward to us before, off of Madeline and Williamson, that project we've talked about, hashed out and did things with it, and it was coming together beautifully. But I don't see any of that vision in something of this. So my question is, is the vision got lost? I agree with Reed though. I understand flipping the land around to make sense of residential homes versus the commercial. Putting the land properly in place to sell it, I get. But how we sell it is my concern. So yeah, it needs to be restructured.

I don't see this as just a little Flipping of, you know, colors, especially when it comes to the commercial, the industrial, all changing to residential. So when I see that, I mean, I look at how many more houses. I'm about the impact and the impact that each house has on the system. May it be water meters, fire trucks, ambulances, garbage, what have you. So you go and you pack 40 foot lots and you're going to back garbage cans and every other thing down these streets. It's just doesn't, it's, this is not what I have vision for this. So, so my, my basic thing to this is I'm absolutely against any of this density. Okay. Nevertheless, we've already changed the layout of residential into the business area, north of Williamson there, which I never, never envisioned that being houses there myself. But I, I will never agree to a 40-foot lot, and I'll never agree to, I don't like 50-foot lots. So we need to come back to something less dense, and that's all I'm going to really agree to is less impact to the system, not more. That's all I got.

So there I am. I just moved up in my seat, and my elbows are on the counter, staff. We're taking what's currently being asked of us is to take 75 plus an additional 73 of a combination of office, industrial and commercial retail, which is totaling over 100 and almost 150 acres and turning it to residential with eight units per acre and then being asked to reduce it to 40 foot lots. That's along the 95 corridor along McGinnis, that whole section that was going to be, if you look at the previous map. So, um, and looking at the previous map already approved, right? They could go out and develop this right now. There's eight units on 61 acres and then another eight units per acre on 31 acres. And then of course there's the 45 acres and the 55 acres of the West town center. I don't know what the zoning on that really is. Maybe staff can help me on that, but we're taking and adding, we're removing the commercial, removing the, the industrial, and then, and then being asked to add eight units per acre. on 140 plus acres that's adding a lot more homes than what that eight units per acre on 61 acres is now unless on this other map correct me if i'm wrong we're keeping eight acres on 53 eight units per acre on 53 acres we're shifting eight units per acre on 46 acres so that's going to be there and then adding another hundred in 40 plus acres of eight units per acre. And then another 16 units per acre on 14 acres. I've never envisioned Port Orange to look like this ever.

I mean, maybe try to help you. It seems like you're headed towards both no on more than just the 40 acre or 40 foot lot. So just help a little bit. Matt can help if I get off track on this. But they have Right now, as you just mentioned, for a certain amount of density. And what they're asking for doesn't increase the density of the 1,200 acres above what they're already allowed to do. So different than the Paytas property where you went from a piece of land that was allowed 10 or 12 houses and he asked for 120. These guys are allowed, I'm just going to use some round numbers, 3,000 houses. And they're offering, they're just trying to shuffle it. So I think I understand where Councilman Green was coming from. It's not the overall density. I don't want it that dense in any one area. Even if you were allowed 3,000 homes, I don't want 3,000 of them clustered on top of each other in a tight area. Because they're not asking for increasing the density of what they were allowed in the past. You don't like how they're laying it out. At least I'm trying to understand where you're coming from. Because the town center area there now is allowed 16 to 24 units an acre. It's more dense than what they're asking for. So they have an area for high density in there now where that was going to be that road Tim mentioned where if you loop down the off I-4 and come in that way, that was going to be the town center and it was going to be very high density. So it was set up for that. They're just reshuffling the deck and moving them around. What I'm hearing council say very clearly is we don't want to see some small lot, single family developments with stuff crammed in. At least one of you said I'd rather not see any apartments. So I'm trying to help them if you go down the path of saying no, because you're not saying, hey, this is more density than it's allowed. You're saying, and you have a right to say as a legislative body, I don't like the way it's being laid out. I would rather you do something that's better for our community that fits better with the vision that's still consistent with that. And if I'm reading that correctly, I'm just trying to make sure that I'm helping you with the details because you could spend a lot of time going into the weeds of this piece and that piece, but we can help probably guide them better if your direction is we just don't like how you've come back with reorganizing it. And it sounds like there's not really a problem with We don't expect to see a bunch of US foods and Amazons lying in the interstate. That doesn't seem to be the problem. The problem is, how do you put the houses out there? What do they look like? What do they feel like? How do emergency vehicles get around in there? What does the community feel like? That seemed like that was what I'm hearing is the concern, if I'm correct.

Well, I can speak for myself. I'm completely against a 40-foot lot. I can't stand 50-foot lots. You want to know what I like? I got that. I just thought you were also heading towards denying the whole thing, so I was trying to... Well, it's not going to have an approval from me because the way it sits right now, no. I mean, I don't like... I'm not against the layout. I understand that I'm against the 40-foot lots.

completely they will be able to get an apartment and I'm against that as well I do not want an apartment complex in there and then the applicant may want to get up and clarify and rebut some of what I was trying to say but I was just trying to help as you were going down that path if we're gonna send them back to the drawing board so my that's okay no I don't you know I'm gonna give you a chance here just you know

as a council and as residents in the city we we have seen what comes in projects in this format right you're seeing these diagrams and visions and things like that and we can appreciate the amount of work because that we also see what turns out to be the result and in our community these smaller lots that create density in a smaller area, even though, yeah, you might have got a nice bigger open park, They're very problematic for us. They're problematic for pedestrians. They're problematic for parking. These more dense communities and even our, especially our apartment complexes are a much higher draw on our community resources for public safety, police, fire, EMS. Like it's, I don't know what the actual numbers are, but it doesn't make, I mean, you just, we see it and it's a massive difference. Also, our community, as the city has grown over decades and decades and decades, we have become used to being kind of the bedroom community of Volusia County, right? Similar to a lot of places in Ormond Beach. But the structure and the desire of our neighborhoods are a little bit more elbow room, a little bit more space. I've never had, not one time, ever, ever, ever had a resident come up and say, God, I wish we had more apartments. We just need more apartments. We need more townhomes, close, close together townhomes with tiny streets and nowhere to park. We just never get that, right? And I understand there's a whole discussion about affordable housing. I can appreciate that too. So I understand all the complexities, but right now, and it's been very consistent in our community, That density thing is a problem. We're looking for ways to get away from apartments. We're looking for ways to get away from 40 and 50 foot lot neighborhoods that just don't work. It's funny, Tracy mentioned the one where he lives. I was thinking the exact same thing. We just had a conversation last weekend with a gentleman in that neighborhood. And the problem is once the neighborhoods are built, there's no space to go back and fix what those problems are. And they are just never ending frustration. So anyway, that's what you're seeing up here and that's what you're feeling from us. We are also extremely aware come November, there could be a lot of changes in how municipalities see projects because you're going to have to figure out how to fund resources for these types of things. So we're going to, I think, selfishly, we're looking for projects that we believe we will see a lesser need and draw, heavy draw on resources. And when I say resources, I'm talking public safety and all the utilities and all those kinds of things. And I do I travel all over the state of Florida and I see where there are communities in our state where that high density in a small area with commercial on the bottom and three levels or four levels of residential. And I see that it does work in some of those places, but those communities seem to have desired that, whereas our community doesn't desire that for this community. So that's some of our reservations and some of our thoughts. And as you guys can see, you guys have definitely provoked some pretty deep thought.

Mayor, before you turn it over, because I think it's important as to what the initial presentation was, and you were talking about the other cities in Florida. I think this is probably the biggest challenge. Two of the examples you used, okay? Lake Nona was acquired in 1996, right? And was developed in 2001, is when they first started breaking ground. It was 2005 when that medical city got done, right? And then Baldwin Park, 1998, is when it was actually founded as a city. And it was 2002 when they first started doing... Or 2001, they started doing development there, right? Port Orange was founded... in 1867, right? And there's such an old part of the city here because there are neighborhoods where that idea of having smaller lots and everything else, where it can work, it'd be great for a young family community and all these other things. It's just we're not a 30-year-old city. We're technically a 150, 60-year-old city here. And it's just that's what makes it so challenging. So I just want to point that out because I think that's a key detail in the presentation is we're not comparing apples to apples. We're comparing apples to poured oranges, right? So no pun intended, but... Go ahead.

For the record, Jessica Gallacopp called 1 Daytona Boulevard, Daytona Beach, Florida. I don't like to claim that a land office, although I hang out there a lot. I just wanted to touch on a little bit of what Councilmember Foley touched on, which is kind of the bigger picture first, and then kind of diving into what we're looking at, which is that this property is owned by the same family corporation that originally planned for Williamson et al, right? And so when we look at planning overall, We are looking at Rose. We are looking at recreation. We are looking at that master plan. This is not a group that is obviously they've been holding it for a very long time, as noted. And it is not because they could not have sold it somewhere along the way. It is that there is a kind of exacting level of vision that they are trying to implement that we have worked really closely with staff. And we want to kind of describe that this site layout The vision behind this is a vision around a 100-acre park dedication in the core of it that we are working with staff on. And we've been working with staff on this for two years. That has informed every kind of design iteration that this has gone through. This project will include the extension of Crossy Boulevard from its existing road point out to Tomoka Farms. This will also include the eventual extension to Madeline over to Shuns across the interstate. This family is the same family that has ensured as development has moved forward on both sides of 95 that corridor for the Madeline extension exists. So the landing pad that was negotiated when Walker's Green was sold where they had two paths, kind of coordination with the county. We talk about Williamson and the widening. The current phase of Williamson Boulevard is using another property owned by this family for the stormwater for the current expansion. And we've already met with the county about the stormwater needs for the bridge widening. um because that will be located likely on our clients property that they also hold in port orange and so it is not lost on us that the overall vision and infrastructure needs is something that we have to coordinate very closely with the city and county on and this developer has continued to do that for over I am not that old, so I will let others speak to it on the gray hair aspect, but they've been doing it for decades. I think that as it relates to the benefit, obviously it will be a separate item, but that contemplation of the park expansion kind of informed that development program. when you ask why we did not change the allocation of uses percentage wise you know i think that one there's a hesitation to change this to a kind of a core residential area because there are changes coming at the state level where a mix of uses can be helpful i want to point out that that workplace district and i think it's not shown on the map so it's not really clear but it's in the backup the workplace district allows multi-family development So that change we are making to remove workforce and change it to community reduces density. That density currently there is 16 units an acre. So all of the workforce acreage, that district allows multifamily up to 16 units an acre. So when we're looking at this change, that overall density cap remains, like we said, and I think what we're looking at is not... Could you say that again?

