City Council - workshop

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our summer workshop. We're going to start this morning off with roll call.

Councilwoman Morgan. Yes, ma'am. Councilman Pickett.

Yes, ma'am.

Mayor Martin. Here, ma'am. Councilman Bonner. Yes, ma'am. Vice Mayor Caraballo.

Here, ma'am. Please stand for the pledge.

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.

And for public to be heard this morning, I have a person signed up to speak. Ms. Goldberg, please come forward.

Good morning. Good morning, Mayor and City Council. What I would like to do is ask that when you're building or repairing stormwater treatment areas, retention ponds, canals, please add littoral zones and living shorelines to prevent erosion, which you can see right out at the retention pond right out here. and to also to absorb nutrients, which can help prevent unwanted algae like the cyanobacteria microsystem, which is what we call blue-green algae. Though this is at an additional cost, it saves the higher cost of repairs and cleanups. I know that right now you have to deal with worrying about Amendment 3, whether it's going to pass. I did put a letter to the editor of TC Palm, it was in Sunday's paper, saying that I am against this. It is my feeling that you really do a great job in budgeting and almost everything you do has a very good reasons for it. I did speak to one of the mayoral candidates, Eric Strazzeri, who thinks there is waste and could not tell me why, but I'm the one who attends a lot of your meetings and follows up with your website and also going to many events to know that the waste is very minor. And I agree with most everything that you do and hope that you will bring to the attention of the citizens here to please ask them to say no because there are too many things that we do need to take care of and the things that will be harmed are the public themselves. So thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Goldberg.

OK. All right, before we get started, I just want to give a kudos. So right here I have the American Public Works Association magazine called The Reporter. And there's a great article about how our city of Port St. Lucie Public Works Department sets the standard with seven consecutive APWA accreditations over the last 25 years. And that And that just goes to show how professional our organization is, how our public works department works tirelessly every day with all the men and women who work for the department to make sure that we're getting things done and UTILIZES BEST PRACTICES. THESE ACCREDITATIONS ARE VERY, VERY HARD TO COME BY. THEY TAKE A LOT OF WORK IN ORDER TO MAKE SURE THAT WE ARE MEETING THOSE BENCHMARKS AND STANDARDS. AND I JUST WANT TO THANK YOU, COLT, AND YOUR ENTIRE TEAM FOR EVERYTHING THAT YOU DO, BECAUSE WE HAVE THE ABSOLUTE BEST, AND WE'RE ALL VERY, VERY PROUD OF OUR ENTIRE TEAM. SO THANK YOU SO MUCH. AND THE PUBLIC LEADS TO KNOW, RIGHT? VERY IMPORTANT TO SHARE. With that, Mr. Morejo, you have some opening comments for us today. Good morning.

Good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, residents, staff. Let me just start by saying I had a great presentation all set up, but a lot of times that's not the best thing, especially during these times. Just going back, this city, this council, previous council members have really, truly changed the face of the city of Port John Lucie. With 37 years that I've been here, Working in the trenches, no different than a lot of our employees. I've been part of this transition that has occurred. And I am so proud as far as how much we've accomplished in the 37 years that I can say that I've been here. Reflecting on that, there's a short presentation that I truly understand also what the residents have seen that this council, previous council, this staff or your plus 1500 employees have done for this city. So with that being said, let's just going to take a peek at that and then there's going to be a small turn.

My favorite part of Port St. Lucie is all the parks in the community. Being able to go to parks and play sports.

It has wonderful parks so I can take my grandchildren to play when they come to visit.

Also all the green spaces, all the wildlife, especially the sandhill cranes which are my favorite.

We love the outdoor spaces. We love the fauna, the greenery, and we love the people.

I love the people.

I love my community. It's the most beautiful, diverse area. My favorite thing actually has been watching this place grow. I remember as a child, 95 being just a very narrow road and watching it grow and develop over time.

It's amazing the growth that this city has gone through. It's just amazing. My favorite thing that has happened in Port St. Lucie is the widening of Port St. Lucie Boulevard. That was a need, which was great.

I think what was great when they finally finished Crosstown Boulevard.

Being able to build the very first year of the Youth Council and seeing it grow to what it is now.

One of my favorite moments in Port St. Lucie was the opening right here at the port. It's so peaceful and there's a lot of entertainment at times. When they built the Mid-Florida Event Center, that's when I knew we would have a lot more events to celebrate.

My favorite moment would be when they're celebrating their Asian flag.

These events where you can come out and enjoy your neighbors and your friends. I love the Earth Day festivals and all the others. They're really fun. I like that Point St. Lucie does a lot of family events.

Hanging out with the kids at fun events in the city. One of the best things about the city is the city gets feedback from all of the residents.

I attended my first Citizen Summit. I learned so much about the city. Every event, everything they're doing here is make people happy. We love Port St. Lucie for the hometown feel. It was the first time I ever had a grabber in a bucket. And I found out that I love picking up litter so much that I adopted a street.

Just the way the city presents itself, man, it's a beautiful place. We're glad we chose Port St. Lucie to move to. Fantastic place to live.

I just love Port St. Lucie so much. We love Port St. Lucie. We love Port St. Lucie. I love the city. I love Port St. Lucie.

We're loving Port St. Lucie. I love it.

Just so many wonderful memories here. I love Port St. Lucie. Anything you want to say? I love it too. Love Port St. Lucie. Wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Congratulations and happy anniversary to Port St. Lucie.

Happy birthday, Port St. Lucie. Happy birthday, Port St. Lucie. It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure being back here.

Port St. Lucie is super nice. Thank you all. Big up.

My favorite thing that's happened in Port St. Lucie is that I met my husband here.

I mean, that is a tremendous video that really, truly shows the type of residents that we have in Port St. Lucie and how engaged our residents are with our city. But let's turn the page. Passing of Amendment 3, if that becomes a realization. So let's just take a moment. If you want, just close your eyes for a second. Think about this. Think about when you drive into Port St. Louis, what's the first thing that you see? Beautiful grass, no trash, clean, beautiful, safe. Come to Christmas, you'll see your Christmas lights up. All these events, 4th of July. Imagine now, All of that going away. A majority of it going away. What would the city look like when they've taken 65 years to build and we can make the quality, the beauty of this city go away? What do you think Port St. Lucie is going to become? And a lot of that is going to depend on what happens here. A lot of it is going to depend on what happens November 3rd. The tough decisions that have to be made, that have already been made, that have had to cut already just to prepare. Because we're not the type of city that is going to sit back and say, let's just let it happen. That's not how we do things. We've never done things that way. And really, the future's in front of us. But really, the question would be is what type of future do we want the city of Port St. Lucie to become? Do we not want to be the safest city? Because to me, that is at stake. Think about when we've had these different hurricanes. Who are the first responders out there? Your staff. What are we most proud of that residents come out and say? You know what, we get the city back in order within 24 hours, 48 hours. That's pride. That's what the city's all about. We have a lot of pride. But I'm here to say and tell you that I've been through difficult times. I've been through hurricanes. I've been through fires. We've ran out of water. You name it. I've been part of it. But I can tell you that this is the most difficult times that I've ever seen. And I have struggled with what the city can become. And it's going to be very difficult. And we're going to go through some difficult times. And you know what? But I can assure you, That we will give you 110%. We're not gonna stop working and whatever funds are available, that's what we will work with. But the face of the city will change come November 3rd. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, we're gonna move on to our utility systems department capital projects and propose rates, fees and charges.

Good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, City Manager, John Eason, Assistant Director for the Utility Systems Department. I am a military veteran, licensed professional engineer for the state of Florida and Georgia. I have 28 years of experience working in the utility and engineering industry and have had the pleasure of working with the city's utility department for the last 11 years. I just want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to provide you with an update on just a few of our capital improvement projects that staff has been working on these several years. I also want to recognize our staff for all the hard work and dedication they put in day in, day out to make sure these projects are completed. The first slide, I jumped way ahead. Going the wrong way.

Yeah, I'm done.

All right. This first slide is all the utility works that we have done with the roadway projects for relocating the utilities as the drainage and other improvements are being made. Just to go through the list pretty quickly, most of these projects are driven by either Public Works or UCEDD projects or the Florida Department of Transportation. Our utility relocation portion is usually involved in the actual construction of the project. This is kind of to help lower the cost for the utility so we don't have to pay for some of the extra items that would be needed if we did these projects on our own, like MOT and or restoration after the fact. So that's kind of included in the roadway project that kind of saves us some money there. The first project is a city project. That's the Forester Drive Phase 3. The utility portion is approximately 80% complete. We're hoping to have the rest of the utility work done by November of this year. The next project is a Florida Department of Transportation project. It's the Port St. Lucie Boulevard from Alcantara to PAR. The utility portion's roughly around 40% complete. We still have a long way to go. It's not even estimated complete until February of 2028. The next phase is also a Florida Department of Transportation project that one's currently in design. It's the Port St. Lucie Boulevard from PAR to Becker. The design phase for the utilities is approximately 90% complete. Going back and forth on the finalizing the plans, the construction timeframe is now estimated to begin summer of 2027. Midway Road from Selvitz to Jenkins, PRETTY MUCH ALL THE UTILITY WORK HAS BEEN COMPLETED. THERE'S STILL SOME MINOR PUNCH LIST ITEMS THAT STILL NEED TO BE COMPLETED, BUT WE'RE HOPING ALL THAT WORK WILL BE FINALIZED AND COMPLETED BY THE END OF THIS YEAR. Midway Road from Jenkins to Glades Cut-Off. That's still in the design phase for the Florida Department of Transportation. Our utility design has been 100% complete now, and the estimated construction timeframe is expected to be around February of 2027. And then the last project is the Village Green Drive from US 1 to Tiffany. That's a city project. It's also in design. We actually got grant funding to help with that design cost. We're roughly around 60% complete on the plans. And the staff is currently reviewing those and giving those comments back to design firm.

Madam Mayor. Sorry to stop on this first slide, but I just can't help because I'm going to be thinking about some of these things as we continue the conversation.

Yes, ma'am.

I think in the education portion, as we continue to discuss where the city has come from and where we're headed, I think that when I moved, well, I was a kid when I moved to Port St. Lucie. I was 11. And I lived in Florida my whole life. So one of the biggest complaints that I remember growing up and hearing is that why is Port St. Lucie piecemealing? all of its all of its construction its road construction you know they they build the road and then later on they tear it up to build a sidewalk or all of these all of these items and i think it's important to educate where we've been and what used to happen when it came to construction and where we're at today and so this is a perfect example of a complete street project um the city of port st lucie does not piecemeal anything anymore we look at when we go into a street and we redesign for example floresta we address it from utilities to paving to beautification to storm water to every single aspect of that project to ensure that the road and the dollars are utilized right the first time um and i just i just wanted to i it just hit me as i'm looking at these phases when people hear numbers of um projects they assume it's like well why is it so so high well besides the fact that costs went up we ensure that we're going to build it once right and it's going to it's going to last for 50 to 100 years instead of us going back and redoing projects 10 years later i know we'll have future conversations about other projects but that's those are things that as we move forward with with how do we pay for things I'm really concerned about either projects taking too long because we're not going to be able to do that complete street model or the potential of going back to piecemeal things just to be able to put band-aids on things to survive. And I just, I think the education is important so people understand, like, what's the difference in how we construct today versus 30 years ago. So thank you.

Madam Vice Mayor, I think that's a great point. I think the other point that we need to point out is that the city received or purchased a utility that was the worst utility probably in the nation. When a utility runs out of water, that's what you get. And that's what we received from general development at the time when we had no option to really acquire that actually from the county. But you make a great point is that we had to reconstruct this whole city when it came to water and sewer and put water and sewer to every lot. And I think there's another good point that we really need to make here is that not one tax dollar goes towards the utility. It's all the rate users that actually pay for all the construction that's actually occurring in the utilities. And you'll see in the next probably five years, we're going to be spending in the neighborhood about $400 million that have to be spent on the utility. Because the last thing that we want is for a city this size to run out of water. So you always have to stay ahead of the curve. And you really need to be thinking four or five years. As you know, we do our plan for 50 to 100 years when it comes to the utility. Thank you.

All right. So the next project is the McCarty Ranch Preserve Water Quality Restoration Area 7A. We did receive some grant funding through the legislative for the design portion of this project. This project is geared to pooling, like several of the other water quality impoundments that we did, pool water from the C-23 to store to avoid sending that downstream to the North Fork of the St. Lucie River. It will also be used, as Mr. Murray had just mentioned, in our future surface water drinking facility that we will be doing down the road. This water, we capture that and we can use for drinking water. The project is currently under design. The engineer is currently coordinating with all the permitting agencies that are required that we have to go through in order to make this project happen. We're hoping to have the 90% submittals completed by September of this year. The Primeville deep injection well, number two. So this project involves a redundant deep injection well for the concentrate disposal of our Primeville reverse osmosis water treatment facility. Just wanted to highlight that the original bid for this project came in at $19 million. Through the collaboration with the contractor, city staff, and procurement, we were able to lower that price down to $15 million. We did have to negotiate some additional time that they wanted to make sure the project got done. But we ended up saving approximately $4 million on this project just by doing that collaboration. As far as activities, the drilling process has already been completed. The drill rigs have been removed. The driller has been demobilized. We're currently working on all the above ground piping. That's with a separate contractor and it's currently underway. THE WESTERN RAW WATER MAIN PROJECT. THIS PROJECT IS TO CONVEY RAW WATER FROM OUR FUTURE WELL SITES THAT WE ARE PLANNING ON CONSTRUCTION ON THE WEST SIDE OF I-95 JUST SOUTH OF MIDWAY ROAD. IT'S TO CONVEY THAT RAW WATER BACK TO OUR JAMES E. ANDERSON WATER TREATMENT FACILITY JUST TO GIVE SOME MORE REDUNDANCY AND CAPACITY ALLOWED. The project involved approximately 13,000 linear feet of main that has been installed. Contractors currently making all the final connections on that and we are hoping to begin the testing phase of that whole portion of main at the beginning of next month. Becker Road sewer main improvements phase three. This project includes the installation of approximately 3,500 linear feet of low pressure main. This is to help kind of alleviate some of the pressures that we are seeing in some of these mains to avoid over pumping and reduce the cost of electricity. The project involves that main is going to be on Becker Road just EAST OF I-95. DESIGN HAS BEEN COMPLETED AND WE'RE CURRENTLY RECEIVING BIDS AND COMPARING THOSE AND HOPEFULLY HAVE THIS TO COUNCIL FOR APPROVAL NEXT MONTH.

JOHN, THIS IS A CONTINUATION, RIGHT, OF THE OTHER PROJECTS THAT WERE HAPPENING ALONG BECKER ROAD, CORRECT?

YES, MA'AM. The Darwin and Becker Road parallel force main project, this project is needed to accommodate for the additional flows that we are seeing for the developments that are going on on Becker Road east of the Turnpike. The existing, unfortunately the existing main is not, was not, or does not have the capacity to meet those additional flows. So this additional main will help relieve those pressures. The design firm is finalizing the plans as we speak to address some of the comments we've received from the Florida Department of Transportation, the Turnpike Authority, and city staff. We're hoping to have this project out on the street by September. The Northport Campus Improvements. This project is to relocate our existing warehouse that is located currently at our Primeville Water Treatment Facility over to our Northport site. In doing so, this will provide additional storage for our component parts that we store on site to make sure we have the components needed to do our work, along with equipment storage and some additional work areas for our field staff. Project is the design for the site work and the stormwater improvements has been completed. It's currently out to bid. We're hoping to have that out soon. And then the request for qualifications for an owner's agent for the remaining design is currently in procurement's hand. Hopefully have that out to bid next month. The Primeville Water Treatment Facility Generator Replacement. So this project is to replace the existing generator at our Primeville Water Treatment Lime Softening Facility. We did receive approximately $400,000 in grants through the Hazardous Mitigation Program. We also were able to save approximately $28,000 in tax savings through the owner direct purchase process during this process. All the equipment has finally arrived on site. The contractor has mobilized and is currently removing all the existing equipment and hopefully start the installation of the new generator and its equipment here shortly. This is the long one. Westport Wastewater Treatment Facility Nutrient Reduction Improvements Project. So this is actually a construction manager at risk, a CMAR project. It's a multi-phase, multi-year project. At the end of this, we will be able to meet the FDEP requirements for nutrient removal. We did receive approximately $35 million in grant funding for this project. We have also seen a tax savings of approximately $570,000 through the owner direct purchase process as well. Still have one more phase, so we're expecting to see additional savings on that as well. Update on the phase one. We're approximately 80% complete on the phase one. This phase will get us to meet the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's requirements for the 10 parts per million of nitrogen and six parts per million of phosphorus. The biggest challenge on this first phase and the reason why it's taking so long on this one is we have to keep the plant operational while we're doing these improvements. So we're basically having to take one basin down at a time to make the improvements before we can move to the next one. Good news, we're on the last basin. So we're on the last one. We're in the middle of actually working on getting the adjustments needed to start that next process of controlling the bugs and how they dispose of the waste.

So you touched on a good point and an example of when the laws change that we are required by law to make changes and But we have to go out and look for funding. And we have to figure out how we're going to pay for things because of the unfunded mandates that come down. I mean, to be able to receive a grant of that size is huge and pretty much unprecedented. So very grateful for that. But there's a lot of things that happen that come down from Tallahassee and that we don't get the opportunities for these large grants to be able to pay for these things. So the unfunded mandates definitely have a huge impact on us when the laws change. And so it's important to point that out and talk about it a little bit. So thanks for touching on it.

Madam Mayor, also something that with these expansions, and you'll see through the next couple of slides, is that in the city you do have certain entitlements already in place. So you have roughly, what, 40,000 additional lots out there that can be built upon. And that is so important because how can we, all those entitlements occur many years ago prior to this council being in place, but we cannot just sit on the wheel and not be able to plan for it because it's a requirement of the city to be able to provide that service.

Right.

So I just kind of wanted to highlight that, that, you know, there are entitlements out there and we're prepared to meet that challenge.

Thank you. Madam Mayor? Yes. And I appreciate you bringing up the issue in regards to the unfunded mandates. I also think, too, that part of last year's legislation that was a discussion and almost went all the way forward, I believe, was a requirement that if we have capacity in our utility, that we allow outside entities, meaning other cities or other counties that are adjacent, to be able to hook into our utility. And so the utility, not only is it one of the best utilities in the nation, is a very precise operation which has calculated the amount of water that we're gonna have for the residents that are here today, the residents that are anticipated to come based upon entitlements tomorrow. And as we look at glades and other water treatment plants that need expansion, i'm not only concerned about the unfunded mandate i'm also concerned about legislation that potentially would take away that capacity just because of based upon availability in the capacity when really it's not available we're just waiting for the inevitable to happen which is the growth which is entitled to come whether it's today or 50 to 100 years so the thought that on top of the dollars that were not being provided to to actually come to compliance with what they're asking. I have very deep concerns with them coming into compliance with some of these items only to then lose that based upon preemption. And so, you know, I just share that with council because I think that regardless of how the amendment moves forward, I think we need to have very deep discussions with our legislators and really discuss the future legislation for utilities throughout the state of Florida, because this is a huge threat for us. So thank you.

thank you yeah and i'll just keep adding to that so our next phase is to add a denitrification filter that will bring the process of the plant to what's called advanced waste treatment which will even lower the nutrients even further down to a three for the nitrogen and a one for phosphorus Again, we are expecting those mandates to hit at some point, so we're trying to be proactive, and I believe we will be the first utility that will be advanced waste treatment once this is completed.

And if I may add to that, John, thank you. I think it's an important part. So that AWT, Advanced Wastewater Treatment, When that change in legislation occurred, the city was committed to expand the waste park plant in size and was fully permitted. We had the design 100% complete and the basic management action plan was released and otherwise change requirements for treatment and we were ready to go. And so staff at the time had paused, had to re-look at the improvements that were necessary, the costs associated with such, and it was decided against expanding that facility, however, significant investment in that site to meet those standards. I will give credit of the team and staff Seeing the writing on the wall, advanced wastewater treatment, they chose then, and I think that's what helps with the assistance of so many and Kate's team on going and getting those grants. That's why the city was able to get that for advanced wastewater treatment. What we see now is a lot of wastewater plants, when they come up for their permit revisions, Florida Department of Environmental Protection is already pushing plants to say, you need to meet AWT. So the fact that the city chose that years ago and is going to have that not only being the first, I think at a huge cost savings because if that would have been done later, it would be at later cost. So an important distinction, the treatment at that plant will be much better with this process. But to your point about capacity and such, the unfitted mandates really are troublesome. They're hard to combine in that case, or in this case rather, the city was prone to expand that facility and had to pivot. You know, that's the team we have. We're throwing stuff left and right, and we look at it, we break it down, and we see what makes the most sense and what's going to be the best value to our residents and customers.