I want to actually write that note down. Yep. Because I think that's important. So the workplace that is on the 2002 version...

allows multifamily up to 16 units an acre. That high, high density. And that's in the backup of the LDC, where you can see the workplace district. That allows 16 units per acre? Correct. and so the the shift and you're looking at it we don't want to open the cities so i think that's that's a key distinction when we came in the workplace dayster contemplates multi-family and it contemplates town homes now your townhome lots are allocated at 20 feet in width. So the areas that we are looking at, that smaller lot size, that 40 feet, it is not a distinction of estate lots versus a 40. The vision is adjacent to that park. If you have supporting retail, you have a community park. And you've seen those examples. And I understand that Port Orange is unique. but i think that when you prove that residential works beside public spaces it's a smaller product so that smaller product is either apartments which would be three-story high density townhomes which are permitted or a 40-foot lot product that is twice the width of a townhome lot and you don't touch your neighbors I think we can certainly work with staff on, you know, this is first reading. It's an introduction. We have heard some concerns loud and clear. If the concern is if we approve this in the overall community district, we can't control where it goes in that vision, even if it's what we intend. As a lawyer, I'm inclined to say with language, you can make almost anything happen. Which is that we could work on some restrictions on implementing those 40s where the townhomes adjacent to kind of the public spaces, that vision piece that we're looking at. Because we don't want to be in a situation where 20 years from now we have an entire neighborhood along the interstate of 40 foot lots. That's not the vision. That's not the intent. So we're happy to work with staff on that vision statement. And it is just adjacent to that park and kind of that coordination where you can have 20 foot town homes. Why do you hate 40 foot single family in lieu of a 20 foot town home? Why do you like attached product versus that detached small product? and kind of acknowledging that 16 units an acre that exists now. And I know right now it is, it's undeveloped. And so the conceptual comparison of 16 units an acre across the workforce district versus what we're proposing is a little bit hard to kind of put your head around. But I think that that is where we are, right? When this came in from the county, under the county, which is very rare, as Wayne noted, the exact entitlements that are there today are what existed under the county zoning when it came in under the interlocal agreement. So they matched the trip cap for those entitlements and it hasn't changed since 2002. No increase in density, no increase in allocation of units or trips. That's why we want to keep that. We want to keep the mix of uses so that the city has kind of a backup of non-residential use types in case there are changes to tax revenue sources or anything like that. So we kept that in place. And we're really asking for the city to invest with us in a vision. And if we did not do a good job of outlining that vision by text, we are happy to do that and bring it back.

Yeah.

Again, Mark Watts. And I think one of the things, as Jessica said, this is kind of unique. You don't typically have a property owner, usually you're here talking about a rezoning or an annexation or a PUD or something of that nature. You have an entire section of your code that governs this section of the city. one of the I think significant benefits into the mr. Dobie's comments about you know I experienced the traffic coming over here my eye doctor is over at Airport Road and and Taylor so I'm over here for appointments and things of that nature we're over here get you know nieces and stuff that come over and go to soccer academies and stuff at crossing Park One of the things that I think I see in kind of the long, speaking to the point of planning for kind of that long range vision, that long range future, To give you some of the historic context, my dad worked on the original Williamson agreements with the county. This has been going on, and it was with the Karasi family. It was with their predecessors, the cousins of state. So this, you've had a long-term opportunity here to kind of work through how we plan for this area. But one of the biggest benefits I see in what happens out here is I think consistently when I'm over here working on projects or even over here going shopping or going to meetings, we all experience the traffic. We all are the traffic. But what you have when you do a plan of this nature is you have the opportunity to also plan for those alternatives. And Jessica mentioned a minute ago the extension of Crossy Boulevard and the planning that's gone into this with the Madeline extension and reserving those corridors. Those are there. Those are dedicated. They will continue to be dedicated as this moves forward, but this connection to me you know listening to a lot of the the long-term discussion of dunlott and taylor and williamson and some of the the choke points that we all experienced there is that this is one of those points you know i think mayor we we talked you know some some couple years ago about the cost of that overpass widening over williamson or the cost of that madeleine overpass to get it from the east side to the west side This is probably the lowest cost opportunity that we all have to move traffic out to another north-south corridor that isn't Williamson by making those connections with Madeline, by making the connections with Karasi Boulevard. And that's part of this overall plan moving forward. And I think the only way we do that is through the partnership that's been in place for at least three generations now between the family and the city. So we're happy to continue working on that.

Anything else? Thank you. Dr. Council. Final comments, Lance.

Well, again, man, I commend the Karasi family. They've been a great partner over the years, and I appreciate everything they've done. They've also seen this city grow, and they've seen this city mature, and I think that this is an opportunity that we need to to set something aside that is gonna be better when it's matured. I would like to see them decrease density, straight up. Decrease density, let's decrease impact. Impact is width of lots. And so if we can work on those two things, I would say bring it back. But as of right now, I'm not good.

Okay, Sean? So I'm a little confused. On the map from, the previous map, Yeah, no, if I can have maybe the attorney come up, or staff, whatever is easiest. Sorry, this, and here's why I'm passionate about this, and I love what you, I think you guys are fantastic. You're explaining it very well, and the same with our staff. This is our last piece. This is it. We're built out. I mean, we obviously South Williamson has spoken for with ICI. You got the other side. He owns that. They're doing a fantastic job. We got a great opportunity with a commercial piece coming off a 95 interchange that's going there to help. We don't have a traffic problem. We have a patient's problem. I've driven it east to west 100 times filming it all times of the day. We have people who are impatient. That's it. We don't have failing intersections. So I'm not worried about the traffic. And we know that the density is not the number of trips aren't changing. We've, they're already in place. I get that. This is, and I know the Crossy family has done a phenomenal job working with this county on a lot of projects. And I'm, kudos to them. But they don't build the houses. They sell them to some builder who's not from here. And if you're going to tell me, anyone from that family, that they're real happy with Westport, I got a real problem. That's not what we, that, I'm, infuriated that this was approved 20 years ago now my question is the office industrial on the old map you're telling me right now and right as it sits it says it's it says office industrial 75 acres you can actually drop an apartment complex in that

So there are two levels to the PCA district. The regulations that are in the LDC backup that we are modifying relate to the, what we call kind of the major districts. So the major districts are the West Town Center, community workplace, and neighborhood.

Hold on one second. The West Town Center, okay, is the orange? Yes. Okay. So what can go in West Town Center is, define that. Because the blue says clearly residential. West Town Center, what's that make up?

I'm sorry, the problem is the broad categories. That's what it says. But you've got this, it's like a 20 page code section. It's got a ton of detail in it. And it's 20 something years old. So it's written. And at one point, I knew that but I haven't been in this thing. And it hadn't been my role. But just to give you an example, the purple section, White Palm and the springs are in that purple section. There's two big apartment complexes in the purple section.

So when you go down there and look, it's it clearly says multifamily. Like it was zoned for multi-family.

Well, it was zoned for workplace or whatever it was called. I can't remember. It just allowed... The problem is it's a mixed-use district, and so there were ranges. If you look in there, there's a series of, you know, between 30% and 60% has to be that, and 20% and 30%. So it allows you to move the things around. It's a The planning concept has been around for years. When I started in Hilton Head, sea pines and all those places are built off the same form of planning with a large plan development background where you can move parts and pieces around them. So it's hard to follow without understanding the depth of it. But he can give you the density. The brown areas, I understood, that's the one that goes 16 to 24 residential units. It also allows a whole bunch of commercial options. And so you can make it way more dense apartments. You could have made it way more dense commercial, or you could find something in the middle. It allows you to have a whole lot. Again, the challenge is going to be because you really don't know what you could get. but it allowed the flexibility to work with the market.

And in the backup, just kind of on the track changes, it's page 8 of 38 is the density, and page 7 of 38 is the West Town Center district overall. You're going to love this answer that it cross-references other zoning districts, so it's not a clear list, which is lovely. But permitted uses, right? They range from general public use, agricultural uses, anything allowed in your R3H, which is your medium density residential, up to multifamily. Your community commercial district, I think is what CC is. Multi-use buildings, so that's your multifamily and then your commercial above it. Bed and breakfast ends, sorry, apartments above commercial on the ground floor. parking garages community recreation and it says densities as noted are allowed at a maximum density of 16 units an acre they can go up to 24 units an acre in that town center and it has the workplace the only the main distinction on workplace is it has the industrial district included some of the heavier commercial districts included as a base zoning and that workplace district only allows 16 units an acre there's not that provision for up to 24. okay

So we're going to be moving that to residential neighborhood commercial. So there could be some small commercial piece in there to accommodate the houses. And all right. Um, well, I mean, when, if this got approved tonight and then next thing, you know, a developer came in and said, we want to do a 16 unit apartment complex there. We're we're, we have nothing. We're done. They can do it. Wayne, and this might be a question to you. As a council, can we rezone this? Can we change the densities in this as a council?

No.

So what was done in 2002 is set in stone.

Those are entitlements. They own the land with the entitlements to use the land. Very good.

And I ask these questions so the public can hear this and understand why we have to make decisions we have to make up here. It's an education for me. It's an education for them. And now it's, oh, them guys just getting paid by developers, right? No, we can't change what someone else did in 2002 when it comes to this. But we can do things to make it better. All right. I want to tell, I want you guys to understand I'm not in favor of 40-foot lots, okay? Madeline Commons behind the elementary school, which I knew you were kind of against, I remember the planning board, dropped through there. I can show you pictures now. It's not something I'm interested in. And if that's what we're going to get out there because someone else made that decision in 2002, it's on them. But I'm not for 40-foot lots. I mean, yeah, I'm not for 40-foot lots. I'm stuck with 50 right now, which I'm very disappointed about, but there's nothing I can do about it, obviously. I was just in a house that's 40-foot wide.

Do you guys have anything else? Yes. Go ahead, Tracy.

Jessica, anytime you want to come and ride a bike or walk through Sunset Cove with me, I will show you 100 residents that would disagree with a 40-foot loft. Saying that, the issue that we have is y'all have visions of places over in Orlando. We're not Orlando. We're not Windermere. We are Port Orange. So saying that is single family homes is what we need, what we're looking for. So 40 foot, I'm just dead against. I agree with Lance on density. How we get away from the density is crucial for approving things. And talking about the West Town Center, what came to mind, and you probably would agree with this, the concept of Venetian Bay. the bottom floors of all the businesses and then all the apartments above it. That's what your thoughts are, if I was picturing as a possibility.

I will say that is, I think, what is contemplated in the code from 2002. That is not the vision of the development team. So we think it's important to have a town center set aside. I think that in the current working concepts, the town center concept, the use kind of allocation doesn't change but in general and this is my thought but as you saw in venetian bay and as you see elsewhere marina brand anywhere that tries it the actual vertical integration of commercial and residential doesn't work in our market it works in college towns but other than that i think they struggle so that is not something that we typically advise okay

All right. Well, that's the concept. And like you said, 2002 is what the concept was. So there's a lot of stuff, I believe missing for the ideal of what you're trying to propose for us. Yeah, I'm just gonna leave it with that right now.