That's great. It's an example of how we are always planning. We are always looking at what we have to do when we get those unfunded mandates. We're pivoting. We're being flexible. We're adapting to all the different changes. And the one thing that we face that's the most difficult is the driving factor of what the costs are. Because when you're designing, when you're going out to design, you're putting in estimates of what we think the costs are. Then with the inflation and then all the issues with still getting materials, the costs are still much higher than we expect. Especially then when you go to the next phase of construction, there's estimates. But then when you go out to bid, the numbers are actually different. And, you know, I've seen a lot and heard a lot about, oh, cost and over-budgeting. It's not about over-budgeting. It's that every phase is that you get every process and all the phases in the different process, you can only estimate because you don't know what the costs are going to be until the projects are actually bid. And with all the inflation, again, and everything that's happening, our costs are not going down. They haven't gone down. They continue to go up. And, unfortunately, they are going to continue to escalate. We know how frustrating it is, but at the same time, we have an obligation to get these things done because either they're mandated or we've made promises to our residents and we have to keep moving forward. We have to keep doing the things necessary that enhance our quality of life, that address our roads, address our traffic, address our water needs and our wastewater needs. And it's going to continue to be challenging in the future. Um, but it's important to have these discussions and that's why I enjoy the workshop. I know we all enjoy the workshop so much is because this is the opportunity that we have to have these detailed in-depth discussions about the reality is what we all face every day and trying to plan for everything that we need to for the future growth of this city. So, and I appreciate these conversations very much.

Yep. And just really on that as well, you know, far as the utilities facilities themselves, there's only a certain number of contractors that can build these things.

Right.

And as these mandates come out, that means every other utility is needing them as well. So it just drives the cost up because now you have less people to pick from and they're busy and they know that. So they're like, I just raised my right. If you really want it, you've got to pay me extra. So that's the challenge for us on this as we go forward is trying to get those qualified firms to help at a reasonable cost to build these facilities.

So I remember when we went out to the Prineville location and we were doing the drilling. and learning about all the intricacies that went into that and all the things that had to be done with pulling up the rocks and studying what those look like and all the things that have to be followed by all the regulations and all the laws. And it was very eye-opening. And I remember saying, If our citizens even had a clue about what all this entails and everything that has to be done just to get to this point and to do what we have to do, I wish everyone could learn about it. Because then that would really show an example of everything that we have to face in order to get our projects done, how many entities that we have to work with, all the laws that have to be followed. There's nothing easy about anything that gets done in all of our projects. They're very difficult and there are many tedious things and so many different agencies that we have to work with. And that is why things take the time that they take in order to get them done. Yes.

So I just wanted to say to you in regards to cost increases and then cost changes throughout a project, you know, obviously any amendment to a contract is public record and we have to vote on it at a council meeting. And I mean, I know we all review them, but I review them in detail. And nine out of 10 times, almost actually almost every time that I see it, it's usually because there is unforeseen things in the project that were unable to be predicted prior. So perfect example is Port St. Lucie Boulevard. You know, the city has a lot of new projects going in the ground, which we're able to control how they're built today. But the city is over 60 years old. And some of these roads have been around for a long time. and Port St. Lucie Boulevard, when those plans were actually designed, much of what should have been documented or documented accurately 60 years ago was not. And so when you have an issue where you're having to now reconstruct a road and the pipe is off by a foot and now the contractors hit that pipe because the plan showed it or didn't even show the pipe, and now you have an unforeseen cost. And so I know we hit technology hard because everyone, I think everyone in the world is concerned obviously about AI and all these things that are going to change the way we do business and the way they do business and jobs. But in a way, I'm very glad to see technology move forward because we're going to hopefully have better plans, better designs, better records to ensure that things are cost savings in the future. You know, that's like even this Westport treatment nutrition reduction improvement on top of what we have to do, we're also having to analyze what was done before and things were done differently back then. So we're having to readjust. So I just wanted to share that because you were talking about cost increases sometimes to a project. And again, it's all public record. You could look at the amendments. It will lay out basically exactly what the amendment's for and why the cost changed. So thank you.

And then to continue on, Phase 3 is to construct two reject tanks at the facility. This was again a mandate from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection on our effluent disposal means. We have to have additional storage on site should we not meet our requirements on our effluent disposal. That project is currently finalizing on the design right now. The design engineer is adjusting the plans for our city staff comments along with the CMAR comments. The Discovery Water Treatment Facility. So this is another multi-year, multi-phase project. This is actually a progressive design build project. And this is for our future drinking water facility out at the Discovery Way. The contract for the Progressive Design Bill firm has been executed and the preliminary design and collection of data is ongoing. We are expecting to have the 30% design plans ready for us to review in December. And the plant is actually expected to be operational by the end of 2029. And this plant is, right now, we're working on a 10 MGD plant, but we are, again, looking to the future. So we are making sure it's expandable to 30 MGD, along with making sure we have the site layout for the future surface water treatment facility that would be coming down the road. The discovery injection wells, this project includes two deep injection wells along with a monitoring well for the concentrate disposal of the future discovery water treatment facility. The contract was issued back last month in June. Staff is currently reviewing shop drawings as we speak and we are expecting to hopefully have the contractor on site by next month. DESIGN BUILD FOR NINE FLORIDAN WELLS AND A RAW WATER MAIN. THIS IS ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE DESIGN BUILD PROJECT, MULTI-YEAR, MULTI-PHASE PROJECT WILL INCLUDE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THREE FLORIDAN WELLS FOR THE JEA WATER TREATMENT FACILITY ALONG WITH SIX ADDITIONAL WELLS FOR THE FUTURE DISCOVERY WATER TREATMENT FACILITY. We have seen a tax savings already on this project of $100,000 through the purchasing of equipment, through the direct purchase opportunity that we've had. We do expect again to see additional savings as the following GMPs come in. The design of the wells are approximately 60% complete. All the pit casings for multiple of the wells have been installed already. The first drill of the first well is nearing completion. So once that's complete, they'll move straight over to the next well. And we're hoping that we'll have a second drill rig on site by the end of September or October. That would speed up the process of getting additional wells in the ground quicker. We have received the second GMP guaranteed maximum price proposal from the firm and currently in review. Once we have that, hopefully we'll have that to you guys for approval next month. the Glades injection well. This project includes the drill of one additional deep injection well at our Glades wastewater treatment facility. This is the same driller that came from Prime Bell, so as soon as he demobilized from Prime Bell, he went straight to our Glaze treatment facility and began work there. We have approximately 40 feet of 70-inch casing has been installed, and roughly 190 feet of 60-inch casing has been installed to date. And the contractor is currently working on installing the next 50-inch casing. And last but not least is our glazed wastewater treatment facility. This is the expansion to our existing glazed wastewater treatment facility to account for those additional flows that we have projected that we will need to meet in the near future. We're in the middle of selecting the owner's agent, and then as soon as that agent has been awarded, he's going to help us put together the progressive design package to go out on the street, and we're hoping to have that to procurement by the end of this year. The owner's agent will also help us navigate the process of which process we want to go with it. to hopefully account for those changes that we see in the legislation and requirements of the different agencies to make sure we get the best product that we can before we move forward from there any questions or comments questions or comments council

Jason, these multi-phase projects, have we already earmarked that money? Yes, sir.

Typically, the way I've been doing is slating certain amounts of dollars each year as the project progresses. I just wanted to make sure we highlighted that. Yes, sir. Thank you.

If I may just add, too, in relation to the Glades wastewater plant and expansion, so plant capacity fees were evaluated a few years ago with a rate consultant. Those fees and the next presentation that'll come before you by Mr. Segee will be concentrating on the user fees, et cetera. We are having the rate consultant look specifically at our wastewater treatment plant capacity fee. YOU KNOW, THROUGH THAT STUDY, A FUTURE RECOMMENDATION NEXT FISCAL YEAR ON THAT ON CONSIDERATION SHOULD THAT FEE BE ADJUSTED SO THAT ANYBODY, YOU KNOW, DEVELOPERS OR PEOPLE BUILDING A HOME TODAY, THAT ONE-TIME FEE SHOULD HELP OFFSET THE COST OF THE IMPACT THAT'S CREATING. SO, YOU KNOW, NEW CAPACITY IS ANTICIPATED FOR GLADES, AND SO THAT FEE MOST LIKELY WILL NEED TO CHANGE. we'll await the results of the study to see how that looks like phasing in, et cetera, but just wanted to put that on everybody's radar.

Okay, thank you.

I have something, go ahead. Yeah, so I just, and this is a general comment, so this goes for all the presentations, I really, REALLY WANT TO ENCOURAGE, AS WE GO INTO STRATEGIC PLANNING IN THE FUTURE AND PROJECT PLANNING IN THE FUTURE, WE REALLY NEED TO UPDATE HOW WE TITLE THESE ITEMS AND EXPLAIN THESE ITEMS. BECAUSE, LIKE I WAS GOING BACK TO ONE OF THE SLIDES, A RAW INJECTION WELL. HOW DO I IN THE PUBLIC KNOW WHAT A RAW INJECTION WELL IS AND WHAT IT DOES? part of the challenge with this discussion of property taxes, and I am, we're all citizens up here, but I still live, I still live in the sense of what this is like living in a city and trying to understand some of these things from a citizen's perspective, even though I've been on the council for a number of years. I remember when I didn't know these things, it's just like, what does the city do? How do they help me? Where is my money going? How is this project going to matter to me? Why do I care about a raw injection well? We have to realize that these are terminologies that we use internally. These are terminologies that we utilize to obtain grants because this is a requirement of how we present the project for funding. But the average person needs to understand how this project or any of these projects impact them on a daily basis. Because my conversations have been You may not know what your city has done for you today, but if some of these things begin to go away, you will feel it and you will know what we used to have. And when I think about it from that perspective, I can't blame them for questioning. Because when you look at some of the way we present these items at meetings and settings, They're just like, what is this for and why should I care? So I'm being critical, I'm being nitpicky, but I really think that in order for the public to truly be engaged and understand what their city is doing, we need to speak to them and explain these projects in a way that they understand how it impacts them. So I just really hope that we can do that in the future, especially not just because Amendment 3 going forward for future years, even past the discussion. Thank you.

I'll add a comment to that. I agree with you. And I think what I've seen from the utilities, not only through community outreach, through the Lunch and Learns, through the website, We agree with you, and I think sometimes we get complacent, use these terms. So we are really trying to get the word out there, educate the customers so that they can understand what we're building in their neighborhood and what they see going on throughout the city.

I appreciate that, Danny. For example, what does Injection Mill do? Just really quick. Go ahead.

Well, we have multiple different types of injection wells. So we have an injection well at our reverse osmosis treatment facilities that it basically removes and injects the concentrate that is generated from the production of our drinking water. So it's the bad stuff that you don't want in your water. So that goes down that injection well.

Back of 11 terms, back of 11 terms. Your salt water concentration goes into, in simple terms, you're injecting salt water back into the ground.

okay yes yeah so that's that's on the drinking water side the wastewater side you also have a deep injection well that is to uh all the effluent that you generate from after the process goes down that type of well so that's another way of disposing the the regulations don't allow you to do any more surface water discharge or ocean discharge so now they're forcing you to go this route which is the deep and wet injection well out, which the well itself is roughly 3,000 feet below, so it's got barriers between that, so it keeps it safe from our source of drinking water as well. But there are a lot of requirements with it. They also have each well has a monitoring well. We make sure that we don't see a bleed up from these injection wells to make sure we're not contaminating anything above that as well. So that's kind of why all those prices go up because you're adding those different components. You're making sure you're testing that. We have to test those wells every five years, make sure the integrity of the well is still good. And then we... continuously do testing on the monitoring wells to make sure we don't have anything moving upward.

And I know I'm oversimplifying this title, but it's just really quick. Glades well treatment to remove waste out of your water like whatever the terminology is that it just explains what it is. You said a lot which is good, which I am, which again after years I understand what you're coming from. We've had many conversations of how these operations work, but the public is busy. They have families they're taking care of. They have work they're going to every single day. They come home, they've got five seconds, and we all have social media to absorb whatever it is you want to tell them about today. And we need to find a way to put that in a very simple term that people will say, okay, I get that, next, because that's where we're at. And there's a lot of things being thrown at people every day. And they're living with a lot of stuff on their plate, including information overload. So to me, the more that we can take what you said and put it in a sentence where they're just like, OK, I know what that does, that I feel is time is money. And time with their family or time away trying to go on the website to read all these things, that's hard. And I get that. So I just think that we can just work on that and do a better job. Thanks. Not to pick on utilities.

No, that's fine. Because I know it's all of us. I got the engineering brain, so it makes it hard for me. I know, that's the hard part.

We hear you and certainly recognize that. It's something utilities, we don't want people to have to worry about or pay much attention to, right? They just want to know it works. Correct. But we need to speak in a way that they understand it. The injection well that some of you toured that the mayor spoke about earlier, that's very technical on layers and all that. That's where that disposal occurs. And the important dynamic, that well is a redundant well. And so not only do we have it for disposal, we have a backup well that we use and we can rotate and take out of service. And so what does that mean for our resident? That they don't have to worry about our water plant can't run because our injection well is down, down for maintenance, right? And those are the things staff's doing.

we can do a better part in communicating and educating our residents to know what value they're getting i appreciate that thank you madam vice mayor just the end goal you know this and i'm sure all council know this the end goal here is to make sure that when our residents get up in the morning they can flush and they can turn on that water and that water can be there that is the guarantee that this city has made to our residents that every single time you get up there that's what's going to happen and if that gets destructed i'm sure i will not be here because that's a failure in our part. So that is the guarantee. All these projects goes back to that one item, to make sure that you have reliable water and sewer. That's the end goal. And you're absolutely right. Can we do a better job of explaining it? Absolutely. We can definitely work on that. Thank you.

Thank you. You ready?

Yeah. All right. With that, I'll get 10 minutes. I'll have to change all my language before you fix it. Okay. I'll do my best to present it in simple terms. Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, directors, staff, residents, my name is Daniel Segee. I'm the Senior Assistant Director for the Utilities Department. I am going to be talking about the rates and some other issues. I've been with the city 29 years. I started at the wastewater plant, you know, where Jesus was the director. As a lab technician, I received my wastewater seed license and then had the opportunity to move into management and here I am. With that, I will start with the topics. I'm going to discuss customer growth, water and sewer rate adjustments, the water connection fees, and sewer connection fees, and then septic to sewer conversion program. Currently, we have 100,509 water customers and 85,469 sewer customers, and that was as of June 30th. Looking at this chart, you can see the growth that we've had that was discussed earlier. You see how the connections have gradually increased. 2004, 2005 is when we hit the peak. Gene and Frances Hurricanes, we were able to get contractors in to assist us with the sewer installations. And what you see more towards the end, when you're getting into 2004, 2005, 2006, is a lot of the new construction. Since 1994, the utilities have seen an increase of 83,133 water customers and 74,455 sewer connections. And as I mentioned before, 100,509 sewer, 85,469. That's a lot. And that's a lot of growth. MISCELLANEOUS FEES, MONTHLY RATE STUDIES. RAFTELIS, WE'VE USED THEM IN THE PAST, 2004 THEY DID THEIR STUDY, IT'S A FIVE-YEAR STUDY. THEY'RE FINANCIAL CONSULTANTS, AND THEY'VE SUGGESTED INCREASES FOR RATES, FEES, CHARGES SPANNING FOR THIS FIVE-YEAR PERIOD. THEY WORK WITH STRATEGIC PLANNING, FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY, EXPENDITURE TO REVIEW, AND SERVICE LEVEL IMPACT. So the analysis for our day-to-day operation cost is what they review for treatment plants, field operations, customer service, and they provide suggested incremental annual increases for the next five years. As was mentioned earlier, as we all see in the economy, the increases in market prices, we've experienced that in the utilities with materials. We went through the period of time where it was difficult to get the materials, as John mentioned. Prices go up. You know, it's a necessity. You see all this growth. The other side of it, and that's the part that I've been on the side of, on the maintenance side with the water and sewer groups, is what goes in, we have to maintain it. And we have to provide that, you know, exceptional customer service, you know, to the customers. That's what's expected. The five-year forecast. Rate increases, and these were from the 2004 study. As you can see, and we listed out the previous years, what we're proposing this year is on the water, a 3.5% increase. We broke it down to what the percentage would be, 1.34%. In further slides, I'll break it down to what our actual customer would see with that increase. What we also wanted to show is the rates that we've kept standard or level on the sewer rates for Fiscal year 2425-2526. We've kept them at zero this year. Same, but what we want to point out is that we will be seeing increases in the future. You know, as I mentioned, you know the the cost increase what goes in. We have to maintain it, but we did want you to see that that is what the forecast has for the next few years. So typically, you know, this is what we've shown in the past. I think Donna Roden started this showing what a typical monthly bill would look like. You can see currently water rates and this is for based on a 5000 gallon usage. In the monthly increase, you can see current rate for the water, 37.31. Sewer rate, 59. Total, 96.31. With the 3.5% increase for 26.27, you can see it goes up slightly, 38.60 on the water. Sewer stays the same as I had mentioned, 97.60 on a 5,000-gallon usage. That's an additional $1.29 a month. And again, we we wanted to forecast out just a little for 2728 2829. Now I'm going to break down the different. categories on the installs to help our customers get a better understanding. The water connection fee, this is new residential construction within special assessment districts and assessed utility service areas. This is kind of outside the, what I say, the regular areas of Port St. Lucie, not out in the traditions in the developments. The 3% increase on our fees, the plant capacity, John had mentioned the growth and the expansion of the plants. So this is where we collect those fees from the new customers to help contribute towards that. We kept the treatment plant capacity. I think we had increased it in years past, so we kept it the same. There's no difference. The meter installation cost has gone up slightly. You can see that it went up $46. Security deposit stays the same. The overall effect of this for the new construction residential for the SAD and USAD is $46 increase. To the install.

And again, this is for new residential construction.

Yes, new residential construction. Now, this next one is the water connection fees for residential construction outside the SAD and USAs. And this is the Southwest-Northwest annexation areas and the unincorporated county. So for most people, it's like thinking out west in the tradition area and the developments. So the 3.5% increase... On the certain fees we kept the treatment plan capacity the same. The line charge that stayed the same meter installation. You see the slight increase of $46. So again, the increase for the total for for customer in that situation 7000. $95 was last year, $7,141 is this year. And let me go back and touch on the line charge. Again, the new customers coming online have to pay that additional cost in order for us to cover the cost for our installing the additional lines and what's needed to provide them service. So we don't put that on our existing customers. This is the residential well to water, city water conversion fees, the 3.5%. Again, we keep the treatment plant capacity the same, the meter installed, $46. Conversion cost that's our staff going out converting from a well to the city water. We increased that $33 security deposit stays the same $70 for the proposed total 7335. $79 increase so monthly amount over the 10 years which we allow the 10 year financing. no interest, the payment would go from $59.88 to $60.54, so 66 cents of an increase.

I do have a question on this slide.

Yes.

So, and you both were here when the conversion happened, the main conversion, correct? Like when they hooked everything up? Yes. So, and my parents, I was a kid, my parents remember when they got their bill and they were, they had to pay that. So when we did the original layout and connected up to the house and not the rest of it, and people had the choice whether they wanted to stay well or sewer, but they had to pay for that initial connection so you can connect into the system. They did not. force them to pay capacity back then? They didn't have to pay for capacity back then for the water treatment plant, even though, let's say, they were on well?

Yeah, at that time, they did not have to pay. They would pay the capacity once they connected. So if today you have a well and you wanted to connect, today is the time that you actually have to pay for that connection. Back in the day, what you paid for was the SAD to have a water or sewer line in front of your lot. That was the assessment. That was over a 20-year period that you can pay that back. through your taxes.

Okay. I just wanted to make sure because it just, and again, I don't know what happened 30 years ago, but I was just thinking, I was like, why wouldn't they pay for capacity at that time because obviously they can tap at any point in time so they should pay for that future capacity. But I guess it's because it goes on their utility bill and they're not receiving the utility bill.

And not only that, but we struggle trying to get people to pay for that line to go in front of their home and remember all the issues that we had back in the day. To add the capacity on top of that would probably would have tripled that cost. So we wanted to just keep it flat and we just require that when you connect, that's when you actually have to pay the planned capacity fees and like Dan said, Now you're adding the installation of that meter or that grinder. That's an additional cost.

Yeah, I was just asking because I guess I was hoping beyond hope that they did pay for it. So then that way we could we can lower it to get people because obviously the goal is to get people to hook up. And then that way we have better water quality in the city. But when there's that cost involved, I know that's the hesitancy. So we could find.

And that's the key. You don't want our existing customers paying for that new growth. You want the new customers paying for that.

Correct. But that's why I was looking at this, when it looks at residential conversion, these are residents that are already established that have the...

The well.

Correct. They're already hooked in. Like, technically, they can hook into the system any time because they paid that initial loan that happened many, many years ago. And that's why I was asking, does capacity happen to be paid for back then, even in the smallest amount?

Right.

Because then we can bring that down.

It's a great point, if I may add, and that's the distinction Danny spoke about the line charge and why it's broken out like different areas of the city, to make sure that customers, when the SADs, the special assessment districts, were previously created and then infrastructure was installed, those properties were assessed, that owner at the time, whatever that may be. And so we want to make sure any fee that we have otherwise charged, they're not double paying.

Correct.

It would have probably been advantageous of them to have paid the plant capacity fee many years ago because it would have been much cheaper. The downside to that, to Jesus' point, there were significant costs on those assessments. And to add that on, that would have required the utility to build plants for full build out at significant dollars. And so I think we've done well, I think, to hear your point. A big distinction with us maybe compared to other utilities is from start to finish, the utility takes on that responsibility. If you go outside of our area and that utility infrastructure may exist, it may not, but in the cases where it does, you're required to hire a plumber. to install that line from the meter to the house and do that conversion. You're required to hire somebody to take care of your septic system and install a system, which here, the city is responsible for maintaining. Others, it's not the same way. So again, our residents, our customers get, I think, a really good value in the products and what we offer. And again, the interest-free financing, some have even taken that and learned from us. We've been very successful.

Thank you.

I think sometimes customers get confused because they'll say, oh, I already paid for the install. No, what you paid for is that special assessment to put the lines in. Now, when you apply, you're paying for the installation cost, and that's what was mentioned. And the comment about the capital charge, I've asked those types of questions when I first came into the utilities to better understand. You hear now, you know hindsight, you see the cost how they've increased and John mentioned, you know how much the the price of the plants has increased from when we first start to design. Imagine if we would have captured those capital costs back then it would have been at such a lower cost as compared to actual costs that we see now.

Yeah, and I understand why you're getting some of those questions. We have longtime residents that live in their home for 30 plus years like my parents.

Well, the good part is the side notes here, less than 300 wells are estimated to still be in use that could convert to city water. 52 well conversions average per year during the last five years. This makes me laugh because I think of the days when it was just nonstop installs. I was lucky to come in to the city in 1996 right when all this was going in, so I was able to witness it. And to see 16 well conversions are estimated for 2025-2026, there's months now that we don't get any applications for water conversion. That's how well we've done. and the customers have really jumped on board to convert over.

And are we still utilizing the grant funding that's been provided? Do we still have some of that funding available, or is it something we're going to have to seek?

Well, we're constantly, and I'll get into that later, we're constantly looking for the grants. And I think our staff, along with the city staff, does a good job of pursuing all avenues.

I'm talking about the grant funding for conversion encouragement.

I have that in the further presentations, but yes.

Thank you.

This is sewer connections fees for new residential construction. And these are sewers with grinders in the SAD and USA areas. Again, treatment plant capacity stays the same. The grinder systems installation cost, which has gone up, we've increased that $133. Security deposit stays the same. So ultimate increase is $133. And again, these are the new customers coming on board. Gravity customers, there's no increase to fees proposed, you know, for the new gravity connections. The cost on those, treatment plant capacity, you know, 3,250. Line charge, 1,972. Security deposit, 110. 5,332 on the gravity connections. And these, again, I use as an example is thinking of the out west, the developments. This is what the cost is for the gravity connection. This slide is the residential septic conversion fees within SAD and the USAs. We are doing an increase on this. The treatment plant capacity stays the same. The grinder system installation costs, we're raising that up from $4,289 up to $5,459. That's an increase of $1,170. Septic tank abandonment, which is a requirement for us to do. by the regulatory agencies, $609 last year, $626 this year, $17 increase. The total for the installations, for installation, $8,258 was last year, $9,445 for this year. That's an increase of $1,187. And again, you know, for the For the breakdown of the monthly amount over the 10-year interest-free payback, it went from $67.90 to $77.79. That's a $9.89 difference monthly. Oh, went too far. IN CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE RATES AND FEE CHARGES, THE PROPOSED INCREASES TO MONTHLY USAGE RATES ARE REQUIRED TO COVER THE COST OF DAILY OPERATIONS AND TO ENSURE DEBT SERVICE COVERAGE. THE PROPOSED CONNECTION FEES INCREASE IMPACT TO NEW CONSTRUCTION AND CUSTOMERS WHO ARE ADDING SERVICES AS I GAVE EXAMPLE AS WELL AND SUBJECT CONVERSIONS. RECOMMENDATION FROM STAFF IS TO APPROVE THE PROPOSED RATES, FEES AND CHARGES AS PRESENTED AND you know, we will be following up with ordinance, you know, for adoption, you know, each fiscal year. That's, you know, the process that we follow. Are there any questions on that part?

Any questions? No?

The next part is... Sorry. Protecting by connecting. This graph really does a great job of showing, you know, Vice Mayor, where I think you were going with this. 11,402 residential septic conversions have been completed since the program began in 1999. I mentioned earlier, if you look at the date range at the bottom, you'll see a huge spike there in 2004, 2005. That was actually what I was in charge of, the water distribution, wastewater collection divisions, the field operations, doing installs. With the growth, we were already falling behind a little bit on the time when a customer applied to when we would get them connected. We went through Hurricane Eugene. And that really put us back. We were able to come before Council and get approval. We brought in four to five contractors to assist us to help get caught up. So that's why you see that big spike on installations. Over time, you'll see how it's kind of gradually going down a little. I think in these next few slides, you'll see Here's the breakdown and we kind of wanted to show. Each district so you can see how many septic systems are left in your districts. So District 1 there's 2995 septic system District 22,679 District 33387 and District 43140 nine. 12,210 remaining septic systems within the city. Here's the slide on the grants. So over the years, we were able to pursue grants to identify the areas in the city that were of concern. And it was part of, in 2018, I think it was, 18 to 20, where we did the microbial study in conjunction with Harbor Branch, FAU. They had identified areas where it appeared that the septic systems were leaching into the waterways that would eventually lead into the North Fork Fort St. Lucie River and it was identified through testing that showed I believe it was sucralose and acetaminophen and that's what helped tie it to those areas. So when we were able to get the grants We targeted those hotspots and you'll see 2020-21 at the beginning, you know, we were able to get money from, you know, the general fund, you know, the Council approved that, DEP grants, Indian River Lagoon Council. So we've worked on identifying the hotspots. Ideally, we'd love to get everybody converted over. I think this was a good incentive where The customers that were maybe considering applying were able to get 50% of the installation costs covered. So we will continue pursuing grants to help meet the need to get these converted over. I think with the utility department, one of the things that I learned in my 29 years is The environmental effect of what we do, you know, waterside, sewer side. It's instrumental and and almost all the decisions that we make. Yes, there are regulatory requirements, but there's also the culture that we have in that organization and in the city is to protect our waterways and. I think Council has been very supportive on that and we appreciate that.

And just to kind of, Madam Mayor, just to kind of clarify this slide too, because you see city general fund, city general fund, how we obtain these grants is also when we get them, our commitment to the agency is it's a matching grant. So they put in 100, we put in 100, and that's to show essentially that we're serious about it. And that's a competitive thing that we have to do in the market in order to be able to get the agency to actually give us the grant nine out of ten times. Is that correct, Mr. Seguin? Yes.

Yes. Okay.

I just wanted to make sure because, and again, if the general fund becomes strapped, it will be harder for the city manager to provide that additional funding, which in turn will not provide a match, and then in turn we may not be able to obtain that grant in the future. I just wanted to put that on the record.

Correct. Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, if I may as well, additional grant opportunities have been, staff has tried to go out and get significant dollar amounts. We are seeing changes in some of the grantors like DEP that, as a condition, not only the matching element, but would actually, they are writing it in such a way that if you were to receive the funds, you must mandate connection, which creates its own unique set of challenges, being that people are, you know, there's multiple stuff to unpack with these conversions. While, you know, environmentally, we want these conversions to happen, we recognize the cost, not only upfront to convert, but then the monthly operating cost is a concern of residents, et cetera. I think to the point of Mr. Segee about the testing in the river and for the public to understand, the testing of those two elements, sucralose, which is artificial sugar, and acetaminophen, or commonly known as Tylenol, for those elements to exist within the North Fork River, they aren't naturally occurring. And so the only way through that study is that they must be leaching from these systems. And so I think that's important for people to say, because some may have an opinion, well, I have a septic system. How can you tell me that that's creating an impact to the environment? Well, it's through testing. These elements should not exist there. And through that testing showed that it is. And so that's important for people to understand. know increasing the the grinder you know the cost of the systems are there i will say and we've discussed the prior workshops the 10-year interest free has been great however based on trying to recoup the cost to actually convert the utility is looking at alternatives and we'll be bringing forward to the city manager and perhaps council on some alternatives to the 10-year whether longer term WHETHER THERE SHOULD BE OPTIONS FOR INTEREST-FREE FOR A PERIOD OF TIME AND THEN MAYBE, YOU KNOW, FLAT INTEREST. AGAIN, TRYING TO FIND UNIQUE WAYS TO ALLOW IT TO BE AFFORDABLE FOR PEOPLE TO MAKE THESE CONVERSIONS.

WELL, AND I THINK WE'VE TALKED ABOUT THIS SO MANY TIMES OVER THE YEARS. SO THE REALITY IS, IS THAT BASED UPON THE ORDINANCE THAT WAS PASSED BY THE COUNCIL MORE THAN 30 YEARS AGO, THAT, WELL, ACTUALLY OVER, MAYBE NOT 30, MAYBE OVER 20 YEARS AGO, upon failure, you're supposed to hook up. Is it safe to say that based upon the systems, the amount of systems that are out and the longevity of these actual septic tanks, that most likely all of these tanks have already failed or their drain fields have failed? And they say they maintain them, but I've met only a few. I have met residents that do maintain them and keep them running and do a good job with that. But for the majority of them, would you say that majority would probably have failed at this point?

I think my first time presenting, that's a good loaded question. That's a tough one.

Let me try to answer that one. Based upon the estimated live expectancy of those septic tanks, most likely all of them have already failed.

That's my point. We may not have. And the only reason why we can't prove that is because the city is not legally allowed to test the actual septics. So we're not allowed to go on to the property to test for them. It requires the county's health department to do that and DEP. I appreciate the grant, but I also don't appreciate necessarily us being the bad guy when really, and us basically saying, we're going to force you to connect. The resident's going to want to know, why should I have to connect if my tank still works? They have to know it's failing, and there needs to be a science behind that so we can explain that to them. And then the other thing, it's not just the tank. It's the continual bill. And people who live on fixed income and looking at having to pay for water and sewer, especially our senior citizens have a very hard time with that. So I want to continue to look at pursuing. We've talked about it, and this is for the city attorney. I know that there's been discussions in the past that mortgage companies are requiring, some mortgage companies are requiring conversion upon sale of the property. I really want to find out more about that because I think that is the optimal time to convert. Because to me, that makes the most sense.

real estate transactions with FHA or VA if municipal services are available they generally tend to to require the connection whether it's signed up the conversion doesn't need to happen prior to the sale of the home but it has to be committed and we go ahead and take care of that there have been prior actions at that trigger point and similarly we've had challenges how do you know the sale of a home you could have a deed you know A death you could have triggering events that but you know occurs that how would the city otherwise know and. Again, I hear what you're saying and I think we we continuously need to see and find a way no different with a lot of these spikes. It's the ebbs and flows of growth, so some of these triggers were home selling right? And so were they getting FHA loan and that required it? And so you'll see some trends based on the market conditions there.

And with time, regardless of septic system, you're going to continue to see that happen as homes sell and these financing... And I went back to the chart so you can see and kind of correlate the time frames to when you know there was a lot of... homes selling and the requirements to convert to city sewer. And that's why you see some of those numbers in the 13, 14, 15 going that way, you know, a little bit higher. And I think it was attributed to that. And as for your point with the septic systems, you know, I worked a lot with the health department back in the day, Jim Duncan, we'd go out we could not it didn't fall under our jurisdiction now if code enforcement if our utility employees noticed a failing drain field of the septic system we would notify the health department we'd work in conjunction with them many times we would pump out the the septic tank as a health and safety issue until you know the health department was able to enforce and get you know sometimes you know residents trying to get the owners to to convert you know and the tenants there having to deal with it. So it was a challenge, but again, it didn't fall under our jurisdiction. I don't think we'd want to go out there. It could be viewed as we're telling people it's failed and making them connect.

I don't think you have to even test. You just see how green the grass is.

It's going to require, I believe it falls under DEP now, not the Hill Department, so it would require them to go out and do testing.

Yeah, I mean, and I agree. I'm not saying that we should do mandatory testing. I'm just in the sense of being forced to convert and just doing the conversion based upon acceptance of a grant. That's just, to me, that's not helpful in the discussion to the resident. You know, like it's just saying we're going to force you to do this. I just, with that, I'm even knowing, okay, why and is it failing and no requirement of testing. That's just disappointing.

Yeah, I think to the grants, these have been voluntary. So we sent out letters to sets of individuals, and we do second rounds. I'll say even Darwin, we didn't have to send a second round of letters, and that was a new area that hadn't been concentrated on. And so to get 30 people commit to that, that was very good. So again, if we can find the money and otherwise, it's been working well in that realm where we're not forcing people, but people are afforded an opportunity, but it's

again it's limited to the funding that's received well and it's also because we want to make it fair so like let's let's be honest you we could do 100 we could take the grant do 100 conversion and they pay nothing for the conversion but you guys went through a painstaking process to see, okay, what would be fair? Like how much do people pay at full price? Like my parents who bought into the water system upon hookup 20 years ago, and those that have paid full, like what's the average amount that people pay to ensure that the new people hooking up, if they get the 50% discount, are not benefiting more than the person that paid full price? So that's why I can never agree to 100% of the dollars utilized for sole conversion because it's not fair for most of the residents in the city who paid full price at that time. Once we did inflation, we backed the number up. Then we figured out, okay, if we go about 50%, that's what most people paid out of pocket. So that's fair because they're paying about the same. So there's a lot, again, this goes back to educating our state legislators and explaining to them why we do things the way we do it. So as we move forward, they understand the ramifications that can happen to the actual resident. Because I'd be ticked, my parents would be ticked, if someone got 100% septic for free when they had to pay for it. And David would be mad too. Right, David? And Stephanie?

I do have a question. I have a question.

Yes, I'm saying.

I have a question for the city attorney. Is it doable for us to pass an ordinance where requiring at the The sale of the home, the new resident hooks up or somebody pays for it, hooks up to the city sewer. I know mortgage companies are requiring it. Some mortgage companies are requiring it. But is it something that the city could do to make sure that when these homes do sell, they are converted?

I saw Councilman Morgan jumping in. I just don't want to step on her sentence.

You're going to step on my toes?

I was trying not to. You already cut my tie.

I was going to say, I could, no. We've been down that road, and it's illegal. to do that. I was looking down to Rich, but it is illegal to do that and put that in there. However, I know that we had also had the discussion prior that anybody that was within 50 feet or 100 feet of a waterway had to connect. This is where more of the issues are, but I know it didn't go far, and I know that at our joint meeting with the county, we're going to take a look at it, and we do have a meeting scheduled to discuss it because there's quite a few county issues properties on the waterway in Port St. Lucie that need to connect. But it is illegal. It was brought up. I don't remember who. Could have been my big mouth. But it was brought up that we were going to try to force them, basically, to hook up if they had a sale. And then the legal gets in the middle of it.

I apologize.

That may be future workshop discussions, you know, but we take the direction from council, the city manager.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you. You know, I just wanted to make one last comment. Septic tanks have a lifespan of about 20 to 30 years. I know I was, my home that I built was in the moratorium for phase one. So until all of the water and sewer lines were installed, we could not build. That was 30 years ago. You cannot tell me that these septic tanks in our city are younger than that and haven't failed in some sort. And it's sad because I know that it's just... And especially the ones that are on the waterways is really concerning. We are talking about safe, clean, beautiful in our waterways and the Indian River Lagoon and here... we have septic tanks right there on the water side. So it's a slippery slope, and it's difficult, but it definitely needs to be done for safety.

But just remember that the majority of them are actually within the county, and that's within the kind of with the city that surrounds the city. And the sad part of that is that you don't have sewer available to every lot.

Right.

So they've never done a special assessment to charge around the way the city did back in 94, 95.

Right, and that's why when we did the microbial tracking study, we did target and ask for voluntary hookup with the homes that were within 50 to 150 feet of the river. And we have had some success, but again, it goes back to the affordability of people not wanting to do it because their bill would Even with the grant, it would go higher.

Yeah, that's what we hear most of the time. And I will say the last letters that we sent out for the Darwin area, it was good response. We got a lot of good response out of that area.

That is a good response.

So I just don't forget this. We need to really be realistic. The city council, previous city council, have been very receptive to what happens protecting our environment. If you think about it, you'll have no other city, probably in the nation, that's done so many steps to a conversion in the nation.

Right.

So really, the city has really done tremendous to protect our environment, which no other city has done.

Thank you. Shannon. Yes. One more thing, too, is, and again, another theme that I would like us to consider is the future of all of our procedures and all of our systems. So, obviously, I don't think we're going to add septic to the city, but, you know, I read articles occasionally where in the state, in DEP, they're looking at different septic systems that are more advanced and those kind of things. things that are cost savings. Because here's the problem, the utility is a very expensive, very expensive beast. And to continue to maintain, obviously we have to maintain water quality, maintain people being able to access clean water, and it's very expensive to do that. and so there is innovative ways that people are coming up with to create cleaner water the ability for septic to work better than it currently is working today all of these things i really would love to see moving forward even at a strategic planning session or prior to strategic planning or at a workshop i would love staff to start presenting like what is your 50 to 100 year vision of where your department's going. Because with the technologies and everything that we have coming forward, I think we need to start thinking about where is the utility going to be in 50 years. One of the things that you and I, Kevin, I think spoke about was knowing that gravity is much cheaper in the future to maintain, but it is extremely expensive to actually install. so do we create something similar to a sidewalk plan or a um an infrastructure plan that is a hundred year plan that as we do with complete streets right as certain streets need to be redone do we then hook up to the gravity the closest gravity at that point in time and then little by little the city will convert it will take many many years we'll all be dead and gone but we at least put the plans forward to improve the system. But then I started thinking with technology, we may not need gravity. There might be the next thing on the horizon that actually is cheaper and more effective and more efficient. So that's why I think it's important to like maybe explore with council because you see this every day. We don't see this every day. And that way we can come alongside and make sure our policies are in alignment with the future vision of what the utility is going to look like. More importantly, how do we make it more affordable? because the level of infrastructure that it takes to maintain these, it scares me in the sense of I don't know how many cities, other than the ones that are really old, I'm talking like, you look at New York and Chicago, those utilities are hundreds of years old. I don't know how cities that are new like us that have to continue to expand and maintain, how we're gonna be able to keep up with the cost, because look at the request that you have for me today.

Yes, and Vice Mayor, the challenge with that is, as I mentioned, I come from the residential side of it, overseeing the water and wastewater collection and maintenance groups. We're making the best of the system. you know, that was chosen, the low pressure system, the grinder system. And I can say, you know, over the years we've tracked the cost. Yes, the cost, and it was expected, you know, low cost at the beginning. The city maintains, you know, the grinders once they're installed. They're not the homeowners, the city. This is where our public outreach, our lunch and learns, all those things, are done to get the information out to the customers to help us. Don't abuse the system. The grease, the wipes, all those things are adding additional wear and tear. So we really push that because that is going to help the residents. It's going to help us keep the cost down. And I can tell you, overseeing that group for over 20 years, it's the men and women that are out there in the field responding to those calls 24-7. They're the ones coming up with innovative ideas, and we all are always looking at the new technology coming out, and that was part of the reason we've started testing the different types of low-pressure systems, and the system that we have now has been very successful in lowering the maintenance. There's a plus there is what I'm trying to say. And that was part of what I get excited about because I'm used to the trend of the cost just going higher and higher and higher. And with some of the changes, innovation that we're seeing on the low pressure systems, in my opinion, We're going to start seeing in the next 10, 15 years some of those costs going down. There'll be less maintenance. But the key is, with our customers, is to help us. Don't abuse the system. Don't put things in there that shouldn't be in there. Because what goes in there is going to be trying to go down in through that grinder system, and it's going to create issues. Out in the West, gravity, love it. My guys didn't have to do anything with that. So, again, it's the system that we have, and we're trying to make the best of it, run the numbers. We have to be close to 50,000 grinders and step systems out there. So that's going to be a big undertaking if we choose to go a different direction.

Yep, and I think, and here's the thing, I don't think we've ever been afraid of that. I think that when you look at our master plans, we know that much of what's in a master plan, we're probably not going to get to do ourselves. It's gonna take continuous pursuit of completing that plan, and it will take many councils to complete those plans. But looking at what's special about Port St. Lucie is, What special is, is that we've had those plans, we learned from history, and much of what we have that many cities do not have is because of the vision. It's because we captured it. It's because we set the plan out and we followed it. And so it is a huge undertaking, but I definitely want, because things are only going to get more expensive. NO MATTER HOW MUCH GRAVITY COSTS US TODAY, TAKE 50 YEARS, IT'S GOING TO COST EVEN MORE. AND SO FOR ME, IT'S JUST THAT THOUGHT PROCESS OF HOW DO WE GET TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND EFFICIENCY AND COST EFFECTIVENESS OVER TIME. AND IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN OVERNIGHT. IF I HAD BILLIONS AND IT WILL TAKE BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR THE WHOLE CITY TO GO TO GRAVITY, YOU COULD SAY, OKAY, YES. BUT I JUST THINK THAT HAVING THE PLAN IS IMPORTANT AND HAVING THE VISION FOR IT IS IMPORTANT.