Great.

all right um well first off mark jess thank you guys this is obviously not the first project you brought forward and you're having you're having to really work hard for your money tonight but um karasi's been a great part for the city um for probably as long as i've been alive or maybe longer right um that's not lost on me um and it's also not lost on me that there there is a need for I'm moving around to the Legos, if you will, right? Taking them off the board and find a new place to put them. Clearly, my counterparts have voiced they're not okay with this 40-foot lot thing. What I want to ask you, we have a motion up here to approve that, which I think we can all see where it's going. Is it more beneficial, because this is not something, as I understand this, and anyone, Wayne, Matt, speak up, if this was to get denied, there's no waiting period as to how soon they could bring something else back, because it's not the same thing we were dealing with last month. They would be able to bring it back with a different proposal as soon as they have a new proposal together.

So I would say that I think that does restart a little bit of a process, and you just have to go back to planning board who recommended approval. I think that... Motions can always be amended.

That's what I'm getting at. That's what I want to ask you and Mark. Again, you guys have been great to work with in the past. I want to be great to work with here because in the end, I think we can get somewhere that's going to work and can be a benefit for not only the crossy family and everyone here on the team but also as well as for the residents um would you prefer it be tabled like what what's going to give you the best process to go back to the to go back and be like all right let me bring something more amendable to to council and i just want to get your thoughts on that here and give you a chance to say because i think we can all see what's what's going to happen

and mark has been doing this longer than me so i will let him weigh in but i have found that the the vote on first reading is not necessarily um a vote to approve the project it's a vote to move it forward to a second reading and if the motion was you know move this forward beyond first reading with the direction to work with the applicant and staff to look at boom boom boom that gives us the our marching orders okay

yeah and then the directive i think from staff standpoint is when these things are done and when we've addressed those points that are raised from the council then it gets scheduled for the second week okay and that's what that's where my head was too as well um

But I wanted to make sure I gave you a chance to kind of speak on that. Because it's, and I know I'm about to, oh, go ahead.

Well, I was just saying, I mean, one of the things, you know, this is where this process occurs, right? I mean, we can all, you know, sit in a conference room with staff and look at planning manuals and look at what the code currently says and how we think it makes sense to tweak. And a lot of the changes in here came from that process. But you ultimately are the ones that, you know, make the decision.

and this is the opportunity that we get to come in front of you and have that conversation so i think that's you know extremely helpful if that direction is kind of given to us in in the context of the first reading green if i can say something just to help you along with if you thinking about adjusting your motion i didn't make the motion but yeah that's me oh okay tracy um or whoever would be willing to amend a motion. Uh, I would be in favor of the way it sits without the 40 foot lots and the removal of the 16 residential units per acre that you have in the middle of there.

And then I just want to clarify the location. You're looking at that little strip, which is beside the town center, right?

So it's like a, yeah, there's an arrow and it says residential up to 16 acres, 14. Yes.

Put the map back up so we can make sure we're all talking about the same piece property.

Sorry, I'm referencing with the house. So basically, my thought process is it helps them make this a more marketable piece of property for today's markets. It keeps us off 40-foot lots, which I am a no. I'm telling you all right now. You made it very clear to me you were too. And I don't want to see another apartment complex out there. Now, what you do in West Town Center and stuff like that, I guess there's no control over that because, you know, But that would be, I would be in favor. So then I would certainly be in favor of that to remove the apartment, the residential up to 16 units per acre and go to 50 foot lots as it is now. And it didn't make sense to me because there's really nothing else we can do.

And I'll say... from my perspective, you know, we all have different visions for what we'd like to see. I don't have the biggest concern when it comes to apartment complexes. I have concerns when there's not a lot of green space, right? I personally have stated many times, and I know there's conflicting opinions, you know, that's what makes this great is we all work together. I'd rather go a little vertical than to go out. because that gives me more natural grass, more land, more natural water when it comes to storm water. So my vision has always been to actually go up, not out. And so that's the same reason I have similar concerns with 40 foot lots when it comes to width. I don't really have the concern on the units per acre. So if you were to bring me that back, but you were to increase the amount of minimum conservation, Those are trades that I'm willing to make. I mean, we have five different opinions up here. But just as you're thinking through the process of what might come back in the event that Tracy decides to amend his motion, just let you know where my head is.

No, that's fair. And I think part of what you lose when you're looking at a planning map like this also is some of that. I mean, there is green space included in the overall plan. There are green space standards within your code language as well. I think it's a 30% in this entire district that has to be maintained. There's a 10% conservation. You know, when we're talking about that cluster of uses and those range of uses, there's a 10% conservation requirement that's in there that's not changing. So those things are in there. as jessica said a minute ago and we're working with your staff to plan this around a 100 acre park expansion so i think coming up with the illustration that you know maybe shows you that as we move forward as well it would be helpful it would probably help across the board here okay good

So Matt, make sure I'm doing this right. What we're looking at proposal here is to amend the motion on ordinance 2026 dash eight to negate 40 foot lots and to make sure that it stays at the 50 foot lots or would it be more straightforward to have them withdraw the motion and make a brand new one that says approval with

I can make about the 40 foot lot and that one specific section at 16 units an acre removed.

If you remove your motion, I'll be happy to make a new one.

Okay. We'll remove the motion on Amendment 2026-8. Who's second?

Sean. You want me to draw your second? Yeah.

We're removing it.

Draw your second. Do you agree that you're second to remove it? Yes. Okay, so we have a little removal of the motion and the second.

right and then i will make a motion for approval um with the condition of coming back with at least 50 foot width on the lots um and to for you guys to continue to work with staff uh on the feedback that you have provided here tonight and to bring us something else at second reading i second it does that cover what you were looking for no

didn't it covered half of it um like i said we have an apartment complex out there we actually three of them out there and um my son lived in one it's a disaster a complete disaster um so i'm completely against that i'm not in favor of an apartment complex or 16 units on an acre so

That's your second. Any other comments from council? I look forward to call the roll.

Councilman Foley? Yes. Councilman Gephardt? No. Councilman Green? No. Vice Mayor Grabs?

No.

They're still there? No. 4-1. That was the motion.

That was the agenda item motion.

There can be another motion.

You have another motion? Yeah, I certainly would.

Okay, because I like where we're headed here. I apologize. I'd like to make an a motion to approve ordinance number 2026-8 requiring that the lots would be remain at 50 feet wide and that there would not be a 16 units per acre allowed.

that specific section and that on the map correct along mcginnis what do we call in that spot what do we so that we're making sure we're clear yeah it was intended as the area where the those units would be adjacent to the park right but i kind of feel like for the motion we need to make sure we're properly it's definitely enough

If it's the pocket along McGinnis Avenue labeled as residential up to 16 units an acre.

And that's the only place that says that there's 16 units per acre on this map. Correct.

But noting that the town center does permit that.

Correct. And there's nothing we can do about that. So this motion would be keeping what you want agreed. in the town center, which makes sense.

Do you want to put the max density on that 16, take it down to something like 8 or 12?

Well, consistent with everything else, 8 units per acre.

I'll second that. I was just going in good faith. But if you want to do more at the Apple now, that's fine. I believe they're going to bring that back forward anyway with my motion.

Okay, so we have a motion and a second.

All right. Is the applicant good with that? Motion and a second? Yep. Any other comments from council? Questions? No? We'll call the roll on that motion.

Councilman John, or Councilman Foley? Yes. Councilman Kephart? Yes. Councilman Green? No. Vice Mayor Grubbs? Yes. Mayor Stillner?

No. 3-2. The motion passes. Thank you.

Appreciate your time tonight. No problem, guys.

We, I know we have more to do, more work. I promise this will be brief. We're going to take a five-minute break. All right, sorry to break up the social gathering, but we got a few more things we got to get taken care of. We're going to be on item number 20, first reading of ordinance number 2026-6.

That's an ordinance of the city of Port Orange, Volusia County, Florida, proposing amendments to the city of Port Orange charter, setting a charter amendment referendum, amending the charter of the city of Port Orange to change the qualification requirements for city council members, including the mayor, amending the residency requirements, providing for authority to resolve disputes related to qualification and election, Provide for an election to be held November 3rd, 2026. Unqualified electors of the city may vote for or against the charter amendments. Provide for ballot questions. Provide for public notice. Provide for severability, scrivener's errors, repeal of conflicting ordinances, and an effective date.

Can I get a motion and a second to put this item on the floor, please?

Get a motion for ordinance number 2026-6. I'll second.

Motion to approve ordinance number 2026-6. And a second. I'm going to have Matt walk us through this a little bit more, but this was something that I had asked him to look into quite some time ago. Interestingly enough, while it sounds very simple and the concept that the people of a city expect the elected officials to be residents of the city, it turns out there's been some pretty odd stuff all over the state of Florida. And so this is more so just clean up and making it what lot of us would say is common sense as we all know it's not spelled out there's always going to be an avenue or a way of somebody trying to circumvent what the intent is so i had asked matt to look into this i had i had seen a few things not only locally but but around the state and i'm like okay this just doesn't make sense so matt can you kind of walk us through what this is really about

yeah or spell it out for us on what we're looking at yeah and it seems really complex and that's because you're changing the charter normally uh if this was just a code in your ordinances this would be two rings it would be done we wouldn't have anything else to do because this is a charter requirement that's changing uh that's why there's the need for the referendum so this would be placed on the ballot in three distinct questions like the mayor kind of foreshadowed. The biggest thing was that our charter is, it clearly states that you have to be here for 12 months. You have to be a resident city for 12 months. We assume that means just before the election, right? Or, you know, even beyond there, but it doesn't state that anywhere. So the problem is, you know, with that language, the court's bound to that language. So in the event of a challenge, they're not gonna read that things into it that aren't there. And right now it's not there, so. ironically if somebody just randomly kind of stopped in Port Orange for 12 months there's an argument to be made that that would actually meet the qualification which is not what we think the intent was so this is to the mayor's point kind of a cleanup in our minds in that we we all think the intent was that it was the 12 months immediately preceding the qualifying period that you live in the city of Port Orange so that's what it does secondarily on that qualification period for the residency We don't really have anything in the charter either that says you've got to submit something. There's no submission of proof or any affidavits. This adds to not only is it defining what that period of time is, it also says you actually have to provide proof and an affidavit that says, yeah, I've been here. Here's some justification for it. We put a few different ways you can prove that in there. It's also silent to who decides disputes related to qualification and election, so we're just making that clear as well, that that's the city council that would solve those disputes if the dispute comes up. so because these are are kind of you know cleanup items we try to break them down and make them as simply stated as we can so you'll see in the ordinance you have the three different uh ballot questions you'll actually see them again if approved here tonight you'll see those again on in november um on the ballot and if those uh go through and they're uh you know a majority of the the voters agreed to these amendments to your charter, then those will actually go into place January 1 of 2027. It's just a mechanism for actually amending your charter. We haven't done so in a very long time, but as the mayor mentioned, this was kind of one that came up on a question. I've done some research on the case law, and it was very clear that we've seen similar language go in a different direction, where the court said, I'm sorry, that's what it says in your charter. He's qualified, and it's kind of an absurd result. based on what we all think is the intent of that provision. So hopefully this is gonna clean that up. Hopefully the voters can understand that. We spent a lot of time, but you only get 75 words to explain all that, and you get 15 words in a title, and that's the limits we gotta live by on a ballot. So hopefully we did that, and we'll see what happens in November.