And the support we've received from from Council and previous city managers has been great. You know, for the utilities, as I mentioned out West, the gravity systems, the developers are building all that. You know the key for me coming from that maintenance side is making sure that it's installed properly, correct? Because that's getting turned over to the city that's going to cost the taxpayers money down the road if it's not put in correctly. And I think that's where you see us, you know, with our inspectors and. We're trying to be as diligent as we can to make sure that they're following the specs because we know that's going to belong to us, and we're going to have to maintain it.

For sure.

So we appreciate your support when these issues come up. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be back in 15 minutes, and we'll continue on. Okay, welcome back from the break. We're going to move right on with our St. Lucie West widening study. Good morning, Colt.

Good morning, City Council, City Manager's Office, and residents. Just here to introduce the team. I won't be making any formal presentations to you as the director, but we have a lot of great staff members and team members in public works that will be. So I know we started doing these bio slides earlier. I struggle with this because I don't like talking about myself, but here we go. 19 years of industry experience in the engineering field, 14 of those as a professional engineer, 13 of them with the city of Port St. Lucie in government. Along with that, I have two bachelor's of science degrees in civil engineering and one in architectural engineering and done a lot to work with APWA and the local Treasure Coast Florida Engineering Society. And with that, I'm gonna turn the mic over to Ms. Emily Sider.

Good morning. Good morning, Madam Mayor, Madam Vice Mayor, members of the Council and the City Manager's Office. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today in terms with COLT. I'm pleased to provide some of these certifications and honors as I've had an opportunity over the last four years with the City of Port St. Lucie to grow my certifications through a number of different aspects. So thank you all for supporting the continued education of your staff. It matters. As we move into the St. Lucie West widening study, I want to begin by giving a little background. In 2024, staff reviewed proposals from various firms to conduct a feasibility study of 1.77 miles of St. Lucie West Boulevard from Peacock Boulevard to Cashmere Boulevard. A highly qualified consultant was selected and work began. The initial task order provided for the corridor-wide data collection, field observations, and safety and operational analysis. This provided a real-time lens on where we are today. However, as Mr. City Manager so eloquently reminded us this morning, Port St. Lucie is never complacent. We are always focused on moving forward and we're focused on the future needs of our growing community. While we may not have a crystal ball to look to the future, we do have Kittleson and Associates. We're excited today to allow them to present. In 2025, with the future in mind, phase two of the task order was executed and a scope of work was provided to provide a sub area model regionally appropriate growth rates and the future operational analysis through 2025 of eight critical intersections on the corridor. Importantly, the intent of the feasibility study was to arm us with the data to inform the direction and the level of service that residents can expect from the widening of this critical corridor. In addition to the data for the level of service, we also looked to provide a glimpse of a preliminary set of typical sections so we can see how the roadway configuration may operate, as well as an extremely high-level opinion of probable cost to inform the next steps on the project, which we look to utilize a design-build contract and have further discussion with you at that today. We're proud to present to you the findings of this feasibility study. We have the project manager, Andrew Garrison, who will be speaking, and along with principal engineer, Kakwan Ma, and transportation engineer, Daniel Torre. We are really looking forward to questions, answering, moving forward. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you Emily and Colt. Good morning. Hello Madam Mayor, Madam Vice Mayor, and members of the Council. As Emily said, I'm Andrew Garrison. I've been with Kittleson. I'm a senior engineer. And we'll be discussing the findings of this study. So this morning I'd like to discuss the project scope, the build alternatives that we landed on, and then some features of the build design that we identified. So the first step we had in this study was determining what growth rates we should use to determine what we expect the future condition to look like. We did this using what's called a subarea travel demand model. This takes into account the actual development that's planned in the area around the corridor as well as roadway improvements that are expected in the area. So we wanted to make sure we applied growth rates that were appropriate to this area because we know it's growing very rapidly. Once we had those growth rates, we took those and applied them to our existing volumes that we collected in phase one of the study and forecasted future traffic volumes out 30 years. We then analyzed the no-build and build operational performance at the eight signalized intersections along the corridor. and develop build typical sections and intersection concepts that accommodated the increase in traffic. So we're looking at a four to six lane widening. The initial goal of this project was to be to provide those six lanes but have as little impact as possible. So we looked at taking that existing right turn lane that's out there today outside of the four lanes and CONVERTING THAT INTO A THIRD THROUGH LANE IN EACH DIRECTION. AND THEN WE LOOKED AT TURN LANE CONVERSIONS AT ANY INTERSECTIONS THAT NEEDED ADDITIONAL CAPACITY BEYOND THAT. AND THEN WE DOCUMENTED ALL OF THAT ANALYSIS IN THE FINAL REPORT. SO FIRST OFF, I'LL WALK THROUGH THE ALTERNATIVES WE IDENTIFIED AT EACH INTERSECTION, FOCUSING FIRST ON THE INTERSECTIONS WHERE WE NEEDED ADDITIONAL CAPACITY BEYOND JUST THE THIRD THROUGH LANE. SO THE FIRST INTERSECTION IS PEACOCK VILLEVARD. We added first the improvements that are being implemented right now that should, I think, be done in the next month or so. These included a second southbound right turn lane, a third eastbound left turn lane, and a third westbound through lane. In addition to that, we also added the third through lane as part of the six-lane widening. And what we saw was that the no-bill condition in 2055 was failing in multiple time periods, whereas the bill condition provided about a minute of improved performance for each driver. So we definitely think this is a much better situation than what will be out there in the no-bill condition and are excited about that alternative. All right, so the next intersection is California Boulevard. Here we again added the third through lane in both directions. Oops, and sorry, I think my graphic messed up there a little bit, but we also had a second left turn lane added at each intersection, or sorry, at each approach as well. So there's one left turn lane at each approach of the intersection today. We're looking at adding a second one in each direction. What we see again here is that you're failing in multiple time periods in 2055 in the no build. The build condition saves you about two minutes per driver. It has much better experience that we're expecting. At Country Club Drive, again, we're adding that third through lane, but then we also are looking to add a second left turn lane on the eastbound and westbound approaches. And a similar story here where you're failing in multiple time periods in the no-build, but you have about a minute of time savings per driver in the build. And then we have Cashmere Boulevard here. We're looking to add a third westbound through lane. The eastbound direction already has three through lanes as you're continuing on to a six lane section to the east. We are actually also looking to add a second northbound through lane. There's two receiving lanes on the north side there today. So that is more just providing capacity on the south side, but doesn't need any improvements on the north side to make that work. And a similar story here where you're saving about half a minute in the build compared to the no build. We also have four other signalized intersections along the corridor that we analyzed. In these locations at Lake Charles Boulevard, Palm Drive, or the shops of St. Lucie West, Bethany Drive, and Kings Isle, we expect that just adding the third through lane in each direction is the only improvement that you need to make. One thing I do want to note at Bethany Drive, we are aware that the Somerset Academy is expanding just south of there. That has been accounted for in our volume growth. I know that the, that expansion has a study ongoing right now, but I don't think the findings have been determined quite yet. I think it's in review. That may have impacts on exactly what they recommend in terms of turn lane configurations at the Bethany Drive intersection on our corridor. THAT'S NOT INCORPORATED RIGHT NOW BUT COULD BE BROUGHT INTO DESIGN PHASE IN A FUTURE DATE. ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THESE BUILD ALTERNATIVES?

I DO. GO AHEAD. BETHANY DRIVE, IN LOOKING AT THE MAP HERE AND MENTIONING ABOUT SOMERSET, I KNOW THAT Coming off of St. Lucie West Boulevard onto Bethany Drive is a cluster. You've got people turning into, I think that's CVS there, and then trying to get over to get into the bank and the medical offices, and then to go up just a small distance to get into the other medical offices. And it's Is any of the widening going to be on Bethany also, or does that come later on with the city and then possibly discussing this with Somerset? Because that's going to cause a lot there.

Yeah, I think we definitely need to discuss that with them.

Okay.

Yeah, and if I may, I think we're awaiting the results of that analysis, see what impacts with their preparedness. proposed changes, what they would have and whether that would justify further improvements along Bethany.

Correct. And if I can add to that, currently, their preliminary analysis showing a dual or second left turn lane needed for northbound turning off of Bethany onto St. Lucie West, as well as extending the westbound left turn lanes. Part of the discussions will have to be with the traffic signal there, because if you add a second dual left turn lane, you're going to need another turn lane. Right now, they're trying to propose a standalone turn pole that would be in the middle for traffic signal. We don't do that as a standalone primary traffic signal in the city. We do have them on Crosstown at the Flores intersection, but those are secondary because we do have the overhead. So right now, that is one thing we would be wanting the applicant to do is put a second left turn light on the overhead instead of a standalone traffic signal.

Thank you.

All right, thank you very much. So the next stage is the build design. So our first effort that we tackled was the build typical sections. So we developed these typical sections in collaboration with city staff. Our biggest goal was to limit right-of-way impact and reduce the cost. We are looking at a narrow cross section on the eastern side that we will need because the right of way there is closer to the roadway. We do expect that most of these, the typical sections are expected to be within right of way along most of the corridor and then there's certain places near intersections where you're adding turn lanes where you might need you might begin to impact the right-of-way a little bit. Some key features of the typical section include 11-foot travel lanes, and obviously there's six of those. We will also have a 10-foot shared use path on the north side of the corridor. A big part of this that makes this work as a cost-effective project is maintaining the open drainage so we don't have to DO ALL THAT'S INVOLVED WITH DOING UNDERGROUND DRAINAGE. THERE ARE SOME PLACES WHERE WE'RE LOOKING AT CURB AND GUTTER THAT WOULD CONNECT BY A FLOOM TO THE SWALE THAT WE WOULD USE IN TIGHTER AREAS WHERE WE DON'T HAVE THE SPACE FOR A SHOULDER. And here are some images of the two typical sections we're looking at. So on the western side, you can see that we have more like 200 feet of right of way. That gives you a little bit more space for a shoulder, some drainage areas, and then that shared use path. We also have a slightly wider median in this area. As we get to the east side of the corridor, same width for the travel lanes, the median, we're tightening that up a little bit. and then again using that curb and gutter with the flume to connect to the drainage areas. Once we had those typical sections and based on the alternatives that we identified in those previous slides, we then developed intersection concepts that show what we expect the area or the improvement to look like on the actual roadway itself. So a couple things that we wanted to just point out and make sure everyone's aware of. One thing that this study did not do was a complete drainage analysis to understand with the roadway developed the way that we're proposing how much drainage you'll need in certain areas. We're based on a, we're, determining the space from the edge of pavement to the sidewalk and the space that's left in between for the swale based on engineering standards the city has. But you know every place is different. You need to do a drainage analysis to determine exactly how much space you actually need. So that's something that would be done in the design phase. Potential issue that that might cause is there may be certain places where you do that drainage analysis and identify you actually need more space than what we're currently showing on the concept, which may have right-of-way impacts. And a good example of this is northwest of Bethany Drive where you can see that's pretty tight and you're pretty close to that right-of-way line. So something that will have to be looked at as you go further into design phase. Another thing we wanted to point out was right turn lanes into shopping plazas. Our analysis focused mostly on the signalized intersections, but there are a lot of businesses along the corridor. Our goal was to limit right-of-way impact. And so certainly at the signals, if we could get away with just having a shared through right, we tried to do that to save space. But we know for some of these businesses in between signals that they would like to have as good access as they can have. So that's something we think would be better left to the design phase to flush out, work with property owners to talk about how, whether those should be maintained, whether they should be taken away in certain places to save right-of-way space. A big thing to keep in mind with this is, you may provide better access. But if you have to add that additional pavement for those right turn lanes, you may begin to have more drainage impacts. There'll be more costs with construction and materials. And you may actually impact the right-of-way as well. So there will be some trade-offs that will have to be thought through a little bit more in a design phase. But we did want to at least bring that to your attention at this stage. And then on the question of right-of-way impacts, right-of-way impacts will of course be looked at more closely in the design criteria package phase. What we are identifying is that just based on the concepts we have right now, we will have between eight 8,000 and 30,000 square feet of right-of-way impact. That's what we're at least anticipating right now and that range is dependent upon whether you don't have any of those right turn lanes into the plazas or if you added them all. So that's that 8,000 versus that 30,000 number. The other thing we wanted to just point out and I'll have a little bit more detail about this on the next slide is There are certain places where the existing sidewalk today is within the private right-of-way, and our concept just kind of mirrors the existing sidewalk. And so you are technically within private right-of-way, but it appears that there's some sort of easement agreement that's already been reached between the city and those private owners. That would certainly want to, we would want to confirm that that can be maintained the same way. So while we are into the right-of-way in other places, we think that that won't necessarily come with any additional costs. And here's what that looks like. So this is just to the northwest of the Lake Charles intersection. Maybe a little bit hard to see on the screen, but you have that red line just below the sidewalk. That's the current right of way line as we understand it. The sidewalk is just north of that technically within the private right of way. It seems like that was some sort of easement agreement as I said, and so that would just be something would have to be confirmed during that design phase. And here's just a quick example of the type of right-of-way impacts we're expecting. In most cases, it's around signals where we have had to add a couple additional turn lanes. This example is at Country Club Drive. As you can see, we had to add both. We have the third through lane. We're maintaining the right turn lane. And we have a second left turn lane, which means that you're pushing the travel lanes a little bit further south. That pushes the sidewalk a little bit further south than where it is today, which results in being a little bit past the right-of-way line. But if you extend that for a couple hundred feet, that does tend to add up in terms of the square footage we're looking at. Then we have the opinion of probable cost. As Emily noted, this was a very high-level analysis we did just to try to get a planning-level understanding of the costs associated with the materials and the improvements we're looking at. Key thing to note is that it doesn't include drainage impacts, stormwater impacts, utility impacts, or right-of-way impacts. So there's a lot of things that are not included in there, but We did this to try and give the city a better understanding of how to shape their design criteria package, and a better cost can be determined in that phase. A more accurate and more reliable idea of what the overall cost for the project will be. Yep, so as Emily said, the design criteria phase will be moving forward in the winter of this year, and the project is also included in the TPO's list of project priorities. As for the overall timeline of the project, what we're looking at as this current study is concluding is that a design criteria package will be put out for solicitation in fall of this year. The city is expecting to award that contract in January of next year with about an eight month contract. Step three would be then actually going for the full design build solicitation in fall of 2027 with the award expected in January of 2028. From there, we'd expect about a year for the design portion of that design-build contract, and then about 24 to 30 months after that for the construction, depending on what the maintenance of traffic plan looks like. That means from the start of the design-build phase, you're looking at about 36 to 42 months. Putting that all together, we're looking at a tentative project delivery date somewhere in fiscal year 2030 or 2031. And it is very dependent on funding. I believe that's all that I have aside from next steps. It's going the wrong way. Any questions about that build design content?

Any questions, anyone?

Just to clarify, this timeline and this construction delivery timeline is for the improvements within this particular item? Correct. This is not the redesign of St. Lucie West Boulevard as far as a whole, adding additional lanes or anything like that, except for what you're indicating here?

It's just the four to six lane widening that we're describing and the intersection concepts. Okay.

And then based upon our previous conversations, when do you forecast or see the city actually basically moving forward with what we know is going to be the future of St. Lucie West Boulevard, which I think in early estimates was like $75 million is what it was looking at, but now it's even going to be more expensive than that to do that over time. When do you think that the city is going to actually construct? Because this is going to last about 20 years, right? Is that the estimate, 20 years?

Our design year for the operational analysis was 2055. Okay.

So, and the reason why I'm asking these questions is because eventually this is a good fix for now. I think it's prudent to move forward especially for the difference in cost in comparison to the full build out today and what we would need to do to actually correct it. I think that, and I shared this, and the reason I'm sharing this council is because I shared this with them. So it needs, obviously we need three votes in the future. I'm encouraging staff to move forward on this. I'm good with this. But I definitely want to make sure that we have the next planning for the design build phase for the future. Understanding that in order to get the federal grants for that, in order to get TPO funding, you're looking at a very long term plan. AND ACCORDING TO WHAT STAFF AND I DISCUSSED, WE NEED THAT DESIGN, AND THAT DESIGN FOR THAT LEVEL OF FUNDING ALONE, BECAUSE THAT'S A REQUIREMENT BY THE FEDERAL FUNDING PORTION OF THAT, IS GOING TO TAKE SEVERAL YEARS. IT'S NOT AS QUICK AS THIS DESIGN BUILD EVEN FOR OUR CURRENT PROJECT. just because i wanted to see how much that would cost today it's 75 million is the estimate for the construction and the completion of the overall project long term if we would wait to 2055 or we would have to wait to 2055 obviously you're looking at potentially based upon inflation and where we've seen inflation like 234 million dollars that goes to show you just In that level of time, today costs $75 million, 2055, the cost would be, if inflation is historic and continues the way that it's been, looking at $250 million for the completion of that project. So time is of the essence for the long-term piece of it. This is good for today. This is going to be good for the next 20 years. But we need to, again, be prepared for what's coming forward in the future. So thank you.

So in looking at what's here, We have issues with right-of-way. And it looks like the right-of-way that is existing is mostly private. So where do we get more space to do even future build-out even bigger if we don't even have right-of-way? That's my question. How do we do that?

Well, that is a great question. That's where with the mobility planning that we look, you know, 25, 50 years out, we have to start looking into that and either additional east-west corridors or you're going to have to start looking at some of the other bigger cities where we have vertical roadways where you have roads stacked on top of each other.

Right. Because just looking at this, which we're talking about now, you're not widening the existing St. Lucie West Boulevard anymore because there's no more space. Correct. So a project like we're talking about, many, many years in the future is going to be completely different than just saying, oh, we're widening, you know, we're going to do an even bigger future widening of St. Lucie West Boulevard. We can't do that. So it's like you say, it will be another east-west corridor, and I don't know what that looks like, or what you're talking about, doing something above, which that's a whole other realm and topic. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're going up, it's different.

That ties in on the Vice Mayor's point earlier. I know we'll be looking into the 50-year vision, 100-year vision, and trying to lay that framework out. That way future generations have something to work to and know where we're going to have to go.

Right. And I agree with you, Shannon. I think I wasn't going to steal Colt's thunder because I knew that that was something he had also brought up, which I'm sure he brought up in your meeting, too, was going vertical. And we've got examples of that already, right? Like West Palm has a couple of those instances. It's not anything new, especially in Florida. Yeah. But to your point, that's a long-term plan, but I really think that we need to start having all of those ducks in a row because that will be here before we all know it. And if it's not, we are going to end. Like the goal, right, is to do better than Fort Lauderdale, than Miami, than all the things that we criticized when we moved here, right? And I think the only way that you do that is by making sure that you are way ahead of those plans as much as possible. Because I don't want to see St. Lucie West turn into a parking lot. And to me, it's pretty close to that already, just because I complain about it. But I mean, it's not that bad. But it can be.

I can only imagine what the response will be when the conversation starts happening about going vertical, especially as it relates to the character of that area. And I don't foresee that that will be received very well. But again, it's many years in the future and it's going to be well past, I think, any of us in this room. But as far as the current project that we're talking about, The three most concerning words on any of these slides are dependent on funding. So where are we anticipating the funding coming from?

First question. Well, I think we have some challenges. I think going back to a couple of years ago, I could easily would have told you that I had a funded mechanism to be able to fund this project. At this point in time, with the uncertainties that we have, just the housing sales tax, we will want to get that renewed. I think we're having some challenges with that with the county because we can't ourselves put that on the ballot for the residents to decide.

Right.

So to me that is a huge challenge because I was going to use that funding if it was approved by the voters to be able to build this road. Right. So that right there is a huge unknown for us.

Right.

And I know I sent a memo out to the county, to all the county commission, encourage them to vote for it and put it on the ballot. As of last night, I think there was a 2-2 vote. So I think it's going to be brought back August the 4th, correct me if I'm wrong, Christina, for reconsideration. And I know the legal department's also looking into it to see if there's anything that the city can do ourselves and be able to put it on there. But from what I've been told in the past, we couldn't, but we're also exploring that opportunity. That's one. The other part is mobilities. We're going to be able to go out there and bond. Well, our mobility fees were averaging between $8 to $10 million per year. We're down to about $3 to $4 million per year.

Right, due to the slowdown.

Due to the slowdown. So that's another component of this. So this project may have to be delayed as a result of that. So these are the different things that we're dealing with on a regular basis.

So constraints over... Half cent sales tax being put back on the ballot, constraints over not knowing what's going to happen with Amendment 3, constraints over not collecting as much impact slash mobility fees as we have anticipated, therefore lowering our bonding capacity. Because if you're going to bond out for projects, you need to have the collateral to support paying back the debt. So these are all real-world examples that we are faced with right now. But at the same time, we're struggling because we know that these things need to get done because no matter what, we are going to continue to grow. The question is, we don't know at what pace in the future, just like we didn't know over the past five year period that we would have such exorbitant growth and have 55,000 people move here. So these are all very real things that are happening right now and very real challenges that we're facing. And we are on pause. Because as we continue to plan, and we're going to do that because that's what we should be doing and that we always do, execution is on hold. And execution, as we see over the next couple of these two days, execution for things is going to be on hold as a result of what we're facing with.

Absolutely.

And it's extremely challenging, for sure. Madam Mayor. Yes.

Can I ask Stephen a question? Yeah, of course. So I like this, this topic is interesting about bonding because I just provided an example of inflation and if you look at 75 million today can be 255 million or whatever I said in 2055, that's one of the reasons why the city bonds. The city doesn't utilize, there are some areas that use pay as you go systems, but because things take so long to construct and build out, we know. That if we don't get that funding today and secure it today and build it today, it's going to be much more expensive in the future. So how long have you been working on bonds, Steven?

With the city?

Just in life. How long have you been working on bonds?

I've been dealing with bonds in different forms for more than 15 years as far as...

so would you then say that the ability for the city to have available funding and a reliable funding source is contingent on receiving that bond yes okay and so if there's funding sources that are closed off and or wait or if we wait for those funding sources to be addressed at the last minute upon an expiration How likely would we be able to get additional funding for some of these projects like this today if there's not a direct funding source because we won't know for two years?

It's unlikely.

So we have a tentative project date of 2030 or 2031 based upon the uncertainty of whether or not we will have funding in two years or the funding will be approved in two years. Would you then say that potentially now this project goes to 2032 to 2033 because we won't be able to bond right now immediately because there's not a secure funding source? Correct. Okay. And I'm only saying that because there's a lot of conversation on this. I've heard some comments. um i have spoken to our commissioners and to some of the county staff and i understand and i hear what they're saying but i just think that it's really important to for us to be able to move as fast on these projects as possible and if we don't have a secure funding store source that we can go to our bondholders and say, hey, we know for a fact that this has passed the ballot, that this funding will be available, and we can go ahead and bond for this project at today's dollars, not at two-year inflation dollars, today's dollars, and begin that project, that would be not just something positive, but a huge cost savings to the city of Port St. Lucie and its residents over the long time.

Correct. Can I just interject a little bit? Please do. One of the things that a lot of municipalities and jurisdictions have in their favor is they have a stable funding source.

Could you pull your microphone a little closer, please?

Sorry. One of the things that jurisdictions such as municipalities, counties, and local governments have in their favor is they have a stable funding source. Once that stable funding source is eroded or is depleted, the risk goes up. One of the reasons why we've been able to keep our rates so low and favorable is because of that stable funding source. The most stable funding source that we have right now is Avalorum taxes. That's your property taxes. It's consistent. It happens year over year. It allows projects to get done for local municipalities and counties. Once that's gone, the risk goes up significantly. That's all I want to say.

With risk, can the interest rate be an increase on the bonds? Yes.

Yes, interest rates go higher.

Oh, Caroline. So, yeah, I was just going to elaborate on with the risk going up, the interest rate goes up, which means it ends up costing more to the residents.

So, and that's just, I just want to share that just because, I mean, I watched some of the meeting back last night and I want to thank staff for advocating on behalf of the city and providing that information to the public. and to the commission. And I understand some of the things that individuals are wrestling with. And so I'm not here to argue everyone has their opinion, everyone can do what they like. But it's a partnership. And what we do together as a county and a city is a partnership. And we both as entities have different priorities. as we should, because we're different. The county is not like the city. The city is part of the county, but we are different, so we are part of the county. And I just think that it's important to have these conversations and to understand the challenges that we're working with. And I think that without knowing, and obviously without polling the council right now, I think that if we had to have the conversation, I don't know if we would come to the same conclusion as far as whether it goes on the ballot. But unfortunately, by constitution, we are not allowed to put that measure on the ballot ourselves. It requires a partnership with the county. And I know they care about infrastructure. I heard that comment that we were saying, I absolutely know they care about infrastructure. I just think the timing and what we need versus what their needs are might be different. I don't know. And I just really hope that if it is coming back, I just hope that there's just some further consideration for the challenges that we're all collectively facing and the pressures that we're all facing together. um you know i think everyone's just i think everyone's just really obviously worried and concerned and and and we're all reacting in a different way so i just i just hope that they they considered again these these these constraints because i know they care about i know the commission cares about st lucie west boulevard And this would be one of the projects in our conversations. Would this not be one of the projects that we would be putting for the future for the approval for the half cent sales tax? I believe that this was, Colt, can you confirm that?

Yes, this would be the premier project.

This would be the actual main project. Yes. Okay. And I just, again, I watched some of it back. I didn't watch your comments, so I don't know if that was also expressed. I think understanding, knowing that the stadium's off of Peacock, knowing that that's one of their main tourism, that's one of our main tourism generators in the community, this is a very important project. And to me, the fact of being able to know that we have that funding secure is so important. Yeah.

I can also add to the half cent sales tax is a consumption tax. And what I mean by that is it's not just paid by the residents, it's paid by individuals who visit us. So it's shared. I think that's something that's very vital and it helps kind of spread that cost because it's not just borne by the individuals who live here. But residents who also, I mean, outside visitors who come and utilize the services are also paying into that.

And I mean, and I know there's a conversation occurring, too, in regards to whether it would pass, whether it wouldn't pass. And I know we have our statistics and all that, but I look at this from a pure choice aspect. The residents of the state of Florida are going to be given the opportunity to vote whether or not they want to continue property taxes. They're given that choice. I feel like it's inherent of us to also give them the choice that if they would like to utilize this particular methodology for collection of revenues to be able to deal with these projects, that they have that choice as well. I think more choices, it's their community, and if it fails, and we have to go back again in two years, but if it does to fail, then that gives us an opportunity to have that conversation with the public of, you know, here's this project specifically that we're looking to do, and this is very important to be able to get done. know so i i'm not for me it's about the choice i'm not worried about if it passes or it fails for me it's a choice to give the public say here are the projects that we need to get done these projects would take exorbitantly longer if we just allow the general fund to fund it because of the lack of funding we have there we want to fast track this as fast as possible even though residents look at 2030 and say what Well, imagine if we didn't have the half-cent sales tax. A project like that, you're looking maybe in 2040, right? It's even longer. So that's the goal is to push these out as fast as possible so people can have relief, especially in the St. Louis, U.S. area. So, again, I want to thank the commission for the discussion. I hope the discussion does continue, and I really hope that there's just some reconsideration as the conversation moves forward. Thank you.

Thank you. I also hope that they reconsider. I know I've had some conversations myself And, Julian, you're right. This is about giving the residents the choice to decide. In 2018, when this was first voted in, we put forward the projects that we told our residents we were going to get done, and we are on track, and we have done exactly that. We've had that oversight committee in place to make sure that we are spending the money, and they report to us that we are spending the funds in the manner in which we're supposed to be spending it. Again, if you don't ask, you don't know. And it's about letting the residents decide. And then whatever the outcome is, we have to live with whatever that outcome is. But going back to the point that Steve made, the issue has been all along is that our residents have been paying for it all. And we need the visitors to also pay for this, especially out in that area. We know what the traffic looks like during spring training. We deal with it, the PD deals with it, and has their plans in place for how to deal with the traffic that have been enhanced over time, and it has been great. But we know that we need more relief on that corridor, especially. And so having everyone share in that, paying for it, has been vitally important. And that is why it passed, because our residents recognize that it's not going to be just me. It's not going to be just us. It's going to be everyone who comes into the city to be able to help pay for it. So I do hope they reconsider as well. I think it's important for all of us to continue to pick up the phone and have these conversations with our colleagues in the county, and maybe we can get them to reconsider, and I hope we can. All right. Any more questions on the widening study? No?

All right.

Do we have time to move forward with our half-cent sales tax update before we go to lunch? Okay. Let's go forward with that.

Thank you, everyone.

Leading right into this important topic, because we're talking about where the money's come from, right?

As Eric's moving up, I want to thank the city manager and staff for including your bio. You guys say that you don't want to talk about yourselves, but here's the thing. To get your job that you have today, you had to talk about yourself. and you had to provide your bio to your city manager. And you work for the public, we all know that. And I think it's important in the conversation, because I hate to say, i've seen some ugliness because there's always ugliness in politics but i know how smart our staff is i know how hard they work what kind of experts we have in the room and i've seen comments like they build this road they're so stupid they don't know what they're doing and it's like i really think that not just for this meeting i think for every meeting anytime you are with the public I mean, outside of a regular council meeting, obviously, we can't do it every council meeting. But when you go to address the public, I do think you should include your bio. And I think the public should know your expertise, like we know your expertise, because that hopefully will help shift the conversation. We're not, you're not people that we're just pulling off the street. These are highly qualified, Eric, you're bringing up your bio. You've been here for, you've been in the business 40 years and in government one year, which means when people say, I want more people from the private sector that understands how business runs, you have 40 years in the private sector. So you're going to give great fresh eyes in your experience to the government in regards to what we could do better from the private sector versus public. So again, I want to thank you for those bios, and I do think that we just need to continue to have that in the public view. Thanks.

All right. Eric Sacksauer. I'll move forward here. And it's a great segue into this particular item on the agenda today with the discussion that just occurred on St. Lucie West widening, as well as bonding and funding, and the half-cent sales tax initiative re-up. But again, Eric Sexauer, I'm the manager for CIP and Half Cent Sales Tax, the project group. And by the way, good morning mayor, vice mayor, city council, staff and residents, city manager. Eric Sachsauer. I do have 40 years of industry experience. I've been with the city just under a year now. And I'm here to talk today about the half cent sales tax projects and really give you sort of an overview of where we started, where we are, and the two remaining years that we have. on the first 10 year of the plan. And before I dive into the presentation, just to kind of circle back to the other topics that were discussed as part of St. Lucie West widening, we do have the half set sales tax program is authorized through 2028. We are programmed, as Mayor Martin indicated earlier, we are delivering on those projects. We do have a infrastructure surtax citizen committee that monitors our spending on those projects. We provide monthly feedback to them. We do quarterly updates with them. and they report back to city council on the success and adherence to those commitments. So I just wanted to sort of say that before we move into the actual deck. As we do in all of our areas within the city, we are a data-driven function. And so from a data-driven component related to the half-cent sales tax, we obviously have the mobility plan, which is out there that we're following today. We have the draft mobility plan, which has been circulated and coming back around for review. We obviously focus on adherence to the comprehensive plan. We do streetlight data traffic counts, and we look at PSLPD crash data, which help us to inform what projects are critical for us. We also participate and rely heavily on the TPO, the St. Lucie Transportation Planning Organization, with their annual traffic counts, long-range transportation planning, congestive management process. We also look at the FDOT five-year work program, also through the TPO list of priority projects, which helps inform us what, from a regional standpoint, are critical projects. Also, the Transportation Organization's Transportation Improvement Program, or TIP. And then we also look at LRTP calculations. And then last but certainly not least, we also do resident engagement. And so we had the Citizen Summit last year, which we focused on. We did a national community survey. We also took a sales tax renewal survey just recently. And then we also participated in the Citizen Summit for the 2026 prioritization. Our proposed projects for the future, which would be picked up in the next up of the sales tax should it be on the ballot and it be approved, would be the corridor roadway improvements that we just talked about as it related to St. Lucie West Boulevard, and that would be our premier kind of poster child project from a roadway improvement. We're also focusing on water quality and drainage improvements citywide. Resurfacing is another major component that is a benefit of the half cent sales tax. And so our road, which you'll have a presentation a little bit later on, but our roads resurfacing is dependent on that half cent sales tax. And then we've also tried to focus on sidewalk and community connections, initially focusing on getting connected to parks and schools and so forth. And later on today, you'll also hear a presentation on the sidewalk master plan, which is also in part funded from this half cent sales tax. So I wanted to touch a little bit on some of the history as well and give just a high-level overview on some of the projects that are in the first 10-year plan. Floresta Drive we're all familiar with, but this was Phase 1, which was completed in 2022, Phase 2, which is completed in 2025. And then Floresta III, which is under construction, and that has a contract end date of early February, or I should say early of 2028, February. However, the good news is on this project is that our contractor and our team continues to make good progress, and we are projecting an early completion of that. which is good news. The other thing is that this contractor in conjunction working with us at the city continues to open up roadway segments and remove detours and closed road segments earlier and as soon as they can to allow traffic to move through. But the features of this project was adding dedicated bicycle lanes. We had multiple ponds to provide roadway drainage and flood protection. sidewalks on both sides of the road, street trees and landscaping, pedestrian and FPL street lighting, landscape modern roundabouts, pedestrian crossing safety enhancements, a new bridge at the Elkham Waterway, and baffle boxes to clean stormwater runoff as part of our D11 work connected to this project. Here's a snapshot of sort of phase one. The photo on the left is what it used to look like. And you can see the swales and the fairly narrow road, no sidewalk connectivity. And then the photos on the right are the improvements that were done in phase one. Again, the pond work, the bicycle lanes, the sidewalks, the center turn lanes or left turn lanes and so forth, significant changes for phase one. Phase two, which the city just accepted earlier this year, the final acceptance. But on the left, again, a before shot. And then the three, or two on the bottom right and in the middle, and then the top right up top is the old. But adding that bridge, again, bicycle lanes, sidewalks, and enhanced medians, and a much better look and feel for our residents. Not to mention the connectivity that it provides for transportation. More shots of phase two. Again, an example of one of the roundabouts, the pond work over there. And then the oval roundabout, which is in front of the school and some of the artwork that was incorporated into the project.

Really quick, just on the, because we had some severe rain come in quickly last week, Friday. And obviously the area that's being constructed had some flooding. And then there was flooding in many areas of the city. And so this is a side note of this particular project. But would it be beneficial? Because I know we have cameras that we can keep static. Would it be beneficial at some point in time to pick an area that has, whether it's floresta, that has drainage, like that stormwater and drainage that the public pays for so they understand and show how quickly the water dissipates? Because that's something that I've learned just living in the city and in different areas of the city. It's amazing to me. Not every area of the city, that's why we have Oak Hammock and some of these other projects that we're working on. But a lot of areas of the city might get flooded for a second and then within hours. But by the time I got home, my dad sent me a video of our street. It was like the road was underwater. By the time I got home from my activities on Friday, it was all clear. There was water in the swale, but road was clear. And I don't think people realize it may flood, but it dissipates quickly. Is there anything that we can do to kind of capture that, like in a fast, real way?

So, yes, there's some technology we're looking at, and thank you for bringing that factor up because a lot of residents don't realize that roadways are secondary storage for stormwater. They are set at certain elevations for storm events, which most of them are 10-year three days or 10-year one days is what the roadway elevations are. So then if you have a 25-year storm, of course, water is going to be in that area. And that's why houses are also set at the 100-year three-day storm to provide additional flood protection. But to your question about trying to provide notifications, we are looking at a company. It's called HiFi. And they do flood detection sensors for a relatively moderate price that we're trying to see about implementing as a pilot program. One area we'd be looking at is California and Savona for the time being until we can get out there with road improvements. What we like about this is right now, we get the phone calls. Hey, it's raining out here. Send someone out. PD gets the call to go out there, and then our works department goes out. Well, with this type of device, it would send automatic notifications to us when the water elevations get to a certain point with the goal of trying to get there before there's any water in the intersection to give the residents or ma'am's notice. part of that also measures not just when the water gets there it's constantly measuring it so with that time lapse we could start to show hey the water rises this quick and it drains this quick so we'll keep exploring that option i like that and then further integration of notification of the public so whether through text message like i would love to see i love it notifies us but i want to get to the point especially with technology where

resident would know hey your area is having flooding please do not leave your house for the next 30 minutes hour whatever because we do we've seen a couple cars this past was it on friday where they got stuck in water so i think it'd be really like to be able to communicate that that'd be amazing for the public i i know i would appreciate that notification like stay put for the next hour

And specifically on Floresta, in the construction phase, the contractor was out there right behind the Friday storm and got that flooding resolved and taken care of actually that evening and into the next morning. Friday's event was an unusual event. We got three to five inches in some areas of the city, and yet part of the western area got less than an inch. But, yes, there were definitely some areas that saw some impact from that water. But to your point... Vice Mayor, because I drove all of our projects that were focused on in CIP at least, and while there was water in the swales and temporarily on the roads, that all dissipated overnight. So to Colt's point, the fact that roads also are storage is something that I think is maybe an educational opportunity for us as well.

So that's what I was just going to say, because we've talked about it several times. But I think we need to keep educating and communicating the fact that when you have such hard rainfall and it's coming down so much in such a short period of time, it's difficult for the system to be able to handle that. And we need to keep putting that out there, especially during this time, which is our storm season, right? And we're heading into August, which is our high season, August and September for STORM OPPORTUNITIES. SO BEING ABLE TO PUT THAT INFORMATION OUT THERE, ESPECIALLY DURING THIS TIME ABOUT, HEY, WE'RE GETTING FIVE INCHES OF RAIN IN AN HOUR, THAT OUR SYSTEM NEEDS TIME FOR THAT, AND ESPECIALLY DEPENDING ON WHETHER OUR GROUND'S ALREADY SATURATED OR NOT. SO, YOU KNOW, FINDING A, KEEPING IT SIMPLE AND GETTING THAT INFORMATION OUT. EVEN IF WE HAVE TO SEND IT OUT A COUPLE TIMES, YOU KNOW, A MONTH, JUST BECAUSE THE MORE TIMES PEOPLE SEE IT, THE MORE TIMES THEY'LL UNDERSTAND IT. AND THEN THE COMMENTS WILL BE, OKAY, THE CITY HAS EXPLAINED THIS TO US, INSTEAD OF THEM SAYING, WE DON'T KNOW, WE DON'T KNOW.

WELL, AND WHAT'S CRAZY IS, SHANNON, IS I'M SURE YOU SAW IT TOO, IT WAS ALL OVER SOCIAL MEDIA. YOU GUYS SAW QUEENS, NEW YORK, HOW THAT WAS UNDERWATER? I WAS LIKE, SO, AND IT'S, LIKE YOU JUST SAID, IT'S LIKE HOW OUR SYSTEM WORKS, BUT REALLY, IT'S LIKE IF YOU GET AN AMOUNT OF RAINFALL THAT'S SIGNIFICANT, in a quick period of time even places like that can go underwater you know fairly quick and then dissipate but i was like in queens i was just i was sitting there as a shock by it i was like i couldn't believe like how much water was there it looked like miami i think that was the one with the floating truck and then the fire truck driving through where the water is up to the the middle of the fire truck yes yes i was like wow

But we can take an action note both from the CIP group as well as through Public Works on working on a communication effort.

And while we're talking about this, Emily was able to look up the company we're looking into. They do provide public-facing websites. And additionally, if they give us automatic alert notifications, we could also include the communications department. That way they can send out blasts as well, too.

Yeah, that would be very, very helpful.