There was one that, and I don't have all the details, But there was one in Florida where somebody ran or qualified to be elected in a city who didn't live in the city, but because of ambiguous language, was able to say, well, I used to live there years ago. So theoretically, the concept here would be somebody could say, well, I used to live in Port Orange like seven, eight years ago, and they can get on the ballot and run for a seat. Now, if they were elected, they'd have to have residency here before they're sworn in. Clearly that's not the concept. That's not what the intent and what most people, in fact, as I've asked people about this and I'll say, what do you think? They're like, that's absurd. I agree, but you've got to have the language that clarifies that. So that's all this is, is just to say, hey, listen, if you're going to seek election to the city council, you need to live in the city at least 12 months prior to qualification, show some kind of proof or documentation of that, and that the governing body, or am I saying that right, or the body that would review that if there was a dispute would be the current city council for something like that. Anyhow, that's what that's about. Any questions for Matt on this?

No, I think just as best as we can clear this up is better than leaving it ambiguous. So I'm all good with this.

If this passes and it goes on the ballot and someone asks us as a council member, are we allowed to speak on it?

Oh, yeah. You can speak on it. I mean, there are certain electioneering requirements. So, like, we can't spend public funds. Once it is approved and placed on ballot, we can't expend public funds to do some sort of campaign for it. Right, right. But if someone calls me on it, we're allowed to do it. That's one of the exceptions to it, actually. If you're inquired on a specific, you know, proportion of – any portion of this, you can answer the question.

Thank you. The nice thing about this one is – All this is is us giving the voters a chance to say, yeah, we agree with the council.

Is there a certain percentage required for that to pass? Just 50%.

No super majority right now.

Okay. Thank you.

Am I missing? Yeah, I'm good. It's surprising we even have gotten this far. Ready?

Read? Nope. Anybody from the public want to speak to this? No? All right. Back to council. Final chance for questions. Let's call the roll.

Councilman Folding? Yes. Councilman Gephardt? Yes. Councilman Green? Yes. Vice Mayor Grove? Yes. Mayor Stiltzman?

Yes. 5-0. Item 21, approval of historic tree removal requests for the Harbor Landings Subdivision. Welcome back, Tim. Thank you.

You've been well.

I'm so happy, yeah.

We need a motion on this first.

Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you very much. Can I get a motion and a second to put the item on the floor, please?

Motion to put the approval of the historic tree removal request for harbor landings and subdivision?

Second. So a motion and a second.

Tim Bergen, Community Development. Just for a little location, the project is located on Ridgewood Avenue and about Sea Riverside Drive, just north of Seminole. I think anyone who's driven down Ridgewood knows this is a vacant property that has the concrete wall along Ridgewood, known as the wall property then. So this was rezoned, or basically a PUD was on this property since 1999. In 2019, City Council approved the Harbor Landings Master Development Agreement Concept Plan, which established a framework to develop 10 single-family homes on this property, along with 16 townhomes in this subdivision layout then. Fast forward, subdivision plans have been submitted, and once the tree survey was submitted, it was determined that there was at least 10 historic trees on this property. Prior to the recent submittal, there was a subdivision submitted two or three years ago, which staff had reviewed and got up to Planning Commission. Between the time between Planning Commission and this time, the new submittal there, at least three of the trees had went from a specimen tree under 36 inches to right to 36 inches and crossed into the threshold of being historic. Those trees are of course located within infrastructure of the subdivision or proposed lots and single family home locations there. There was also two trees that per the arborist report are damaged are either leaning and basically proposed possible risk to improvements in or also to have a there's one that has the split is basically three trunks growing out of one and that basically is showing signs of damage so The intent is to request by the applicant is to remove up to seven of the 10 historic trees. We've got the backup information in the staff report, kind of each tree and the justification or the request and reason why. I just wanted to point out that there will be the three trees that are currently historic are shown to be in common areas of the subdivision. And also too, there are a number of trees, I believe there's close to five to six along that area of Ridgewood that are close to either 34 to 35 inches right now. So over the course of time, those are in common area. Those will eventually grow into being historic trees, and they will be in part of the common area, which will be protected by conservation easements on that one. The applicant is here to explain their request in more detail, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

First of all, any questions for Tim? No. No. All right, let's hear from the applicant. Welcome.

Good evening, Mayor, Commissioners. Harry Newkirk, Newkirk Engineering, 1230 North US Highway 1, Ormond Beach. Glad to be here tonight. We've been working with Tim and the planning staff for a while on this project. And things have changed over time. Like you just mentioned, we did a tree survey and some of the trees got bigger. Slightly, you know, it gained an inch and then become historic trees. Also, as everyone knows, stormwater rules have changed, so you've got to do a little different stormwater stuff to make these sites work. Now we've got a site that butts two roads. One road's pretty high. The other road's pretty low. Riverside drives around two and a half elevation, two to threes and uh, us ones at nine nine. So that's kind of like the topography of the site rolling to the back. so tim didn't really got a job explaining this we had a proposal we have a proposal in for taking up to seven out seven out of the ten now two of them are diseased so you're really looking at eight historic trees and by looking at the plan we can make that adjustment to remove five so we could keep two more of them so it'd be a total of five coming off this plan we can make that work and you know from a perspective of driving down us-1 the way this is laid out with the drive retention ponds up front you get the look of all those trees so that's what you're going to see when you drive on us-1 you're going to see the the wall that's been there the trees are going to stay and these uh these units will just blend in this would be a unique development where most of the time you know we're doing the big pod's but the one was being explained just a minute ago you take down every tree you mow it all down that's kind of standard 101 with a big old piece of property but this one we're working within you know a small area we're going to save as many of these trees as much it's going to have a high character value to this development it won't look like a cookie cutter this isn't a cookie cutter this will look unique it'll have the grand entrance with these big trees which you don't typically see but we would like the city's support for removal of you know it's a touchy subject when you take down big trees i know that and uh the trees have the word keyword historic to it which also gets a little uh it's not it's a difficult word to deal with with trees but we're trying our best to make it work and have a development that still works within this piece of property um available to answer any questions we also have the owner here also too okay

So I want to make sure, because it looks like we probably need to alter the recommended motion. So what you're offering now is instead of a motion to remove seven, you guys can do with five? Five, yes. Okay, so we'll need to adjust that motion. So five removal of the 10 historic, and I get the two disease, and then there's going to be a replanting of 41 trees. Is that right?

Yes.

Okay. And those will have at least a four-inch caliper on that? They'll be mixed throughout the site. Okay. Okay. So we'll need to adjust that motion. Any questions for this gentleman?

So looking at the tree lot, what you're looking at as far as the structural defects on tree number two and number eight. And then you have tree number three that you're looking at root composition being compromised and the stability of it. so that brings you down to three trees right off the bat and i i see that with no issues at all my question is if you're sitting here telling us which other trees and we're looking at your site plans and you're trying to keep five my question to you is which one are you looking at to take out so the ones i was mentioning the two that we would keep would be uh tree four and three seven okay

and the ones that are coming out are in the middle of the lots and towards the riverside where the topo drops off you'd have to build a tremendously tall six foot like say five foot tree well and that's not a good idea you'll save the tree and then it'll come down in four years so when it it just Don't have high success on that small of an area putting a tree well in. It's not a good idea. High likelihood of survival is not great. Sean?

No, I just, this is another opportunity. This is an opportunity to... have something in a redevelopment area that'll just help us. I'm really excited about this development in the sense that it's been a vacant lot and so many different developers have come and gone and not been able to pull the trigger and get it done. In reference to the trees, I understand what we have to do. I mean, thank you for keeping the ones that we can and not mowing the whole thing down. I know you're going to put trees in there as well. So we're going to net more trees.

Correct.

Something that, you know, I'm excited about. And the layout looks great. And I see why you have to remove a couple of these to make it work.

Plants?

No, I'm okay with taking down the few that need to come down. What I'm not okay with is, um, I don't want a payment to the tree bank of $12,000. What I want is I want the 41 trees, but on the property. So, um, I'm not looking, I'm not looking at the money. I I'm looking at maturity of this project when it's grown. by you adding 41 plus trees. That's what I'm after. Okay.

He said the cost, it'll go down with saving two more trees. So it won't be exactly that number. I don't know if Tim knows what it is off the top of his head, but it'll be different with two more trees saved.

But it says here though, Wayne, 41 trees or a payment. I don't want a payment.

This is stating that if we're only taking five trees down, the number of replacements will go down there because the replacement number of trees is based on the number of historic trees being removed. So it would be a little bit less than that.

But not a payment.

One thing we do like to have that option then is because they will have to plant all the trees that are required by code for the subdivision, which includes the number of lots on the lots, the buffers there. And we like to have that flexibility because when we start adding more replacement trees onto a site that's already densely with trees in, we've run into this in the past where we've done that then, and then we have to go back and thin those trees out a few years later then. So we can work to make sure that we get the most replacement trees on there to have the greatest success, but we like to have that option in mitigation just in case we're not able to fit them all onto that site then.

Okay, but that's not something he can choose.

I think basically the priority will be to get as much replacement trees on that site then, and then what we basically have, if there's a balance left then, then that can be paid in mitigation, but the priority will be replacement trees.

Thank you. Alright, so we're going to have... Thank you. Don't go too far in case we have more questions. Anybody from the Robert's like royalty, so we give him first dibs. Go ahead, Robert.

Mayor, council members, Robert Reinhagen, 1425 Dexter Drive North. My concern is flooding. If we're going to tear these trees down and then fill in to put houses on them, where's the water going? And I don't have a lot of sympathy for cutting down historic trees. So I would like to see all the healthy ones remain. And if they have to modify the layout some, so be it. Thank you.

Anyone else? I appreciate you. Yes, sir. I'm the councilman.