All right, phase three, which is the last phase of FLORESTA, making great progress, as I indicated before, and ahead of schedule. The shot on the left is one of the areas. So although it isn't designed to work this way in terms of phasing, essentially the work is sort of being completed from the center out. And so there are two remaining areas that are under the most construction aspect or from a viewpoint. is the section on the south end connecting to Crosstown and on the north end connecting to Prima Vista. But these are some of the photos actively on Phase 3. On the right again, we've got one of the roundabouts. We have the canal work that's being done towards Prima Vista, and then we've got the reservoir that's being created to hold stormwater off of Harborview. And again, some of the befores and afters, you can see the old two-lane structure, swales, no sidewalks. On the right, you can sort of see the two lanes coming into the area as well as the single two lanes up above. The left shot is the D11 canal where it connects to the river. This is one of the components of this project. It was... earlier, but in this case, this was taking what was an open canal, converting that into twin large pipes with baffle boxes, which are allowing us to clean the water as it's coming out to the river. And then the original canal where the pipes are underneath will get sodded, as you can sort of see in the top middle picture. If you look up, that's sort of what it would look like in terms of the sodding. And down below is the work as they're getting ready to do that. And then you can see on the top right those six metal covers sort of in the very center of the picture. That's the baffle box or one of the baffle boxes which allows us to then clean out some of the sediment that it collects. Another component of the half cent sales tax is the California Boulevard, which is part of our first 10 year plan, phase one widening. We are planning to widen California Boulevard from two to four, essentially from Crosstown to St. Lucie West. We had public information meetings held in September 22 and January of 24. We've had conceptual typical sections and access management plans presented to you all at the council in March of 23. We've had meetings with HOAs and done outreach along the corridor and that continues. And we are now in the active process of soliciting for a design criteria bid, which will help us to inform a design build package, which we expect to contract in late 2027. Another major component of the half cent sales tax is our sidewalk program. And so the chart shows from the inception of the program, 18-19, we did about 1.7 miles all the way through down to 25-26 where we're completing a mile. It's actually about 14 miles, 13.7 miles since 2019. And over on the right are the list of all of the areas that have been positively impacted by the sidewalk program. So Tiffany, Hillmore and Phases, Morningside, West Torino, Selvitz, East Torino Parkway, Torino Parkway, Sandia Drive, Fairgreen, Cadmeo, Galeano, Import Drive, Rosser, Abingdon, Import Drive, a second phase, Brescia, and then what we're wrapping up now as also part of this year's program is Lakehurst Drive from Bayshore to Ivanhoe, and then Eyerly Drive, which is in design phase right now. Just a note on the bottom, in addition to these sidewalks, which are actually sidewalk programs for connectivity, we've also implemented another eight and a half miles of sidewalk, which are part of the floresta drive improvements, which didn't have sidewalk before. Another component of half cent sales tax, and I believe there'll be a more in-depth presentation on repaving later, but just a reminder that we do fund, as I mentioned earlier on, repaving elements. And so from 2019 to 2026, we've done over 104 miles of roadway that otherwise would not have been repaved without the half cent sales tax necessarily. And in the 25, 26 year, about 23 and a half miles. Also part of the half cent sales tax program was us one improvements where we did landscaping and irrigation and that was from the Martin line to just north of Huffman that was started in 2023 and wrapped up in 2024 and that included large and small plants turf irrigation and the stamped concrete. St. Lucie West Boulevard intersection improvements are also things that have been in progress as part of the half cent sales tax. And so Cashmere Boulevard has been complete. That included a new eastbound right turn lane, an additional northbound left turn lane. Bayshore Boulevard complete, extended the southbound right turn lane. And Peacock Boulevard completed. which we've talked about as a separate project, but that's the westbound lanes as well as the southbound turn lanes being added, and it was referenced in the St. Lucie West widening project. So they've factored those improvements into the analysis that they did as part of the widening study. Additionally, Torino intersection improvements. That was started in October of 2019 and also wrapped up in 2020. And you've got some of the before and after shots there. And that's at the East Torino Parkway and California Roundabout and East Torino Parkway and Cashmere Boulevard Roundabout. Again, the befores and afters. And that's the presentation on half-cent sales tax. Any questions?

Thank you so much. Any questions, anyone? No? No?

So with road resurfacing, I know that previous years, it's been a long time, but I know previous years that Shannon and we used to, and Stephanie, I think Stephanie too, I don't know if, David, maybe you were here when we did it. We used to take whatever excess or if we had a little bit of excess for a few years there, we would take, let's say, another million dollars or half a million dollars above and beyond what we would normally receive for road resurfacing. When we get down to the budget conversations and we discuss what's available, I would love to include it as one of the discussion points. Not that I'm going to say that's the only thing because I know everyone probably has a lot of items. I'm just seeing, even though I've talked to Cole, I am seeing deterioration of roads from just a visual standpoint to me, happening more rapidly. There's areas I know in District 3 specifically, I've seen comments from residents. I know that at where you live, I think, Mayor, there's been a lot of challenges with road resurfacing out there. So I want to make sure that's part of the discussion. The other thing is I want to thank Ms. Gilbert for pursuing the insurance on the beautification aspects on the frost that we had. I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHEN THOSE ITEMS ARE GOING TO BE REPLACED. AND THEN SAFE, CLEAN, AND BEAUTIFUL IS ONE OF OUR BIGGEST ITEMS. WE'VE LOST A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF TREES AND SHRUBBERY. AND I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THAT GETS REPLACED BECAUSE THAT, YOU CAN KIND OF JUST SEE IT. SOME AREAS ARE PRETTY HARSH. South Bend. So I met with the residents of South Bend. I want to thank staff for being there. I think that there really needs to be a workshop item on South Bend specifically for this council. We're not just having challenges with the road out in South Bend. We're having even utility challenges right now at South Bend. And I wanna make sure that we're all on the same page and we're working on these strategies together. And I don't know if it's the future sales tax, we can add something for South Bend, but I think based upon what I'm hearing and then also the updates that I received from staff, I feel that South Bend has raised in its critical nature than a conversation even three to five years ago that we've had about South Bend. So those are just a few things. I appreciate the update. I want to thank sincerely our Half Cents Sales Tax Board for their due diligence on monitoring the expenditures, their hard works and efforts to make sure that this is transparent and we are being accountable to every single penny that we collect. So thank you.

Do you want to touch on the one question related to plants?

Correct. Yes. So JD is preparing cost estimates and proposals right now for the damage plants. We're trying to give some time for making sure that the plants do or do not have a chance to rebound right now. But we are at that point now where we're going to be pulling that information together. And the latest plan is we should have those numbers by the end of this month to try and determine a game plan going forward.

Yeah, and I appreciate that. I think there's some things that I've noticed. Number one, they cut it down to the stumps, and now you just see stumps in the top of these medians. The other thing is some of the grass is being replaced by the medians, and they're just putting mulch down. But now weeds are coming through the mulch, and you're just seeing mulch with weeds. I mean, it's just looking... To me, if the roads are paved and the streets look good, that's your first conversation of what we do for a city, especially when that's why people moved here. So I just look at... I MEAN EVEN DOWN TO, I'VE SEEN SOME SIDEWALKS THAT I'VE HAD TO CALL THE CITY MANAGER THAT HAVEN'T BEEN PRESSURE WASHED AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW LONG. SPECIFICALLY OUT IN LEONARD AREA, LIKE IN THE OLDER PART OF MY DISTRICT FOUR AREA. AND I'VE SEEN MORE LITTER. LITTER IS INCREASING. you know, second to safe is beautiful or clean, sorry, clean, then beautiful. So even clean before beautiful. And so I know that we're coming to difficult times. I know that there's going to be constraints that need to be made, but we're going to need to think of creative solutions to keep the city clean. So thanks.

And Vice Mayor, I know there is a presentation after lunch on repaving, but I asked Thomas if he could join because he could answer any specific questions or if you want to wait until that point in time.

Let's wait until then. I just want to say I want to get an update on import. I know we had the sidewalk issue, but you've been promising, promising. So if it wasn't in your plan, I haven't seen it.

I can give you an update on that.

Okay, after. And then I also would like a reminder on what our timeline is and the funding source for Gatlin and Savona and also Tradition and Village.

So some of those will be in the CIP presentation that's scheduled for this afternoon, and I can answer the question on import specifically if you'd like now, or we can.

Let's wait until after because we're at the lunch time, and it all goes in with that. But just wanted to make sure that we hit on those things and you guys are aware. All right, if there's nothing else, we're going to go to lunch, and we'll come back around 1. Welcome back from our lunch. I hope everyone enjoyed it. We're going to move right along with our Rodenbridge and Stormwater Capital projects.

Good afternoon, Madam Mayor, City Council, City staff, and residents. My name is Everett Torge. I'm a project administrator for the Capital Improvements and Half-Cent Sales Tax Project Group with Public Works. And I do... fully believe in exactly what Vice Mayor Caraballo said about making sure that residents know that we are subject matter experts on what we're talking about. And I've also found that they really like to know that so many of us are also locals who love the city that we live in and love the work that we do. So, my name's Everett Torge. I've lived in Fort St. Lucie for my entire 36 years. I commuted to Florida Atlantic University for a Bachelor's of Science in Biology. I have worked on the Treasure Coast in the fields of geomatic engineering, geotechnical engineering, environmental engineering, ecology, civil design, and project management. And I've spent close to the last four years with the City of Port St. Lucie. So with that, let's dive into our capital improvement project updates that I am proud to present. Starting off strong, Floresta Phase 3. We did go over this with the half-cent sales tax presentation. I cannot stress enough, though, this 60% number is, I think, a little bit of a misnomer in that Floresta Phase 3 is a culmination of three different phases of Floresta that has been going strong and been a great project for us, starting with Frank Knott, Tom Salvador, Eric Sexauer, Emily Sider, the entire CIP team, and we are on the final stretch. Again, the end date is February 28th of 2028. However, we do hope to end early with this project. We are looking for anywhere that we can gain time, and we are looking to open up the various roads as soon as we possibly can. St. Lucie West Boulevard and Peacock Boulevard. I actually just got an email on this that we are hoping to open up the entire configuration in its final form by close of business today. There is a small amount of MOT out there with one lane closed. And we are fixing one guardrail that will allow us to open up that lane and have the full configuration that was spoken about in the beginning of the St. Lucie West widening presentation. This project has been a true partnership with not only St. Lucie County, but also St. Lucie West Services District. And we are on the final stretch for it. After we get that final configuration, We've got nothing but buttoning up of cleanup and various closeouts and the final touches. Tulip College Park. For this one, it is currently functioning as intended. However, there is still one final lane that needs to open in the easternmost phase that needs to occur, as well as some sidewalk work. So we are also on the final stretch with this one. We do expect to be completed this fiscal year by September 30th of 26. Tradition Parkway, Village Parkway. We have officially gotten the design and we have gotten this to procurement as of yesterday. And Elena Canofalo with procurement has already started the process. We are doing great with the timeline on this. CEI is also being procured. The project manager on this is Tim Murphy. And Antonia Balistrieri and I will both be doing tons of QA, QC. We love this project. We think it's going to be getting started off on a great foot with construction in the fall of 26, so shortly. And something I forgot to mention for Tulip and College Park, our project manager is Bree Vasquez, who is also doing a fantastic job. the Gatlin-Savona intersection improvements. Our project manager on this right now is Emily Sider. I am going to be the project manager once we get into construction. This is also in the final design phases. So we did see a spot where we could combine two phases together for this project so that we could get it completed with time savings and cost savings. The final design is currently being buttoned up to make sure that can happen. And then we will be going to procurement once that is completed. We're hoping to start construction by March of 27. And we're hoping to do what was previously two phases all at once and get those improvements in as soon as we can.

Awesome.

The PAR roundabouts. What's the completion time on that project? I think for Gatlin-Simona intersection improvements, if I'm not wrong, is it two years on that? Yeah. Approximately two years, so from March 27 to March 29. Thank you.

Wow. That's a long time for intersection improvements.

Oh, yeah. That two years does include anything that's needed for material procurement as well as closeouts. But also with the MOT concerns there, we want to make sure that we're not holding up citizens. We're holding up citizens as little as possible with MOT congestion. So we are trying to give ourselves a little bit of buffer room for that because it's going to be a bit of a challenging one.

Is night work being considered for that, considering how congested that intersection is?

I'M SURE THAT THERE WOULD BE SOME CONSIDERATION OF NIGHT WORK. ANYTHING THAT INVOLVES HAVING TO DO WORK WITHIN THE INTERSECTION, ESPECIALLY AT THIS INTERSECTION, WE KNOW HOW BUSY IT IS, THAT WOULD DEFINITELY REQUIRE THE CONSIDERATION OF THAT NIGHT WORK.

MADAM MAYOR, I'LL MAKE SURE THAT WE EVALUATE THAT AND MAKE SURE THAT WE IMPLEMENT THAT.

ALL RIGHT. AND THEN ALSO LOOKING AT THAT FOR TRADITION AND VILLAGE, BECAUSE THAT INTERSECTION IS REALLY, REALLY BUSY.

And City Manager and Mayor Martin, just to chime in on that, both of those projects, certainly Tradition and Parkway and Village, we've already had the conversations about working with, once we're able to bring the contractor on board and CEI, having those conversations about what elements will need to be done in the evening. or overnight versus those that could be done in the daytime, because that is clearly an already failing intersection. So we've had those discussions. On Gatlin and Savona, once we get the final design in of the combining of the two sets of plans, we'll then take a look at that and see what we can do, both to consolidate the time frame that was just quoted, but also whether or not we need to do any night work, just as we did for the prior one that was up for the St. Lucie West Boulevard and Peacock. We did that night paving process. or we did the paving overnight up there for the same reasons.

Okay, thank you very much.

So another big one in that area, the PAR roundabouts at PAR in Savona and PAR and Darwin. These two roundabouts are being looked at as a way to make sure that as PSL Boulevard, the final phase of PSL Boulevard is completed, we have as well-functioning intersections in the area as possible if any detours are needed. originally these two projects were bundled to save time and to save on costs and we actually have seen that now we've seen the fruits of that if we can assume that the with inflation that there would be some inflationary costs to the consulting that we have saved approximately 150 000 and up to 1.5 years of schedule time for the darwin roundabouts The 100% design plans are currently being buttoned up, as well as the bid documents. sorry, the 100% design plans are completed. The bid documents are being buttoned up. We are going at approximately the same rate as the property acquisition in order to make sure that we are maximizing our quality control and our efficiency with this. Property exhibition is ongoing. However, with the current rates, we are expecting construction to begin in fiscal year 26, 27, so that we can be completed by early 28. And that fits well with the Port St. Lucie Boulevard timeline. So we had a great presentation on this earlier today, the St. Louis West Boulevard corridor improvements. This has been spoken about ad nauseum, and it is an incredibly important part of our capital improvements program. Emily Sider has been fantastic at moving this forward, getting Kittleson on board, and getting as much as we can out of this corridor efficiently and consistently. California Boulevard Phase 1 was also mentioned during the half-cent sales tax. Again, Emily Sider has been working diligently to get this out so that we can get a design criteria package. She did attend the Bloomberg Harvard Leading City Procurement Reform Program, and we determined that a design-build approach would be perfect for this project. So we will get a consultant on board to get that design bid criteria package. Once we get that, we can go to design builds and simultaneously work on the design with the contractor on board at the onset so that we can make sure that this project is done efficiently and with both time and cost savings. Bayshore Boulevard, we are at 90% design. We are working on getting permitting from South Florida One-Demand District. This is a job that is pending funding. It's no longer in the five-year CIP. However, we do want to make sure that we have a shovel-ready design. And through this, we have been able to identify that a roundabout may be necessary on this corridor. So we do hope to have the design completed by December of 26th. and be able to have it shovel ready for when we need to go to construction for this project. Village Green Drive design. So Frank Knott has been working on this as well as Eric Sexauer. We have the 60% through the conceptual and final design. We are currently looking at phasing questions. Those are the next steps so that we can, pending funding, including CRA contribution, get as much as done with this as we can prior to or alongside the future soccer stadium right next door to this.

So can we stop here for one second? Yes. So unfortunately, I heard that we did not receive the federal grant for construction on this project. Kate, could you please, I'm sure you've had meetings already with our team. Do we have any strategies moving forward of how we complete construction?

ABSOLUTELY. SO THE CHALLENGE, OF COURSE, WE WERE VERY FORTUNATE TO RECEIVE A RAISE GRANT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN CITY'S HISTORY OF $2 MILLION TO DESIGN THE PROJECT. THAT WAS UNDER THE PRIOR ADMINISTRATION, AND IN THE ADMINISTRATION CHANGES, THERE WERE DIFFERENT TRANSPORTATION PRIORITIES SET FORWARD THAT, YOU KNOW, WE WERE STILL VERY COMPETITIVE AS BEING A PREVIOUSLY FUNDED FEDERAL PROJECT. THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION TYPICALLY RANKS YOU VERY HIGHLY IN TERMS OF CONSTRUCTION. WE SAW THAT ONE OF THE HEADLINES COMING OUT WHEN THEY WERE ANNOUNCING THE AWARDED PROJECTS, THERE WAS A REJECTION OF BICYCLE FACILITIES, COMPLETE STREETS. THAT WAS NOT EMBRACED IN THIS YEAR'S SELECTION, WHICH OUR PROJECT WAS DESIGNED UNDER DIFFERENT PRIORITIES. So I think it is a challenging until the administration is going to tweak that in the next year. And that's what we'll continue to advocate in our work with White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. This is a project that really has a great deal of economic development benefits. And I know that Vice Mayor and Mayor, you both advocated at the federal level for this. And that really helps us tell that story about how this really is not just, which we care about safe access for pedestrians and cyclists. This serves multiple purposes, also priorities that the administration has prioritized among many priorities transportation-wise. They just had a different focus this round. So we'll continue to advocate for both the focus for the next round, as well as look at other funding opportunities that would meet this criteria, both at the state and federal level, as well as federal and state appropriations. Something we could pursue is a federal appropriation through a Congressman Mast for this project for some funding. But the challenges with the level of funding at $24 million, the BUILD grant was the best funding pot because it was significant. That could have funded a significant amount.

So I'd like to see, like you said, we're going to bring back phasing options. Oh, Frank jumped in. Can I add something to that?

Yeah, go ahead. I was going to chime in too.

SO WE CURRENTLY, BECAUSE THE CRA WAS GOING TO CONTRIBUTE US LIKE $12.5 MILLION, I BELIEVE, TO THIS PROJECT. WE ARE CURRENTLY HAVING OUR DESIGN TEAM LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN GET BUILT FOR $12.5 MILLION. WE SHOULD HAVE THAT IN ABOUT TWO WEEKS, I THINK. and we would talk to you guys on a one-on-one basis to see how you'd like to proceed with that using the CRA, only CRA funds, and then we could pursue additional grant money to do the rest at a later time.

So to clarify, because there's also been conversation about the TIF funding, that would be the Walton in one CRA, which means that any TIF benefit dollars would go to construction of this roadway project, which is a positive use of the funding. for the economic development that's coming forward. So I think that I would love to see the phasing. I don't know how the rest of the council feels. I would love to see the phasing. I would love to have a strategy for the phasing. I would love to see if Congressman Mast would look for an appropriation request. We do have an election coming forward, so I do know that we have a potential new governor coming forward. I think as we begin to whittle down and kind of have an idea of the final candidates, I think it'd be good to meet with their administrations ahead of time to kind of brief them on some of these projects, because whoever the people elect, I want to make sure they're aware of it. And... We'd love to see, I know we had DEO money prior for economic development on the west side. We'd love to see the ability to see if there's any DEO money in the future that we could apply through the state for this economic development project. Because this was, right? I think before the soccer stadium, this was a transportation project for improvement of mobility, Greenway Park, way trails, et cetera, et cetera. It has now shifted because of Walton and 1. TO A ACTUAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORRIDOR. SO I THINK THERE'S OPPORTUNITY FOR THAT DISCUSSION.

ABSOLUTELY. VICE MAYOR, IF I MAY, I THINK IF YOU CAN PHASE THIS PROJECT, IT WILL ALLOW US TO CHASE MULTIPLE FUNDING SOURCES FOR GRANTS. I THINK THE CHALLENGE IS IF YOU KEEP IT ALL IN ONE, AT THE $24 MILLION LEVEL, THERE'S VERY LIMITED PLOTS FOR THAT KIND OF LEVEL OF FUNDING. BUT IF YOU PHASE IT AND ARE ABLE TO SEPARATE, THERE'S MULTIPLE FUNDING SOURCES FROM STORMWATER GRANTS TO BICYCLE PEDESTRIAN FACILITIES TO TRAILS. WE CAN PURSUE MULTIPLE FUNDING SOURCES FOR THAT.

And Kate, Vice Mayor, if I could just add to what Frank was saying. So under the RAISE grant, we are moving forward to continue the design, which will be wrapped up. We've challenged the engineer to give us potential options for what we could do in different phases and also kind of pull components out and sort of give you an option of what to include or not include. And then I know that the CRA group is going to be talking with you all in terms of using those TIF funds for potentially the construction. We are still moving forward with our outreach. We do have, I believe, we sent a note up through to council for it to be on your calendars, but we also have the business group outreach is occurring next week, I believe, on the 30th. So we're still moving forward with that to make sure we continue the outreach. But just from a phasing standpoint, real quick on the map, just sort of to orient everyone, the northern section north of Waltland 1 is already four lanes. And that's the business section predominantly, but there might not be as much need to do that right away, as opposed to the southern area where we have to be able to get traffic moving as a result of the March 28 soccer stadium. So that's sort of how we're taking a look at the project right now. And then we'll be working with Kate and others to figure out how all of that funding might work.

Okay, okay.

SO IF WE'RE READY TO MOVE TO THE NEXT ONE.

If we're talking about federal dollars, are there going to be additional constraints on us for what we can do and what we can't do because it's federalized? That's my concern. I mean, of course, we want funding, and we're going to pursue every bit of funding, but I always know that there's lots of strings attached when we're talking about federal money, so I just have a little concern about that. But, you know, we've got to keep trying for whatever we can to leverage the resources, so...

Yeah, absolutely. Great point, Mayor. There are more federal constraints. And what's helpful is if we did receive federal funding, it's already been designed to federal standards. So that helps us kind of with any, you know, that's definitely been a hindrance in the past for chasing construction funds when it wasn't federally designed with federal standards. So it's ready for federal funding, but we will have to look at that carefully because you don't want to be constrained in terms of how you implement it.

And then the other part is this, is when we're talking about phasing it or segmenting it out, We really need to make sure that when it comes to the soccer stadium, that we already know what the plan looks like in regards to traffic. And that involves the PD with getting cars in and out. Listen, we know that we have much bigger events at mid Florida, right? We have 10 to 15,000 people versus a 6,000 person or soccer stadium. However, still traffic is a concern. And I just want to make sure that if we are able to get funding or use CRA funds and we're able to leverage that, that we're making sure that the PD is included in what that traffic plan looks like for any design elements or things that need to be done. Cause that's going to be key. Yeah. We always talk about doing things right the first time and making sure everyone's on the same page. And this is vitally important as we go into next year with, with the stadium being constructed. So.