I'm Davey Gibbs with GK Real Estate and Development. I'm the new owner and developer. And, you know, when we first looked at this property, you know, Ty is a good friend of mine and we kind of took it upon ourselves to kind of restructure it as far as the kind of homes. So now we're going to be, and I don't know if But so the town, the 10 single family, they're gonna be $3 million homes and 6,000 square foot. They're gonna be all modern, big windows. Surprise. There you go. So as you can see, the 10 single family, three story, very modern. And then even the townhomes, these are 3,600 square foot townhomes. So these are also high end townhomes. And this is going to be a very unique kind of little neighborhood And hopefully it'll be nothing but good things for Port Orange. So that's all I got to say. Thank you.

All right, thank you. Thank you. Anyone else want to speak to this item? All right, we're going to come back to council. All right, so council, we need to restructure this motion just a little bit. And between maybe Wayne and Matt, you guys can keep us on track here, because what I'm hearing from the applicant, we're going to go from the removal of seven trees down to five, which is great. And then I think there's also some interest in the either or portion of this, which no longer will be 41 trees. if I understood Tim, be a little bit less with the idea of focus more towards every single tree we can put back on the property versus the dollars. Did I say that right, Lance? Yeah. So can we get some guidance on structuring that motion?

And I don't think you have to know the specific amount of trees. I think you can say that it's the required amount of trees to mitigate the removal of five. And it may be worded to say that the intent is to maximize the replanting and only use the pavement as a last resort option if it can't be fit on site based on staff's analysis. So you're having staff make that decision.

So I'm going to say so moved. Do we need to take the first motion off the board? Oh, do we already have a motion? Okay, yeah, who made the...

So we'll withdraw the motion of approval of historical tree removal.

Do we need a second? Yeah. All right, the initial motion and second has been removed. Now we're going to put a new motion on there. Wayne, I'll get you to say that one more time and see if somebody moves out.

it's a removal of five trees allowed with the subsequent appropriate uh required amount of mitigation through replanting on the site to be maximized and that payment in lieu of the replanting is only allowed if staff determines that trees can't be fit on the site so moved second all right we have a motion in a second counseling anything else on this before we vote uh

no just a quick comment and we're going to vote but i just want to say that this is one of those pieces of property and for for 40 years i've always felt like somebody is missing it so i'm glad that you see the value and truly this is an area of our city on the far east side where we are very excited to see folks start reinvesting we've seen that a lot on the north end and i know it's only a matter of time to see it on the south end because there's so much potential there and reinvestment in the older parts of our city is really important so we're we are grateful that there are folks that see that vision as well and that are willing to make those kind of commitments so have the clerk call the roll councilman Foley no councilman Gephardt yes councilman Green yes vice mayor Grubbs yes mayor Stilton yes 4-1 good luck thank you so much thank you guys Item 22, fiscal year 2026-2027 budget discussions, preliminary five-year capital improvement plan and fleet replacement.

So Robin's going to get the PowerPoint. Perfect. Nothing like starting after 9 o'clock on a budget conversation. Feel the energy in the room from the department heads. Everybody can't wait to get into this. But just to start while she's getting it set up. So this is the traditional start of the budget process for us. So we always start with capital. And then we bring capital to you first. And then in July, we come back with the operating with all the departments, the total budget when we set the max millage. One of the reasons that we do that is that we don't have all the revenue sources known yet. At this point, we do have a preliminary tax roll information, but we don't get final until July. And then state revenues in addition to that account for a good bit of our funding More than half the general fund actually comes from other state revenue sources, and we generally don't know those until later in July. but it's important to bring capital to you it is the largest chunk of your budget outside of your personnel cost and it's one where you probably have the most ability to to really control and shape your budget so you make decisions on either construction projects or large pieces of equipment that are being bought and this chance this gives you the chance to do that tonight we're not asking for a vote or any formal decisions it's a presentation of a lot of information and then we'd like you to give us some feedback and direction to help us do a better job coming back in july with specific recommendations. You're going to see the CIP presented in a five-year format. That is the best practice to do so, just like you would want to do with your house when you're looking at large-scale purchases and projects. What you don't want to do is have a year where you've got to change the roof on your house, buy a new car, and have a kid's wedding in the same year. Same thing here. You don't want to go into one of your funds and have all these huge things having spikes in the budget is a bad way to do it. You're trying to keep it smoother. We haven't really done the best job of five-year planning in the past. With the transition and finance staff, we are going to go down that path now. So we're in the Prior years, if somebody came up with a good idea today, they just throw it into the next year's budget. And the discipline of a five-year plan is you go into out year number five and work your way up so council knows through a full five-year window what your costs are going to be and what your projects are going to be going forward. And having said that, what's currently showing in year one, the fiscal year 27, which is the upcoming budget, is what's funded. The other four years are planned but not actually funded. And what you're seeing in there are not formative recommendations. We sat down as all the staff and came up with these are ideas of what will help the city run, do better for the citizens and the community. But at this point, they're not all recommendations. I can tell you we don't have enough money in the general fund based on the current millage to pay for all that. So some of those things are going to have to get done in later years. So right now, I just wanted you to be able to see them and get your thoughts on them. And then we come back, we'll decide what we can and cannot afford. But at the current millage, we can't get there. One of the things so at the end, there's a bunch of slides we go through typically the way this works and go to the next. So the table of contents shows the order. So normally, there's a little opening I give and then We go through each one of these categories with all the projects in there. But it's important at the end, one of the things we put is a summary sheet of all the general fund projects. Because instead of trying to go back through 14 or 15 slides and go, can you go back to slide six and look at that one thing? I grouped them all on one slide to help facilitate the discussion. Because that's really where the challenge in the funding is, is the general fund. And so you could stop me as I go through if you've got questions. But probably the detailed discussion on what we might prioritize and not will be at the end when I get there. So moving forward, I don't have a lot of times people will spend a whole bunch of time talking about the economy and how it affects your budget, whether you want to talk about inflation or mortgage interest rates or anything like that. I just wanted to hit a few key points here for us tonight. We know we're nearing build out. When we had that conversation, even when I was hired five years ago, we talked about the fact that we expect flattening revenues. A lot of cities live off of telling people they didn't raise their millage rates, but that's because they're getting a ton of growth and they're living off new development, paying for it. So you get 16 new apartment complexes, you got a whole bunch more money. You don't have any growth, you don't have any more money. So we have not had, and I know we've heard conversations about growth, but we have been really low. In fact, the last almost 17 to 20 years, we've had just about 10,000 people total move here. So it's like 400 people a year. That's close to stagnant growth. Fast moving cities are 2,000 plus people a year. 400 people a year is not. Looking back at the trends that are shown here, the tax base is the one column. We used to get double digits. Years ago, when we would have these meetings with all the other cities, Port Orange was routinely in the upper half of the cities with the most growth and the most tax base growth. That's that's pretty well done. Now, you can see that number 12%. When we got that high, that was mostly inflation driven, though those were the years when inflation was like seven and 8%. So when we got the property appraisers information, we had as much growth based on an existing house being taxed at a higher level than we did from new development. But what what it resulted in is we look on the far right column, that's how much extra money we took going into each budget year to run the city. So the higher number there, the first year, $3 million, that was the year we adjusted the police department's wages. And so that covered all of that in that year. And then that number has steadily decreased since then. And there's always that conversation about going to rollback. What is rollback? What is the percent of a rollback? The state law requires you to state that when you do your budget adoptions. So last year, that little over $1.6 million that was higher than the year before was about a 4% over a rollback number. This year, the preliminary number came out, $800,000 is all the new money we have to run the city with. And that is less than a percent over rollback. So you're almost at rollback with what we've got. So we have to go into next year with $800,000 more to address wage contracts that range from 4% to 8%. We anticipate an 8% insurance increase. We have other contractual obligations and just general inflationary impacts. And that is that is a hard target right there inflation that dropped down closer to two and it went back up a little bit and it came down then it went back over for as part of the war. If the war ends, it may come back down. I don't think it's going to go anywhere near the sevens of the past but we're we're trying to deal with funding the general fund projects with very little new money going into this year. So that's that's just an overall start to what we're facing. And before I got into the new ones, we did want to take a little bit of time to thank the people who put together the projects this year. So we did complete a large number, over 40 projects. Now, some of them aren't finished today, but they'll finish in this fiscal year. A couple of highlight projects in there, we talked about that earlier with utilities, that North Commonwealth water upgrade. We did that whole Commonwealth area in the last few years, went from 2-inch water pipes to 6-inch. Now they've got fire hydrants, they've got better flow, better safety, better quality water in that area. Very big positive project to be done in that area. The Jackson project is completed, another big positive. You can see things for parks and public works has gotten a few things done as well. i'll just start going through the categories so this is the showing the five-year plan on a pie you can see the the total number on the left it's into what would be funded the 57 million is what we would have to fund the 284 is all the other years so it's it's a little bit more like The other out years are like 70 or 80 million, where this one's 57 million. The pie is showing you how they're broken out. Water and wastewater is almost always going to be the bigger one, just because the utility is the most expensive thing we have. This pie, though, includes the $170 million sewer plan upgrade that I'll show you later. And it also has a big wedge for the parks bond. In the future, when the parks bond projects are done and the utility major upgrade is done, the pie itself will shrink. It won't be a pie of 284 million. but it'll still be probably similar ratios. It will usually be dominated by water sewer. So the first category is park bonds, and we did give you the hard copy to look at for people trying to look on the monitor. I'd suggest looking at the higher density ones because the resolution's better. The outer ones are kind of light and hard to read. So on the positive side, the park staff has done an outstanding job. The bond got approved and they have moved really fast to get these projects out there to the community. One of the last things you want to do is have the voters agree to give themselves amenities and tax themselves and then take forever to give it to them. So Fort Lauderdale is currently getting beat up pretty bad because they did a bond about a decade ago and they haven't even gotten halfway through their projects. So they are moving along. As you can see, everything on here but the Karasi Park expansion and the trails is ready for construction in the next fiscal year. The Karasi Park, we don't own the land yet. So we've got to own the land, design the park, and then go forward. And the trails we're holding on because we're using the TPO process where we can leverage some money from the TPO in order to get there. So when we get that feasibility, we'll start working towards some of those projects. understanding what's out there for the public to vote on considering property taxes. We may want to talk about this as we go forward throughout the summer on what we do with Request and Karasi because if you build them, they will have ongoing operational costs. The bond will cover the cost of construction, but there will be staff, there will be electricity, there will be mowers, there will be fertilizer. Those projects are going to cost us money to run when we move forward, but congratulations to the staff. This is one of the most effective one-year movements of a bunch of bond projects that I think I've ever seen in all the bonds I've done. They're also out there leveraging with ECHO funds. So you've already authorized us to apply for ECHO grants to try to add to it. So it would give us the ability to build more than we have. The idea that they've switched land. We came up with the idea to switch land with the schools to build a park here. A lot of positives coming out of the staff to make the most of that bond. I'm not going to go through all of these because you've seen them with their concept plans and where they're at at this point. And then for each category, we also have a map that helps for when you're looking at it between now and then. The next category, the regular parks project. So whether or not we built bonds or not, we own a bunch of parks facilities and they have to be taken care of. So this is their regular stuff. Typically every year you see them somewhere between a half a million and a million dollars of requests. This is probably one of the ones where I was talking about how we haven't fully disciplined ourselves on the five year budget. Everything is in year two. So there's a giant spike in year two. Normally you'd like to see this a little more spread out over a five year pattern. but the notable projects coming up in the funded year would be the rec sound barrier which is being designed now and then the north causeway park councilman green and i were talking about this earlier today it's pretty beat up over there on the north side and that project would come in to to do improvements in that area the y project is being funded out of that rec facilities fund so there is basically a savings account to do improvements to the y that's not a general fund project parks has got ongoing maintenance. This is going to be a theme throughout as well. It was the things we haven't emphasized I don't think enough in the past. Everything we do we have to take care of when we get it. And the parks isn't always thought of as that department like people are used to us paving roads and fixing sidewalks, but not necessarily this but we own if you look at the bottom, we have like 32 facilities So we probably don't go more than a year or two without at least one park being redone or one field being redone. So there is a nonstop maintenance cost as well. And deferred maintenance comes back to haunt you. I think the mayor mentioned that earlier. What happens if you don't do your job on maintenance? You pay more for it later. So I'll show that with all the other categories. Facilities is our buildings that are non-parked. The highlight of our facilities here are the generator replacements. And oddly enough, a couple things at City Hall, the air conditioner here is kind of junk. The thermostats don't work. You have to go up on the roof and make adjustments up there to change the temperature. And you all can see the high-quality AV system that we have here from the 1980s. So those though may end up being the things you decide not to do, but it's there to see we've had those conversations about what's coming up with our facilities. Ongoing maintenance from the facilities division, they're also responsible for making sure all the parking lots that we have are paved and taken care of. Fire doesn't normally have projects like this. They're typically fleet. You see them when we replace fire trucks and ambulances. Once in a while you build a station. What's unique about this year is the public utilities department, we're building their operations and we're consolidating three or four different sets of people over into one facility by the police station. And they will be leaving the building that they're currently in on the north side of the public works property over by Oak Street. Right now, fire trains at the tower and they train at that small building up there by the annex. And the idea had been as part, this is like a long-term out multi-year project that this was planned, was fire would then leave that small building, allow either parks or public works or somebody engineering to use that facility. And then they would move over to this facility and use it for full training in that one area. So the request here is to upgrade that building because it's a building used by utilities field crews. to something fires can train in. And then the pavilion, there's basically a shade structure. So if you've been out there, I think all of you've had the chance to go out there and see the training tower is not real. They're wearing heavy equipment. There's nowhere to be in the shade. So it's a little hot. So that was the request for that. And then fires got a couple out your capital where we're coming up on having to replace radios in the future and some of the breathing apparatus. Transportation projects are our TPO funded. In good years, these are 90% money from federal state funds and 10% hours. Occasionally, some of them are a little different. In this upcoming year, the two big highlights are the Dunlop and Yorktown bundle. That's construction. That's why it's a higher number. That is the total cost down at the bottom. You'll see the note. Our cost next year is $1.5 million. And then the Clyde Morris project will go into design with construction a couple of years out. This is pretty well spread out. Now, some of this is not in our control. We have to follow the TPO process for the funding. But it's a pretty good job of spreading out the projects over the years. We do get heavy in the outer years because you put them in the plans. And one of the things that's required in order to get fair share of money, to basically get money from developers when they're building to help them pay for it, you have to have them in your plan. If you don't put them in the plan, you're not allowed to get money. So we show them in here so that that qualifies, but we recognize that when you get out to the out years, it's not really going to, they may keep moving. They may show in year five, but they may stay in year five for six or seven years. We go on to maintenance and transportation. This shifts over to public works. So public works handles all this stuff. If you look at the funding source, it's all local option gas tax. So historically, the city has not funded this maintenance beyond what we get out of gas tax. The gas tax is not sufficient. I'll give you an idea that everything that we put in this, if you give that money to public works on October 1, they will spend it all well before the end of the fiscal year and not finish everything out there that needs to get done. To council's credit, you've asked me in the past, well, how much money do you need to do it right? And I can't answer that question because we didn't do asset management very well in the past. But when we switched over to Tyler, we have asset management software, and we are on the way to being able to answer the question. We still may not be able to afford it, but we can at least give you the answer of what it would take to catch up. We have, the last couple years, council has actually taken some money out of fund balance and supplemented this to allow us to catch up. So that's the first council I think that's actually added to that money to help catch up in that area. But our objective is to get you data on what it will take to be caught up and take care of those as we go forward. I think we've talked about this before, the striping budget, it's like two little areas and you're out of money. Paving gets you a couple of roads. One of the things that they do, though, is that we don't spend it all. We have planned up to about 70, probably 80%, maybe 85%. They hold a little bit back till the summer in order to pick up an emergency if something comes up, because what you don't want to do is be completely out of money and unable to fix something that's bad.

I'm sorry, wait. So you can grab a quick drink of water while I interject something. perhaps on this particular slide your transportation ongoing projects as we update this moving forward in the project description if it's possible this is just something that came to my mind if you could put a notation in there on what the anticipated Like I know with roadways, there's an anticipated cost per linear mile. Same thing with sidewalks per foot or something like that. Just so when we see the number, okay, $800,000, well, how far is that? How far does that get us? So that might be helpful if that's possible. I know TPO talks about that.

you know in their meetings and stuff like that I don't know where that number comes from but I know that some of those numbers for paving and concrete has gone up and they have to have reduced cost estimation because that's how engineers bid the projects for so or the contractors bid them and we'd be able to say we can be different like cost of Herbert Street is going to be a little cheaper than doing something that's a four lane with a median but we can give you those basic costs just might be a good reference to have on that slide okay thanks The Down Under project didn't really fit a specific category, so I put it in here separately. It was originally envisioned in the ballpark of $5 million to be basically funded when we sold Riverwalk. So part of the assets of the Riverwalk sale would pay off to the town center CRA. The other half would go to this. When that project didn't close last year and we went back, staff came up with a really good idea of trying to split it because they knew we don't have $5 million just to put into this project. So what they did is come up with a phase one idea Because we've been working with the business owners down there. They've been really good partners and very positive, and they're really hoping for something to come out of this to grow that momentum. And so the phase one would focus on this turn lane, which is the road out to Peninsula from the south of the bridge. So it's where the causeway comes in to signal us. If you've been down there, basically people down there have created their own right turn lane in the dirt. So this would formalize that and put in a sign. So it's an affordable phase one that shows goodwill and progress to the business owners down there and probably makes a good safety impact going forward. So I thought that was very creative of them when I said, I don't know that I can go ask for $5 million. And they said, well, how about we do this instead? Stormwater projects, we've got a couple different ways to look at this. We started off with a stack bar showing five projects with the colors or by where the funding is coming from. The one on the far left is Cambridge. That's a hurricane repair from the damage and the cold. And then the other four are master plan projects that are coming up in current years. There's another large project, Nixon, that's in out years you'll see in one of the other charts, but it isn't far enough along to show here. This is 62 plus million dollars worth of drainage projects. It is incredibly expensive to go into the old part of town and retrofit the old part of town to stop them from flooding. That's a lot of money. It's more than twice what we have in the park spot for five projects. So that's a big hit and we don't have all the money for the pink part right now. You can see the couple grants on the bottom. We really hope resilient Florida will work for us. We're going to continue to try and transform 386 to see when their next phase come out. BRIC is a federal program through FEMA that the current administration doesn't really like. So last year, the president's office stopped it, but then a court reinstated it. So I don't really know. They were valuable. People got a lot of good projects out of BRIC, but then the money went away. So some cities are reluctant to touch it because you don't. You go to all that effort, and then you don't get the money. So I think it's still worth trying because it's a pot of money we need to have. On this slide, we put it in a pie. The reason for this is I think it's really important. So it's been less than four years. We got hit by Ian in September of 22. And in less than four years, for $62 million of projects, we have almost $40 million of other people's money in less than four years to do these projects. And we still have $20 million to fill. But $40 million in 10 years is a huge amount of outside money. So the people who go out and get other people's money to do this have done a heck of a job because that is more than we have in the parks bond. In four years, they went out and got that from somebody else's source. So again, it's going to require some work. We have the ability to borrow parts of that and pay debt on it if we get to the point where that's a decision council wants to or we can continue working until we get the grants to fill it in. I put them here. This is your standard five-year plan version that we were showing from the others with the sources. And then this one adds the Nixon project in there so you can see it in the out years. It's a little less expensive because it tags on to the Sugar Forest one so it's not as much money as that one. But this also adds the generator at Virginia Monroe. which is one of the smaller pump areas we have on the east side of town. And the two smaller projects you authorized for design last summer, the Devon Street one and the Sweetwater project are both shown there. So that's what's going forward. And moving on to their ongoing projects and the maintenance. So you see a couple of things with drainage, but we've talked about this. It's an ongoing project to basically replace all the corrugated metal pipes that rust and rot going through that. Down in the bottom right, it shows how many miles that we're responsible for maintaining with that. On the left side, I put in a little summary of the stormwater fund. So $160 per dwelling unit, it generates a little over almost six and a half million dollars. The expenses we have exceed that, so we've been using stormwater fund balance to kind of chip away at those things. That fund balance at 1.7 million for this much work is small, it's way too small. The point of showing that is that this fund is not designed for $62 million of capital projects. Two-thirds of it, or more than half, used up by the people and the machines that maintain the stuff that we have. There's a little bit of money in there. We're still paying debt on some old stuff related to the 04 storms. That debt will eventually retire, but it's still got like, I think it's 2035 when that retires. And then we have money set aside for debt service on future. And I've probably got some of this wrong, but Sue will have to correct some point for me in the future. But we've been chipping away at it using fund balance. So the point of that, just at the $160 per dwelling unit, we can't build $62 million worth of projects. We definitely need other people's help. And we would probably either have to borrow or find some other revenue source to build all of those projects. Water and sewer is the last of the major categories of these. We talked about this earlier with the fee. All this is down in the bottom left corner is the accomplishments of that group of people. To say they have done an outstanding job of making sure that it costs as little as possible to give you high quality water and reliable infrastructure for water and sewer. They do this constantly. They're coming in to see me regularly with ideas about how to do things better. The highlights on this budget, the upcoming $175 plus million sewer plant upgrade, that will probably be, it will be the most expensive project we do, maybe the most expensive one ever, because who knows what technology when this thing's out of date exists, but $170 million is a gigantic project. It is mandated by the federal government. The treatment standards are going up. We aren't going to be able to treat at the level we currently treat, and we do pretty good. We send quite a bit out. We do reclaim, and that's why we get credit through the consumptive use permit because we don't draw as much. We use reclaim for irrigation. We have a very good system and we still have to make it better. That number is big. There are loans out there that are forgivable. If you remember, we had to do a master plan before we did this project. And then we also did the first phase where we talked about the generators and redoing the electric and we were able to get forgivable loans for portions of that. So we're going to go after forgivable loans for this as well. What we don't get forgivable loan, the state revolving loan fund is really low interest like one to 2%. So you're paying mostly principal. So The fund is healthy enough. Toby and our financial advisors came in here when we talked about fees last time. He came in and did two or three different presentations. Our debt levels are such that this is something we can afford. It's in the system, it's planned for, and we're going to be able to do that. But it is a huge project going forward. Now that's why we also purchased that land and the area around it, because we talked about how that's going to actually save us money as well, because we're going to be able to move some of the operations center out of that, keep it running. I think that was another several hundred thousand dollars of savings on this project just by acquiring that additional land. And then down at the bottom, I sort of draw attention to the meters coming up. So some people have been around long enough. Remember the last time we went through a full meter replacement, uh, they're reaching the end of the life. So we're going to be trading out the meters coming up in a few years. Technology has improved quite a bit since then. The benefit of that is that these things have much fewer moving parts so they break less and they provide much more accurate reading so you get better revenue because you're getting more accurate readings going forward. Same thing with all the others. They've got a fairly large ongoing maintenance budget as well so you avoid deferred maintenance. When I got here, we kind of got picked on for being a duct tape and WD-40 kind of maintenance program, and we are not doing that now. We are taking care of our infrastructure. And then they have something a little bit unique. They do have a lot of capital requests, which is one-off things, like whether it's a In this case, there's different parts of the water plant. So most of these are water plant parts, whether it's a pump or various gearbox units. These things are more out of water because the sewer plant is going to pick up that kind of stuff when we do the full plant. So in the upcoming years, you'll see capital being a lot of water stuff as we go forward. And then fleet. So this is a typical year of fleet. This is replacement. So all these are things we already have. It's being paid through by a fleet replacement fund. So so you buy a truck today for $50,000. And you the department that owns the truck pays you think it's got an eight year life. So they pay one eighth of that cost over the next eight years. So when the trucks do, you have the money there for it. You don't do it at the 50,000 today's cost. You anticipate the inflation. So they may be paying one eighth of $60,000 so that that fund is there in the future. So you're not, this is not new money. It's replacing itself like we do with computers and things like that. So, and one of the things that we're doing is it's not just, if you think it's going to be eight years, they don't just replace it at year eight. So year six, they'll start looking at the vehicle and go, has it been heavy use? Is it light use? Can we get two more years out of it? You know, and so it, it, You stretch it as far as you can to where it doesn't cost more money to keep it than it does to replace it. A couple of other things they've done pretty nice with this is occasionally we'll have a vehicle, like Public Works had a bucket truck. And the bucket truck was done for them. They couldn't take it out daily to get out there and work in the trees. But Parks was paying people to use bucket trucks to replace all the banners