Yeah. So to your point, and this might already being done chief, I don't know if this is being done or not, but. because the soccer stadium obviously does have to put forth a plan of traffic and how do we move traffic during a game, which is usually going to be in the evening, it's going to be on the weekend. But we have lights, Christmas lights or Christmas tree lighting in December. We'll have another 4th of July. We'll have a couple of different events coming up. Is there any way that whatever you guys come up with can be modeled at those events and then that way we can kind of begin to time how much it takes to get people off and then we can share that with the public so if it takes 20 minutes to clear everyone out we can say you know the maximum amount of time or the currently what we're looking at the maximum time might be about 20 minutes as far as the exit of the game just to kind of begin testing those scenarios and seeing what it really takes us is that something we could do or is that something we're currently doing

Go ahead.

Go ahead. Vice Mayor, just to piggyback off what you were talking about, when I left the 4th of July, we had 15,000 people at that event. I left out. I went out the back road, come out to US 1 the way the PD had it set up, and there were multiple lanes that you got into. It took me seven minutes from the time I got in my car to get to Crosstown.

That's great. See, and I think we need that kind of data.

We had 15,000 people at that event, so it took seven minutes to get from the backside of the parking garage to Crosstown, where I turned left on Crosstown. So traffic moved very efficiently.

Yeah, and that's what I meant. There's always more people at those events than there are, but just in terms of this project, let's just make sure that everything's buttoned up. Go ahead, Chief.

So in order to do what Councilman Pigott was just referring to is getting all those occupants out of that area rapidly takes a tremendous amount of resources. So we're looking at multiple soccer games during a year, which that amount of resources is not going to be something that's going to be tenable. So what we are working on with our subcommittee and that traffic plan is options for utilizing technology and routes and figuring out how we're going to do it less manpower intensive. So to say we can practice that at these, it's not exactly the same things. It's kind of apples to oranges in that situation because we're going to have to do that at the games with a smaller scale.

I mean, well, true. Now, with the Met Stadium, I know we assist the sheriff's office.

We do all of the traffic.

Okay, so we do all the traffic there. So that's a different corridor because they actually have less accessibility than we have on US 1. That area gets more. I'm just thinking of how can we get ahead of this discussion, that's all, with the public in the sense of before the soccer stadium opens saying, We've got it figured out. We know how quickly we're going to get people in and out. And even though, again, people are not going to be stuck in traffic, these are weekend games in the evening. No one's going to be going to work during a soccer game. Well, maybe, yes. Some people do work at night on the weekends. I take that back. But a large majority of people. I just think it just helps to give assurance that we can get them in and out fast.

And, Vice Mayor, if I can add into that, the subcommittee that the Chief is talking about, we're meeting regularly and we're scheduling another one. We're not looking at it as just a soccer stadium. We're setting it up as different tiers. So if you have events of 1 to 1,000 people, what kind of management plan do you need there? Or if you have 10 to 15,000, so we're looking at multiple different tier levels. That way they know how to roll it out and not have to recreate the wheel every time.

Oh, yeah, because once the soccer stadium gets busy, guess what's happening? People are going to be like, I want to do an event, Mid-Florida Event Center, and you'll have competing events at the same time utilizing the same amount of area. So, yeah, I can see that.

That makes sense.

All right.

Okay. Our next project, the traffic signal preemption, has been so far a fantastic success for the city and for the fire departments. We have, of the entire map up there, three signals that are not yet complete. All others are working. There are some that we're not able to connect to due to a lack of fiber connection underground. However, IT and our traffic team have been working diligently to get all fiber needed in the ground, hopefully by the end of summer. Cesar Simonelli has been a fantastic project manager on this and the preemption will help allow our fire department to get throughout the city to emergencies as needed in a major way.

What intersections are we not able to do yet due to the fiber not being there? Are they major intersections that we're going to really need to focus on to make sure we get the fiber in?

Well, I just want to clarify that statement. So there's three intersections that don't have the preemption. Those would be St. Lucie West and Peacock, PSL Boulevard and Gatling because they're under active construction right now.

Yes, and Village and Hagner.

And Village and Hagner. The ones that don't have the fiber, the preemption is working and communicating with the fire district.

Okay.

But since the fiber is not connected, if they have issues, we're going to have to send someone out. We can't see the back and forth what is happening at the intersection remotely. So for all intents and purposes, the fire district is getting their preemption and the signal is changing as needed for them.

Okay, thank you for that. So Shannon.

Yes, go ahead. So kudos. I know that we had brought this up last year and said it was a priority. You got it done. Yeah. Not only do I appreciate it, but the entire fire district and the employees at all the stations appreciate it. It just helps and just know that you probably saved a lot of lives.

YEAH, I AGREE, ABSOLUTELY. WE KNOW THAT SECONDS COUNT, SO IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT. SO GREAT JOB TO ALL. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

WE ARE DEFINITELY VERY PROUD OF THIS PROJECT, FOR SURE. IT'S BEEN A GREAT ONE. Finally, something that city manager mentioned earlier today is that the city is never complacent. We are always looking toward the future. And so we have several feasibility studies that have been completed in order to help figure out exactly what's needed in various corridors throughout the city. Bayshore corridor has been completed. We have almost finished with the design there, as mentioned. San Luis West Corridor has been completed, and we are able to move to our design build shortly. The Savona Corridor is 90% complete. We are just buttoning up the final conceptuals and PowerPoints to be able to bring it to Council to show what potential future phasing and future intersection improvements could look like in that corridor. And South Bend and Torino are both about 75% completes. South Bend in particular has been a fantastic success. I've been meeting with the residents of South Bend out there. Our consultant has identified seven intersections that could allow us to put off widening of South Bend in that neighborhood area. That would help immensely with traffic flow because we're finding that the traffic flow is really problematic when trying to get on and off the side streets instead of through South Bend. So through this feasibility study, the hope is that we'll be able to save quite a bit of money and focus on those specific intersections well before widening, which may not be needed for 30 years per the study. And that completes our presentation. Are there any questions?

Yep, go ahead.

You brought up FLORESA phase three and said it would be finished February 28. Does that take into account storms, storm days with the pending hurricane season coming up and the rain season? Are those days factored in there?

Yes, so to your question, Councilman Pickett, the February 28th date is the contract date, so we always want to keep that in our eyesight. The most recent schedule that we were provided by the contractor, which was just last week, is showing them completing actually 30 days earlier than their last schedule, so they continue in advance, which is looking at... mid to late fall of 27 and that's factoring in weather which we've been dealing with right during the course of the construction and everything else.

I just don't want to get into the same situation that we had on Port St. Lucie Boulevard where every time we turned around, oh, it's because of weather.

No, no. They've been very responsive. They've got the appropriate amount of teams out there working on it daily. They reacted Friday to the storm event that we had, although it wasn't a formal storm. It was quite a rain event. But the early completion in advance of that 2028 date factors in all weather and all that kind of stuff. Thank you. Yep.

Plus, you have to also remember we're in control of this project. DOT was in control of the other project. And the differences in the contractors and their abilities are night and day. So, yeah, but it's a good question for sure. So, okay. Any other questions? No. I'm glad to see we are really getting a lot done. People don't realize it, but those slides prove just how much planning and how much design work that we're doing in preparation to getting these projects completed and off the ground. Of course, it's always about funding, right? And how fast we can get them done Because once the designs are done, like I said, they're on the shelf and they're ready to go. So it's just going to be a matter of what's going to happen in order to continue to get these projects actually to the construction phase.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much. Okay. We are now on to repaving. OH, STORM WATER. I'M SORRY. THEY WERE ALL LUMPED TOGETHER. STORM WATER.

GOOD AFTERNOON, MAYOR, VICE MAYOR, COUNCIL, RESIDENTS, AND STAFF. I'M PETER MAY. I WORK WITH THE STORM WATER DIVISION IN THE PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF MYSELF. I HAVE OVER 26 YEARS TOTAL EXPERIENCE AND THREE YEARS HERE WITH THE CITY. I'm a professional engineer, and like I said, I will get on with the presentation now.

So, Peter, tell me you're an engineer without telling me you're an engineer by saying 26.5. I love it. Right.

Yeah, it's almost exactly 26.5. I love it. I love it. First, we have a short video.

Every time it rains in Port St. Lucie, a vast and often unnoticed system goes to work. Miles of canals, swales, culverts, and water control structures suddenly spring into action, moving stormwater safely away from homes and roads, reducing flooding, and helping to keep pollution out of the St. Lucie River. Unfortunately, as rainwater travels across pavement and yards, it collects debris and chemicals. Without a well-maintained drainage network, flooding and runoff can damage property and harm water quality. That's why the city invests year-round in system upkeep and upgrades, from clearing swales and outfalls to replacing aging culverts and installing technology that stores, filters, and treats stormwater more effectively. You can see these improvements all across the city. Baffle boxes capture trash and sediment before it reaches the river. Culvert replacements and canal maintenance keep neighborhood drainage flowing. Water control structures and stormwater treatment areas improve both flood protection and water quality by holding and treating runoff before it moves downstream. Major projects strengthen the system even further. One of the most successful is the Eastern Watershed Improvement Project, or EWIP. After Tropical Storm Fay flooded portions of the east side of the city in 2008, Port St. Lucie upgraded the area's canals, drainage structures, and storage. The result? Reduced flooding, better stormwater flow, and water quality improvements, including measurable reductions in harmful nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. As Port St. Lucie grows, the stormwater network must grow with it. The City continues improving older neighborhoods while working with developers to ensure new communities include effective drainage systems from the start. Because the City's stormwater system is interconnected, upgrades in one area can benefit many others. And more improvements are on the way. The planned Oak Hammock Watershed Improvement Project will add retention ponds, upgraded pipes, a pump station, and new water quality features, bringing benefits similar to EWIP to the central part of the city. The Hogpen Slough Improvement Project and E8 Canal upgrades will also expand capacity, enhance treatment, and reduce flood risks across the watershed. Together, these projects form a long-term strategy to keep Port St. Lucie safer and more resilient. From the culvert replacement program to system-wide enhancements and innovative treatment areas, each effort strengthens the overall network. And it's all able to happen thanks to a dedicated stormwater fee approved annually by City Council. This fee funds the maintenance and upgrades that keep stormwater moving, protect neighborhoods from flooding, and improve water quality. It also supports the projects and daily work that safeguard property, keep roads passable after storms, and help protect the St. Lucie River. These investments also benefit residents directly by providing lower flood insurance premiums through FEMA's community rating system. By maintaining this system year-round and planning ahead with forward-looking projects, Port St. Lucie is protecting property, preserving waterways, and building a stronger future.

So this needs to go on Facebook. Multiple times. Seriously, this should be on social media because just putting it on our website is not good enough because we're not driving people to the website to look at this. We need to make sure it's on social media.

They wanted to show it here first, but now that you've seen it, we can release it to the world. Good. Perfect. Great. Make it happen. I agree. I think that even in the presentations, I want to find a way to embed it in one of our presentations because when we present to the public, like I was just at South Bend, I would like to find a way to show this video because it's a really impactful video. And I think you put it, like we can put it on Facebook, but some people just don't watch that stuff.

Oh, they'll watch it. If it's on our page, they'll watch it, and then it'll get shared. Right.

Yeah, and that's what I'm hoping. But then the other thing that it made me think of, because it's such a good video, and you guys are doing something different in the chambers. Where's Gus and Avi? You've been playing music. What have you been doing? It's not music. You're playing something else, I noticed, before council meetings.

Okay, so there was a suggestion to play promos and information in our breaks.

So they've arranged it. Starting Monday's meeting, you'll be getting this. I think this should be like, I think videos like this should be, because it's great because we have residents that come. They come to speak about an item or something, but they can also get some information while they're at the council meeting. I think this is really good to have as part of that rotation.

OK. THIS IS PART OF THAT EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION PIECE THAT WE TALK ABOUT THAT'S SO IMPORTANT. BECAUSE WHAT HAVE WE DEALT WITH IN THE PAST? PEOPLE THINK THAT THE STORM WATER SYSTEM IS SOLELY ABOUT THE SWALES. AND THAT IS JUST A TINY PIECE OF IT.

And it can't, like, you can't change those visuals. Like, when you sit there and you look at the slider from the tool that we have online that people don't, like, we tell people about it, but I don't think they go. When you see that slider move, and then you see all of a sudden this is what the project's going to look like, then you start to understand the impact. Mm-hmm. That's a good video. Yep.

The first project we'll discuss, it's already come up before in the previous presentations, but the D11 canal improvements. This is the piping of a stretch of the D11 from Floresta over to basically the outfall at the river. That project helped improve the, the conveyance remains the same. It's actually slightly more capacity than what the canal was, but there was an area through there where it was very hard to maintain previously. So it was overgrown and it would have erosion problems that we couldn't really get to to maintain. So this stretch of canal is being piped for that reason. It is nearing completion on the construction portion, although it is tied in with the floresta project also. So you see that end date. It will be done prior to that. It's actually very near completion. But yeah, it should be completed here later this year. The Floresta Phase 3 baffle boxes, once again, this was mentioned a little bit previously, there are two baffle boxes as part of the Floresta project at the D10 and D8 canals. They've already been installed, but ultimately there's other work that needs to be completed around them so the completion will be with the roadway, even though they're already functional. The hog plan slew stormwater treatment area. This is out north of Walton Road by the high support St. Lucy High School off Leonard. There's about 11 acre parcel there that is rectangular and you can kind of see it on that diagram, but north of Dunbrook and south of Caribbean. We are planning on taking that area and creating a stormwater treatment area. The design is at 90%. It will involve a pump that will pump out of the canal into the stormwater treatment area and route the water through the entirety of that, and then it will come back out on the south end back into the canal, and that will provide additional stormwater treatment, which we are required based on our BMPs for our BMAP. Funding is still pending on this. We're going out for grants. We have several applications we previously went out for. Now that we're nearing final design and permitting, it should make it a little bit easier hopefully to get grant funding for this so that we can move forward with the construction. The hog pen slew water control structure is APS 60 structure. It's adjacent to US one just downstream of this SDA. This we are already have permitted and we are getting 100% construction plans here in probably the next few weeks and then we will be moving on to. Getting approval for the crew of procurement and then go under construction later this year is our goal. This structure is updating the SCADA system, and the structure is falling apart, so it really needs to be replaced. We're not modifying it in a geometric way, but we are providing updated SCADA so we have remote control ability, and it will be a much nicer facility. The Whitmore Drive baffle box. This is essentially completed. We are just closing out some of the grant funding. We have some of the educational signage that we're still getting in there to finalize that with the EP. That's one of the requirements and actually part of the swag and ARPA grants. There was some requirements that required educational signage that we need to get in there. So that's what the last bit of that before this is closed out. And that once again provides stormwater quality for that basin through the baffle box and it removes sediment and trash and debris. The watershed A and B improvements. This project involves the construction of three control structures. They were basically structures that have met the end of their service life and needed to be replaced. Two of them are along PAR at Sawgrass Lakes. And those they have updated SCADA, which will once again allow us to remotely operate those. And we also are replacing the structure over off of the Horseshoe Canal, which is the A18 structure. And this should be completed later this year. It's moving forward nicely. So we should be completing that by the end of this year as per schedule. Veterans Memorial Stormwater Quality Retrofit Project. This is the third phase of the Veterans Memorial projects. It involves expanding some of the existing right of way where we have canals into stormwater treatment ponds. and we are adding a control structure at Veterans Memorial Parkway. This will allow us to hold water longer to provide more stormwater quality and also improve some of the conveyance and the ability to provide stormwater enhancements in the area. We're looking to start this by the end of the year. We're still working to get the appropriations from the federal government, so we're working through that process right now, and once we get that, we will get into the procurement and start construction. The A14 water control structure, this once again is out on the southwest part of the city off of Becker, and it's actually off of Darwin just north of Becker. This control structure, the previous one was seriously failing, and we are in the process of replacing it and updating it so that it's reconfigured and it actually provides more water quality storage and treatment. So we're getting some additional BMAP credits for this, for nutrient reductions for phosphorus and nitrogen, as is required for us. This is nearing completion. There's some minor work they're still doing on the control structure. There was some concrete that they had to replace on the new structure and a couple of the culverts that they need to put in there. And then that will be finalized. But this does not have SCADA. This is a stationary structure. So what you see right there in that picture is essentially what you'll see in the future. This is the big project that we've talked about in the past. This is the Okamik Watershed Improvement Project. This area is known to flood, as you can see, and we all know it floods quite frequently, especially in the area in front of the Okamik K-8 school there at Savona in California. It's always problematic. This project's goal is to remove that flooding and provide service throughout the entire basin. In the process, we're going to be upgrading some culverts. We're going to be putting in some pipe interconnections. We're anticipating a pump station at some location yet to be determined based on ultimately this first phase where we're going to be doing an updated study, which will also involve some of the design so that we can get some of the work underway that we know We already know that these portions of the project will take place. And then after that, based on the recommendations, we will come up with the additional projects in the second phase of that to finalize the entirety of the basin. And this will also include updating all the swale liners throughout where we don't have swale liners. And some of that work will be completed probably more on the front end. Well, some of the project will be completed by the end of 2030, but we should have some of this under construction by the end of next year or the beginning of 28. The Elk Ham Basin Improvement Project. This is the entirety of the Elk Ham Canal. It is, as you can see in that picture right there, there's a lot of sediment in certain areas, as they call detritus, which needs to be removed. But we also have three control structures along this. And two of them are very problematic in the way that they function. They sometimes get clogged. They're just older control structures that need to be replaced and updated with a new type of design. And the furthest one downstream, it's also going to be replaced. So this project also will include some other minor work. We'll do some shoreline stabilization in some areas. There'll be some re-contouring of some of the canal banks in certain areas. In this project, we're looking to get, hopefully, under design by the end of this year so that we can finish design and construction by 29. The EA Cow Now improvements, this is over north of Gatlin, east of I-95. It's a Tampico to the west. It's a control structure. And then it goes upstream, I believe, about 500 feet where it ties into the previously finished phases, so this is the last of all the phases of this project. It's about 50% complete at this time. The reason this whole area was done in this manner is because we had very limited right-of-ways. You can see in that picture right there, you've got fences on both sides right at the top of bank. It's just very hard for maintenance to take place. So putting in riprap and flattening some of the slopes to make it so that they can get a mower in there for the maintenance up above the rock and then not have to deal with the lower part of the canal. So this is more of a long-term maintenance. benefit for the city so we won't have to be doing as much work in here because this canal was constantly getting eroded and sloughing in and having to be, you know, it was difficult to get to. So this project should be completed by the end of this year and will be a very good benefit to the city.

Question for you on that. So is it becoming eroded because of the grass cuttings or is it just a slope? Like what's causing the erosion?

It was more of just a slope issue. It just inflows.

And so if you look through a lot of the GDC planned areas, they would make one side of the canal bank flatter and then one side steeper. And that was mainly so that they could drive on the flatter side and try and maintain the other side. But with the soils in this area and the type of drainage that goes through there, that steeper canal bank would start sloughing off and creating more of a maintenance issue for us.

Is there any long-term fix that can be envisioned for it? Or is it just something that we're going to have to deal with as long as the canal?

So as Peter mentioned, something like this, can be a long-term fix because that rip-rap, that holds the bottom and provides support for those slopes of the canal banks. So this can't work in every single aspect. It's gonna have to be a case-by-case basis depending on the right-of-way width and the configuration and types of soils out there.

I think the challenge in part with the stormwater is the stormwater funding. You want to get all these projects done, but you only have a limited amount of resources. And we don't want to increase also the fee where it's outpacing everybody else. And that's the challenge. How do you balance everything that we have? That's the challenge we've been dealing with, and I know Council has in the past increased the fee of stormwater to try to address this, but still there's a lot more that should be done, especially when you look at the GDC-era canal system. I mean, I'm not sure, Cole, if you have the number. How many canal systems do we have out there that actually push the flow over into the river?

The number of canals, I don't have it off the top of my head, but I know it's over 200 miles of canals. Yeah.

And that's the challenging part.

Quick question going back to the Ocamic Watershed Improvement Project. So, you know, we say bond funding approved. So bond funding approved, but WHAT DOES THAT MEAN IN TERMS OF THE AMENDMENT 3? WILL THAT BE AFFECTED OR ARE WE COVERED WITH THAT?

NO, THE STORM WATER, AS YOU KNOW, IS BEING FUNDED BY THE STORM WATER FEE. SO WE'RE USING THE STORM WATER FEE FOR THE BOND, CORRECT.

I DIDN'T KNOW IF IT WAS JUST STORM WATER OR WE WERE LEVERAGING FUNDS FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES.

NO, TRYING TO SPEND ALL OF IT THERE. UNLESS WE GET GRANTS AND WE CAN HAVE MATCHING GRANTS, THAT'S DIFFERENT.