around City Hall and help with the lights. So Parks was like, well, you need to use it weekly or daily. We can use it four or five times a year. So they took the truck that was going to be surplused out of Public Works, put it into Parks, and let them use it for a while. And they show up as a, now they're on one of the new replacements, or new requests, because they've determined by having it that it's cheaper for them to own the truck and do it themselves than us to pay somebody to come in and do it for us. But that's the benefit of having somebody in fleet paying attention to, instead of we just auction this thing off, can somebody else use it for a couple of years and figure out maybe it helps you run your operation before we buy something going forward. Service enhancement, so this is, People basically saying, I would like to up the level of service beyond what we have. So there's an ongoing continuation budget, which is do what we do now at the same level, whatever it costs going forward. Service enhancements, three departments have requested more than what we do now, stepping up to something else. These are going to be challenges to find. I just want to go over them so you can see them. That'll be part of the conversation as to what we do with them going forward. Starting with parks, so the out years, we knew that we were looking at parks and staff that would be necessary to staff all the bond projects going forward. As they were looking at how they maintain the structures, and we own 25 different park structures that are not part of what's maintained by the engineering building maintenance team. They currently maintain these buildings through either contracts or with people who work there now, working on the field, go check the toilets or something. Their request is to build a parks maintenance team like we have in building maintenance. I had a couple conversations with council members as we were going over the draft of this that maybe there's a value in creating a unified citywide maintenance and put it all under engineering and have them maintain every single building. And maybe there would be a way to make this work with fewer total people But their point, and I think all three of these are valid business requests, is that we don't have the people right now to maintain the parks building the way they should. They're gonna not get the right life out of them the way we're currently maintaining them. So we need to do better. And this was a good idea from them to start the process of thinking through how do we maintain them better. It came out of our process improvements when we started looking at asset management and where are we not getting things where we want to. So I think it was a good idea whether we go down that path or not. We'll see what you think as we talk about it. The public works request. So they, in addition to fleet and solid waste, they have these four key divisions. This is kind of what they're known for. Like this is the go out and take care of everything we own section and When I first got here as the manager, we had a bunch of vacancies in public works. Over 10 people were vacant. They couldn't staff the four key divisions, so we just kind of pushed them together, and then they would hit projects based on what was most important. But there's a different skill set in a guy that can run a machine like a Menzimuk and get in a dredge versus a mowing guy versus a guy who's an expert at paving versus the people who are good at climbing in trees and cutting them down. So we have operators at both the high level and the middle level and we have different types of machines and then we also have maintenance worker levels that don't operate the machines at the higher level. When we started restaffing and rebuilding Public Works after Christmas this year, we put them back into their specified areas and what was happening is that stormwater and grounds don't have enough people to fully get out and do their job so they were having to cannibalize by grabbing people from streets or signs and help them out on busy days, which then gets in the way of these people doing their job. So what they requested is to these two maintenance workers, which are pure boots on the ground, these are there are entry level maintenance people that get up and help with those two people in those two divisions, you fully staff all four components of public works going forward, and they don't have to cannibalize unless there's a really good reason to do that. And it's not all that high cost because of the level that The final one is fire services and the proposal is for a rescue truck at station 73, the one that's right over here at city center. It is our busiest call center location. Ladder truck is the current truck that's there. And the proposal is to shift or to add a rescue truck to that that would run first response medical. So right now, as calls come in, that ladder truck is so busy that about half the calls that come into that station end up being picked up by somebody from a different station because the ladder truck's out and busy and we don't have somebody there. So that obviously reflects your response time because somebody's got to come from somebody four or five minutes farther away to get there. we've talked about this for years and you've seen it probably some of the other areas that if you have a truck that's got a paramedic on so it can be advanced life support ideally you can you can bring it down to basic but it's still better to have a paramedic so you put two guys on the truck they run all the first response for medical calls when they come in it will dramatically increase our response time and this zone is the area where we have the most assisted living facilities nursing homes there's a lot of medical calls that come out of the 73 areas so from a business standpoint It's a really good idea going forward. It is an expensive idea because it requires two firefighters per shift, so you've got to have six firefighters and the truck in order to do this. So I understand that, but I think all three of them came in as valid responses to serve a need to solve a problem. Now the question and the challenge is going to be for us to figure out how would you pay for that if you do it.

I don't think that 1972 truck's going to cost that much.

I wondered who was old enough to remember that TV show. There's only like three of us.

That rescue truck, is that a transport truck?

It's a pickup truck. I'll show it in the next slide. I'll show you when we get to the vehicles. It's here. It's the truck up at the top. It's a 110K truck to get it. So there's also some additional fleet that was shown in there. The parks crews would need trucks for theirs. The public works request is a roadway marking machine. So the striping we talked about right now, we do mostly manual thermoplastic. This would allow us to get more done by having a machine instead of manual. The utilities has got a vacuum truck. So we have two, this would be a smaller scale vacuum truck that allow us to do better getting into the smaller areas. We struggle with our large trucks to get into everywhere and vacuum it up. So they've seen a need over time. And in parks is that bucket truck I talked about. So after they had a time to use the leftover truck from public works, now that that thing is really at its end of life, the savings of not paying so it's cheaper to own the truck and operate it than it is to pay a company to come in and put all those banners up throughout the course of the year. So that was what the request for that is. So those are the new requests in addition. Before I get to the summary sheet, just to follow up, so we've got July 21 scheduled for the next meeting. We hope that council meeting doesn't have a giant zoning hearing on it. so we can get to it sooner. If you prefer not to do that or if that meeting we end up talking about tall fences or zoning, we have the 28th as well set in there. We wouldn't need to set max millage by then because the trim notices are due in early August to submit that out. There's a unique thing with the budget hearings this year. There's a statute that requires a certain amount of days between when we get the tax money from the appraiser and when you can hold first reading. And because the oddity of September with the first being a Tuesday, it threw everything out of whack with Labor Day. So these are the two dates we were hoping to get all of you together to vote on first and second reading. It doesn't have to be decided tonight, but feel free to give me feedback on it if it doesn't work. And then what I said here, we summarized. So what I put in here is these are all the general fund in 27. And so they're not recommendations from us at this point. They are good ideas from people that we want to get your feedback on. you can see the total over on the right down at the bottom says total general fund 5.7 million and then the enhancements that hit the general fund or the additional five 1.5 so a little over seven million dollars of requests in this year that hit the general fund uh what i put down at the bottom when we lowered the reserve to 23 to 28 we dropped that number to 19 million so What happened is we had extra money in fund balance. Some of it was from selling Alan Green Center. Some of it, not the man. And some of it was from FEMA reimbursements. And then some of it was the excess funds that was in fund balance. So that ended up being your $10 million. We don't fund general fund capital. I've worked in cities where you take a millage rate and part of your millage is set aside specifically for general fund capital. So you will say, if our millage is 5.1, five of it runs operating, .1 runs capital. And that way you constantly have money to, you don't end up deferring maintenance. We've never done that. Port Orange is always trying to squeeze it all out of there. And basically what we did years back is we just took leftover money in fund balance and went, hey, we got 2.2 million, which one of these 10 projects do you want to do? And that leads to deferred maintenance. That's what got us in trouble. That's why we have duct tape and WD-40 reputation in the past. is that there's no reliable funding source for general fund under that method. If you have a year, which if you're Maddie is a bad year, because you get 20 vacancies in the police department, it creates a bunch of money in the general fund to pay for general fund projects. So but he's done an outstanding job. And so has Joe, we don't have those vacancies. And even with the turnover, they're immediately filling them back. So I don't see us taking that $10 million savings account and growing it a whole lot. We have a property off Reed Canal to sell that maybe get us $750,000. It's got a pond in the middle. It's making it a challenge to sell. I think there's a small piece of FEMA money we don't have back yet. But I don't see that. That's not going to just keep growing. So if you spent $7.2 million of it, you're going to have $2.5 million left. and not a whole lot more coming in the future so I'm pretty sure some of these things are going to be hard decisions that we just can't do now going forward but we wanted you to at least see them and be able to comment on them before we started making decisions and I was the one telling you what not to do but at least we got that out there so you can you can see that as a whole and then the last slide is the maintenance because I still want to stress that If we own it, we need to take care of it. We shouldn't have stuff and not take care of it. Uh, we have seen that with the generator at the police department where we lost a decade of youth on it. We've had the, when, when wreck got built, uh, nobody added a generator big enough to actually handle the additional wreck. So there's things like that roofs that didn't last as long. Uh, we really need to make sure that we take care of what we have going forward. So we don't want to lose the maintenance as well going forward. So those are the two key decision points. I'd be happy to answer any questions. I'll look back over here to see what I got wrong. Staff can correct me with their corrections text when I get stuff wrong. But other than that, I'm done talking if you guys have other comments.

Wow. Well, that's a lot of information. And as the city manager talked about, this is kind of the first step in the annual budget process. Pay attention, Stan. And I know he's a numbers guy, he's already over there, his head's spinning. You know, this is without question the most unique budget session that we're gonna go into since I've been on council. only to probably be surpassed possibly next year so uh former mayor green used to say all the time it is not about that initial purchase for buildings equipments or whatever it will always be about maintenance that's the cost that really is going to need to be something you wrestle with and come to terms with and you have any plan for and and and i will like i said earlier in the meeting tonight you know kicking cans and kicking maintenance is gonna catch you. It is going to catch you and it's probably gonna catch you when you're not prepared to compensate for it. We have seen really important infrastructure in the past unexpectedly break burst you know what whatever um then you got to be able to respond to that stuff you got to have the funds and you got to be able to deal with that and um so kicking the can can cost you a lot more all that just to say my my comments are pretty simple tonight One of the fears that I have, and this probably comes from not only being a past employee of the city, but sitting up here on the city council. One of the hardest things that I think an elected official on this diet could potentially ever have to do is cut services and or cut personnel. When you know that it's not good for the community, but if you don't have a way to pay for it, something's gonna have to give. So this is the city manager's job and this is the staff's job to make these recommendations to forecast for us where we need to be, what we're gonna need to have to maintain the quality of life and the services in the city of Port Orange that our residents have come to expect. The reality of it is that we know coming November, the residents are going to get an opportunity to speak as to whether or not that is still what they want from us so as we work through this year's budget it's going to be very difficult for us not to have in the back of our mind that there is a significant risk that if we start adding more new things to this budget and to what we do as a city there's a very strong possibility that the following year you're going to have to remove so just keep keep that in mind i know that's not anything any of us want to have to do but it will definitely be something that we will have to be considering so um i i think that like the city manager said this is this is just the first step to lay this out for us i do like the five-year increment look wayne i think that's um that's the right way to focus and look at this some of those project numbers are huge when you said when you said 170 million dollars like man i missed that i'm looking back at that i'm like that is a 170 million dollar project that's amazing uh that we're talking about that but here again you know that's part of i guess you would argue unfunded mandates right these are these are mandates that are being made upon municipalities at higher levels of government where you have to do it and it's easy to say well we might get a forgivable loan that'd be great We're not the only city that are going to be looking for those unforgivable loans to meet these, these, these higher level government mandates. And then even if you have, like you said, maybe you just get an interest in it's favorable at 1%. That's great. Still gotta pay it back. You gotta have a plan and a funding mechanism that pays it back. So anyway, all that just to say that that's what's on my mind is I really wanna see us work hard to continue maintaining what we already have in this city. And that in and of itself is a challenge not knowing what the next whatever four months may dictate to us, so. Lance, we'll start with you.

No, I'm good. I've been through this thing already. I rolled through it several hours last night, and again, I'm just worried, and I'm worried about what's going to happen in November. Honestly, I'm just worried. But other than that, we'll keep progressing with what we've got. John?

I want to say thank you very much. Your presentation was incredibly... very well to understand I've always felt like when you talk to me I understand what you're saying I hope that our our our citizens can see this and unfortunately there's one two three four five six seven eight in the audience right now the absolute most important thing we do as an elected official is this budget and no one shows up for it it blows my mind that I've had more people in front of us for fluoride in our water than the most important thing and that's paying the operating costs of this city. And what it tells me is that the people trust us and they trust us because we provide the information and you did a great job doing that and I really appreciate that. And we need to get this information out to everybody so they understand the importance of where the money comes from and what we spend it on. And it's quality of life. And it's services. It's firefighters and police officers and Parks and Rec. Everything everybody wants and why they live here. It's the streets. It's the setbacks. It's everything. The trees. All cost money. I didn't see anything in here, Robin, in reference to the lights on Taylor Road. That's all I've got. It needs to be in there. Tracy.

Wayne, thank you for the five-year plan. And thank you to all your staff for putting this together. I know it takes an army of individuals to do this. um previous budgets over the last couple of years me sitting up here and reviewing this was a way easier process so thank you staff for that and putting this together it's always about a five-year plan we've we've talked about build out uh coming and how that's going to affect the city we have to have a plan in motion and by seeing this now come into fruition it shows me that you and your staff is planning for that so thank you because the future is going to be hard november is going to put a kink in things i believe and that makes it even harder but for right now what this is is if we go forward we have a plan in place to be able to take care of the citizens the infrastructure but also the staff You know, a lot of people don't think about, you know, you got 500 people that we answer to, but 65,000 people that we definitely answer to. So these plans and budgets have to be spot on. So thank you for this.

Yeah, Wayne, I feel like these presentations have gotten easier to digest. each year and I appreciate you and staff tonight. I know it's not fun for y'all to sit here for a three and a half hour meeting. Appreciate all the hard work you guys do. I think Scott said it best. I think we all know the elephant in the room with whatever's gonna happen with this voter opportunity, with the state suggestions and this piece of legislation. So it's gonna be a very interesting thing to watch. I think we have to be very careful. because Scott's right, the last thing you want to do is have to peel back and start making cuts. So, you know, there's a time to spend, there's a time to save, and there's a time to stand pat. And this year might be one of those times that we want to be a little more on the cautious side because we don't know what is going to happen come, you know, after November.

Wayne, I think... I'm going to give you a chance to close out the conversation, but I think you're going to need more, you know, obviously direction from council, not necessarily tonight, but I think that what I would encourage and challenge council to be having the one-on-one discussions with Wayne and his team is, is. provide the direction that they need from us look at some of these projects specifically you know right right off the bat for me the parks and rec bond projects and how quickly and fast do we want to advance those knowing they could get hung out to dry and and that that sucks for lack of a better way because our voters have already spoke to that yeah but our voters won't have complete control the state voters will have complete control and so we you know i already talked to wayne that you know no matter how the vote shakes out sometime and this will come later after the vote in november that we will be able to go in by precincts and look specifically at what our voters say So we will do that. We will be able to do that. And so you'll be able to see, obviously, whatever happens with the statewide vote, that's going to dictate state constitutional changes or not. but we'll still be able to look and see what did our voters want. And so we'll be doing that. All that to say, that's well after the next budget gets passed. So we've got work to do trying to forecast what we think the future may hold. We just need to approach that with caution. But keeping what we do know about our community is that our residents look for a high quality of life and they do expect high quality services. We're just going to have to figure out how where that line is exactly and how to provide that. So just be mindful of that, have these conversations with Wayne and his staff, and then let us know, hey, I gotta know this. Where do you guys wanna be on this? And I think you can feel it. You're a resident taxpayer of the City of Port Orange too. So yes, you're the city manager, but you also can see what's going on right now in our state and our community. Just keep us in the loop what you need. Any other comments you want to make on this tonight?

Just to make sure to thank the staff that dealt with me. We met twice a day for the last couple of weeks with several meetings going after 5 o'clock. And Sue and Petra were at a conference learning about the tax stuff and drove all the way over here from Orlando to do it just to go back again. So the staff has been very patient. I don't know, we were on revision 30, 35 or something. But all the questions on what is this, why is this, help me with that information, they've been there for the answers. If you see a project you want to know more about, let me know. If it's something you want to go physically see, if you want to walk in the building and look at it, that it helps understand it, let us know what we need to do to help you understand it, to help with direction to us going forward.

I know it's going to be a late meeting and we're running along, but I just want to say this to staff, and I mean this to not only the staff that's here tonight, but your staff, you know, all the way down. There is absolutely in my mind nothing in this presentation tonight that I look at and go, that's utterly ridiculous. So I think all of this is stuff that holds a lot of merit. It holds true to what the vision and the focus of our city and our residents have looked for and asked for. And so I appreciate that. I also appreciate that the staff is well aware of this discussion we're trying to beat around the bush a little bit with because we just don't know what November is bringing. And I know that all of you are very experienced and very seasoned, and you understand exactly what we're trying to say. We just gotta have a way to pay for it, right? The investors of our city, have to be able to pay for it. What does that mechanism look like? If this is what they want, how does that occur? And the complexity of the budget, Sue, thank you for what you do, the complexity of the budget, because I'm going to promise you this, Facebook doesn't have a clue how stuff gets funded in municipal government. Not a clue. I have yet to see one single person A lot of opinions, but none of them have a clue what money comes from where and what restrictions and certain money and how that plays out in municipal government. It's very complex, so we appreciate what you guys do. All right, enough on that item. Um, moving on to item 23 council committee reports for step shelter.

Yeah, this will be about an hour. So, uh, sit back and relax.

17 slides.

Yeah. Uh, so, uh, Monday we will be interviewing four candidates for the replacement of the executive director. Looking forward to that. And First Step Shelter is doing really good financially. They have a great team that that person will be able to oversee. So we're excited about moving on. The chamber has a wonderful fundraiser next Friday. It's their casino night at Riverside Pavilion. So one of their larger fundraisers for the chamber. And they're doing fantastic. A bunch of different new members. A lot's going on there. There was a mega mixer last Thursday where five chambers all came together in Embry-Riddle. It had a really good turnout. A lot of good stuff going on there for our small businesses and the chamber support.

That's all I've got. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you. Anything else to come before us tonight? We've got another 56 and a half minutes before, you know.