Okay, that's what I wanted to ask. Thank you.

This last slide here, this is the Accelerate Swale and Culvert programs. As you know, we're in the process of going in where we have one PSLs and trying to put in new swale liners where we don't have them or they're causing problems. So this is going to bring additional crews in to help expedite the process of getting all of the swale liners where we have new homes or one PSLs that are currently happening and get those completed. Maintenance is a perpetual program, but these are trying to expedite ones that we already have in our program on our map and This should be an ongoing thing, but this is to expedite doing this maintenance program.

OK. Mayor, council, we are using some of the funding now to assist with the liner. So coming out of the general fund, that's a source that we've been using. And especially when it comes to maintaining the alcover system, the liner system, you know it's a requirement of the homeowners to actually maintain that liner, but the city has stepped in and has been keeping it clean for many years. What are we doing, four or five cleanings a year?

Up to six per year. We're striving for four, and as everyone's well aware, we had a contractor that determined that it was not worth the time for what they were charging us, so we are in the process of getting a new contractor right now and going through the procurement phases.

So what that does is becomes challenging for the general fund, especially when the general fund is going to be depleting some of the funds that we have. So the outcome of that is that if it backs up and the homeowners don't maintain it, it flows onto the streets. When it flows onto the streets, now you're going to start getting potholes because now the water is going to sit out there for a lot longer than what we discussed earlier today.

Okay. Thank you.

Any other questions?

Any other questions on this part? No? Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Clyde.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, and City Manager. I'm Clyde Coffey. I am the Regulatory Division Director. I've been with the City for 20 years, resident of the City of Port St. Lucie for 21 years, Bachelor of Science degree, sorry, Bachelor of Engineering degree, and I've been an engineer for four years. So this afternoon I'm going to just give you an update on the developer funded projects, projects primarily in the western part of the city. The first one is Crosstown Parkway Extension that's being funded by Verano Development. This project started off in 2023. It has extended the Crosstown Parkway from Village Parkway to Rangeland Road. It is substantially complete. It's been open to the traffic for about a year now when this high school opened. And it's in the final stages of being turned over to the city for ownership and maintenance. Marshall Parkway at Riverland, Parcel B, Phase 2. This is being developed by Riverland Development. It is substantially complete as well. That's the segment from the Marshall Parkway, sorry, parcel B of the, I'm sorry, from parcel B entrance to Riverland intersection. And right now, the only thing that's missing on that is the roadway lighting. And once that is done, it will be turned over to the city as well. Discovery Way at Riverland Parcel C has also been funded by Riverland Development, and that is the extension of Discovery Way from Riverland Parcel C's north entrance to Sundance Vista Boulevard. It is currently under construction. Anticipated completion time is towards the end of this year, early next year. Sundance Vista Boulevard at Riverland Parcel D phase one that runs from the extension of Discovery Way and goes south to the west entrance of Marshall Riverland Parcel D. That one is currently under construction and the completion time is summer of 2027. Going for the North Sundance Vista Boulevard at Western Grove. This segment is by Martin me and it is the extension of Sundance Vista from Tradition Parkway to the new K8 school. It is substantially complete. It will be open for the public next month when school starts. Going a little further north, Sundance Vista Boulevard at Western Grove as well, also being funded by MATME. That is from the Crosstown Parkway to Western Grove Cadence east entrance. That is the design just finished, so they should be starting construction pretty soon, and they should be done construction by summer of 2027. The next phase, just south of that phase, is also Sundance Vista Boulevard. It is being done by Matsumi Homes, and it is also under design, expected to start construction within the next month or so. And that phase goes all the way down to Tradition Parkway, and it will be completed, anticipated by winter of 2027. Final segment of Sundance Vista Boulevard at Western Grove, also by Martin May, will be from the extending the roadway from the K-8 school south to Discovery Way. And that's under design right now, planning on being opened by winter 2027. West Cliff Lane extension will complete West Cliff Lane to Sunlands Feaster Boulevard. And that is also being funded by and it is tied in with the Lotus development. So at this point, the date is still to be determined. Fern Lake Drive, as also funded by Mattamy, that roadway completed the Fern Lake Drive. So Fern Lake now is connected from Tradition Parkway to Westcliff Road. It is substantially complete. It's open to the public. Discovery Way widening, that is the falling widening of the existing Discovery Way between Village Parkway and Community Boulevard, also funded by Martimi. This is currently in review and is expected to be completed by summer of 2027. And that concludes my slides. Do you have any questions?

Okay. Questions? NO? ALL RIGHT, THANK YOU SO MUCH. THANK YOU. IT'S AN EXAMPLE OF, WITH ALL THE QUESTIONS THAT ARE OUT THERE ABOUT MAKING SURE THE DEVELOPERS ARE MEETING THEIR OBLIGATIONS, AND THIS PRESENTATION JUST GOES TO SHOW THAT WE ARE ABSOLUTELY DOING THAT, AND WE'RE HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES ARE TO THE CITY AND OUR RESIDENTS.

Absolutely, Madam Mayor. Just to add to that, too, is that currently you only have one way in once you go through the traditions in the schools. With these projects, you're going to be able to head north towards Crosstown or south towards Discovery. So it really enhances our ability to move around out there in tradition.

Yeah. So that's the roadway network that they're expected to build out, and we're making sure that that gets done.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hello.

Hello.

Good afternoon. I'm going to do this backwards. I'm going to show my little about me slide first. Just a couple of highlights. I'm a certified public works infrastructure inspector, a certified professional supervisor, and a certified professional manager with the American Public Works Association. And again, these are just some highlights. There's many more things, but I think this is to kind of give you a A SNIPPET OF WHO I AM. TOM SALVADOR. I'VE BEEN WITH THE PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT FOR 24 YEARS AND IN THE CITY OF PORT ST. LUCIE FOR 37. PROUD GRADUATE OF PORT ST. LUCIE HIGH SCHOOL. I KNEW THAT WAS COMING. AND WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, LET'S GET STARTED WITH YOUR UPDATE TO THE ROADWAY PRESERVATION AND RESURFACING PLAN. FIRST OF ALL, CAN ANYBODY TELL ME WHAT ROAD THIS IS AT A QUICK GLANCE ON THE DAIS?

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

Okay, I'll give you a hint. It's Commerce Center Parkway. Ta-da! Okay, so anyone who's driven out west of town, heading out to Glades, heading out to where the Wilder area is, all that new development out there, going towards railroad tracks, remember how bad that road was? That road is the single road in the city that was failing, a true failing roadway. Now, this is not a resurfacing project, it is not a preservation project, but I wanted to highlight it because it's such an important piece of what we do. We went out and looked at the road, found that it was failing with all of our data, got geotechnical testing on it, said, yeah, you're not going to be able to pave this. You're going to have to rebuild it. So we had a contractor come in, recycle and armor the road all in one shot right there. It's called full depth reclamation. But at the very top of it is your bit of asphalt. So I just wanted to have that photo in here and show how that ties in. That type of work is typically taken under by the Capital Improvement Group. That is something that we see with resurfacing and preservation and spending our dollars wisely. To do that work, it's about 50 to 100% more per mile than to just resurface a roadway. So we can't do it everywhere. That's why we follow the data and follow all the information we can.

Now, on the opposite side of that, Thomas, how much would it cost to rebuild the roadway from scratch in comparison to what we did?

In comparison to what we did, it would be almost identical. However, the impact to the residents and the impact to traffic would have been greater. So in my mind, not a good idea. We would have had to build temporary roadways on either side of this one to build this. Meanwhile, all that traffic coming from Glades. And this is, you know, Now we have Crosstown. Now we have Becker. But for the longest time, the city was built by Commerce Center Parkway or things from down south in Palm City. All of the rock and the dirt and everything that came into Port St. Lucie to build it came through that road. And that's why this road failed. All those heavy loads, all those dump trucks, this is how they got into the city. So, again, it would have cost roughly the same. It's very comparable. But the time and the impact to the residents would have been much greater. So I find this to be the better value.

Thank you.

All right? Can you tell everyone how long it took to get that done?

Was it a week? Not even a week. And it was done at night. The contractor was able to come in and do the work at night. I mean, overall, to get all the striping and everything else in, it's usually about 30 days to do that little bit of work. However, they got in there one night down one side, came in the next night, went up the other side. Then they let it sit. They trim the top of the road. And once they trim the top of the road, they go ahead and pave it. I mean, it's that fast. It is so economical. It's more expensive. But when it's needed, it's the right thing to do. And we're about to do something like that in one of our neighborhoods out off of Savona.

Well, sorry, but I mean, this is why the conversation is so important, you know, because sometimes we look at money. And we say, well, why did they spend this much when they could have spent this much? And if you just said that staff made the decision to do this particular project, because we got it done in a week, which I'm sure building the road or rebuilding a road would have taken how long?

Easily, you're talking six months, top to bottom probably, and it's a little piece of road, but dealing with the railroad and everything else you'd have to do out there, that's a six-month job.

Easy, right? Yep. So that's my question for the public, and I kind of think I know the answer, but if the answer is today I'm going to be inconvenienced, my way back and forth from work is going to be inconvenienced for six months, or I'm going to pay either the same or slightly more to have it done in a week, They don't care about that process. So I just wish that we could find a way to package that in a pretty little boat so people understood. Sometimes you're looking at something and it might look more expensive or you might think there's cost savings, but the question becomes is how important is your time and how long do you want to spend in traffic? I mean, if we could have did Port St. Lucie Boulevard in a week a segment, I don't think anybody would be complaining. You know what I mean? Like that's where... Time is money. Money costs is, you know, like money, time is money, and sometimes saving time does cost more money, but that's also worth the value, too.

Value. That's the word. I mean, you hit it right on the head. What's the value? And, you know, again, it can't be done everywhere. Places, you know, like certain places you're putting sidewalk in, you're doing drainage. This was nothing more than rebuilding the road as it sat right in place. And you can't do that everywhere. But by golly, it worked. It worked great here. And we've used it before. We did it on Melaleuca years ago. Did it on Rosser. And we've done it in some neighborhoods.

Can we do that on South Bend?

Can we? I'm just asking, can we?

We can look at it. Just because if you think about it, South Bend sidewalks are way off to the side. They're not really even abutting the road, so I'm just wondering.

It can be done anywhere if the road is ready for it.

Up at least into the point of the curbing.

I wouldn't want to spend that money doing it if there was a worse road I could do it on.

That was pretty bad, though. And in the same situation, I'm looking forward to seeing how we continue the discussion. I think it's the same situation. I think the deterioration of the road that I'm seeing is because of all that truck traffic in South Bend that's coming from 95 or from, yeah, from the Turnpike back and forth.

Yeah, our first step would be to test it, do all the geotechnical testing to see if there actually is a failure in the road or if it's just the asphalt. Because sometimes what you're seeing is just the asphalt. The underneath is fine. So to spend 100% more than what it would cost to resurface it. But that's why we use the data and that's why we go through the steps that we do, including the feasibility studies from the top.

Correct. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. No problem. Yeah. And that's exactly what's important because there's a different scope for every project. That's right. And you need the data and analysis.

and to know what that scope is and what everything looks like and that separates one project from another every single time it's it's so easy to drive down the street and say that road needs to be repaved but why what if it needs to be reconstructed what if there's a water line broken that's been leaking for years that you can't tell it's been just dripping but it's made a hole in the road all of these things have to be checked you can't just go and pave a road And that is where we live now in our program is we follow the data and the data helps drive the decisions. And in times like we're facing where there can be shortages and there's limited funding, we have to be able to do what's best with the dollar. It's so important. It is. Thank you for that. Okay. All right. So let me amaze and astound you with an update to your resurfacing program. We last saw each other in February. We were six months behind back then. We were a little late in giving our update, but that's because we had just received new data and we were processing all the information. So everything you'll see here is related to that data that we've gotten and with any changes to the budget in forecasting what may be coming towards us here in the future. So a lot of these slides are going to be the same. I try to pepper in a couple new things just to keep it fresh. 926 centerline miles of roadway we've actually increased because of our workout and tradition, all of the roadways that are going in there. So you got 1,992 lane miles that is from the southernmost point in Key West all the way up to Maine, one single lane. So if you drove that whole route, that's the amount of asphalt that we have to maintain here in Port St. Lucie. We are number five for mileage maintained in the state of Florida out of 411 municipalities. So when you look at our nearby competitors, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Cape Coral, Jacksonville, again, number five. I don't see us surpassing St. Petersburg until northwest or more happens, because I'm guessing about 10 to 12 miles left in tradition, roughly. So we're still going to stay at number five strongly, and I would hope that we do. I would rather not keep moving up and getting more because, well, it's very simple. It's just funding.

Well, I've got to update my slide for my presentation there, so thank you for that.

Mm-hmm. Our current plan methodology is to really go after the worst first in the areas using the payment condition index, the PCI score. We try to balance it out in the districts to make sure that all districts are being taken care of, but some of the districts have lesser amounts of roadway and some of them are in a lot better shape. So fiscally responsible, getting it spent to the places that have the worst roads, First choosing arterials and collectors. Those are your main roads that get you to and from the house to and from the store gets everybody to school and gets emergency services rolling. So we look at those. We want those to stay above a 60 PCI. That's kind of like a rough number. If I see it drop below a 60 and there's plenty out there that are below 60. Those are the ones that I want to start doing first. Those are the ones I want to bring into compliance with our neighborhood streets. It's not as much because you don't get the traffic volume and you don't get the traffic load. So we allow that number to get a lot lower. And again, funding, can't snap my fingers and pay for it all today. So using the data, that's how we're doing it now. Worst first throughout the city. In 2021, it was $89,000 per centerline mile of residential roadway to resurface. Current cost is $141,000. That's a 58% cost increase, and as you've seen through all the other presentations and as we've talked about, things go up, they don't go down. So luckily, right now, we're in the fourth year of a continued service or third year of a continued service contract. Prices have not changed. They have not asked for an escalation. We're very lucky to be working with the vendor we are now. This was a competitive bid contract at the time, and they came in lowest, and they're doing a great job for us. Roadway preservation, which is our rejuvenate that we spray on the roads, it actually lets the roads become more flexible again. Roadways are asphalt concrete. Concrete is a rigid pavement, asphalt is flexible. You put this rejuvenate into the asphalt, it allows it to move a little bit and it keeps it from breaking apart and oxidizing, falling apart. Basically, pennies on the dollar, I'm able to extend the life of our roadways. And since we've started this program, our roadways that have been used on are deteriorating slower. We can see it in the numbers. And that is actually great foresight. Having started a few years ago with everything we're coming up against now, we want our roadways to last longer without needing a repair. All right, our progress this year, we are almost complete. We have done all of our planned sales tax resurfacing, which is 23.55 miles, and we have done 17.25 of our capital improvement road and bridge resurfacing. The only project left was mentioned earlier prior to lunch, that is our import drive resurfacing project. That was scheduled this year. That will be completed this fiscal year. It's funded. It's budgeted. We are just getting ready to make some drainage improvements on the road before we resurface it. As soon as the drainage improvements are complete, the resurfacing contractor is ready to go. They have asked me, when can we start? Almost every day. And I say very soon. But we are coming right behind there. We'll get that import drive done here shortly. Our pavement condition index, as I spoke about prior, that's the value that we use to decide where we're going and what our citywide network looks like. Years ago when the pavement program started, our goal was to get to a 65 pavement condition index citywide. However, that number was only based on residential streets. It wasn't taking into account the arterials and collectors. I can tell you this, our arterials and collectors are in much better shape and were built in a much better fashion and are stronger than any of our residential streets because they're newer. The great news is now that we've included the multi-lanes and the collectors into our calculation, we're up in the 67. So we've beaten what our goal was back in 2015. THESE ROADS ARE GOING TO LAST LONGER, AND WE NEED THAT. WE NEED THESE BIGGER ROADS TO LAST LONGER, AND THAT'S WHY WE MAKE THEM A PRIORITY. A LOT OF OUR NEIGHBORHOOD STREETS, 45 YEARS BEFORE THEY COULD GET TOUCHED, WE'RE GETTING IN THERE NOW. WE'RE GETTING THE LAST OF THEM DONE OVER THE NEXT COUPLE YEARS, WHERE EVERYTHING WILL HAVE BEEN RESURFACED IN THE CITY. SO THAT'S SOMETHING I'M REALLY PROUD OF, HAVING BEEN PART OF IT FOR MAYBE A COUPLE OF WEEKS NOW. We expect with the current budget levels, as we're looking at coming up this year, the PCIs should increase slightly. And then with everything up in the air about the November and everything going on, we're kind of expecting PCIs to go down, as you could expect with less funding. Our rejuvenating agent, we're still proceeding with that because we have to protect the investment that we've made. It just makes sense. So we're going to continue to do that. We did 49 miles of that this year. Those were the roads that were resurfaced in 21-22. All right, so our fund number slide. The year over year update comparison, this is where we just show you what the difference between the last time I came before y'all. And when that's why we have the arrows, the difference is a $17.7 million deficit compared to when I saw you in February in forecasting forward. We're going to lose 75.4 miles from the last proposed plan as we stand here today. It's only going to allow us to do 35% of the roadways in a 10-year span, with our goal being 50% of the roadways in a 10-year span. This number can go up and down, all based on funding, all based on commodities, but that's where we stand today with this iteration of the plan. NOW WE HAVE OUR MAPS JUST KIND OF SHOWING WHERE WE PLAN TO GO. THESE ARE THE TWO-YEAR MAPS. WE DO LIKE A TWO-YEAR OUTLOOK. ANYTHING PAST THE FIRST TWO YEARS IS REALLY HARD TO GUESS OR SAY WHERE WE'RE GOING TO GO, BUT IT'S ALL BASED ON THE PCI RATINGS, GOING FROM LOWEST TO HIGHEST. AND I KNOW LAST TIME WE TALKED, COUNCILMAN BONNA, When we were here, actually, we talked about how can we not know what's going to happen in the next five years? Well, I guess we learned, didn't we? Things can change rather quickly from a lot of outside sources and a lot of outside influences. So some things have changed. Some things have moved around. and ultimately though let me get to the last one we are still you know forecasting out to get the bad roads done sooner than the good roads and roads will continue to deteriorate they don't stop this is a perpetual maintenance that will have to occur until we can all teleport from our homes to where we want to go it's and i don't see that happening anytime soon then we got to maintain the roads in the sky

I'm not putting me in a flying car. That's for sure.

And with that, that was the plan. And if you have any questions or comments, I'm here to discuss.

Just Madam Mayor, just to add to this comment, we need to realize that the reason we were able to increase how much resurfacing we're doing was because of the half-cent sales tax.

Right.

So if that goes away, you're going to see a depletion of how much resurfacing we do. So I just want to make sure we put that in perspective.

Import. Import drive. Where are we?

It's out by Savage.

You know what I mean.

Import drive, we're currently awaiting the drainage repairs.

Okay, we're still waiting for that to finish up?

Yeah, getting ready to start, actually. We're just getting the numbers in. The contractor's got some time in his schedule. He's going to come in and do that. Right behind him, the contractor will be ready to resurface. They've asked over and over, can we start today? They're ready. The resurfacing contractor's ready.

And to add to that, with the great work with legal, we're able to come to a resolution with the contractor that, had some not so good work out there and why we have to do some drainage repairs right so that will be coming forward for final resolution in the next couple of weeks and the drainage work will get done and then as tom said contractor wants to go and he'll get out there and get it so how long for the drainage to be fixed before we can get the repaving done the reason i get asked

So I want to make sure that I'm being responsive.

Sorry, I can take that since I'm doing the drainage side. So as Tom alluded to, we've got the contractor lined up to start the drainage work. We had to wait to get some final numbers for the drainage redesign which needed to occur, which is incorporating some other additional items. He's ready to start. We're working with PMD to get the purchase order out to him. We anticipate them starting by the end of this month, first week of August. And then as Tom alluded to, as soon as that work is done, which we anticipate will take less than four weeks, Tom will be coming back here. So the message to the community in that area and the residents in that area is that we will be complete with both the drainage and sidewalk and resurfacing by the end of September.

Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Sure.

Okay. Well, thank you all very much for your time.

Thank you all. All right. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll come back with the last item for the day, unless we want to continue on with the debt review since we're scheduled to be here. But we'll deal with that after the break.

Okay.

Okay, we're back from the break, and we're going to go right into our sidewalk master plan.

Good afternoon, Madam Mayor, Madam Vice Mayor, members of the council, city manager's office. My name is still Emily Sider. I am still a capital projects administrator, and I'm still glad to be speaking to you today. I was joking with a colleague during our break. I don't know if I won the lottery or drew the short straw, but somehow I find myself opening and closing our public works portion of the day. So I'm proud to do so. Thank you for the opportunity.

You're welcome.

Madam Vice Mayor, I'm gonna take a cue from you. I'm gonna stick on these certifications and honors for a minute because I am proud as a member of the city team to hold these. While I received my formal education at the University of Kansas, I hit the infrastructure world running, no pun intended, and I built on the private sector for over 10 years. I worked in right-of-ways and doing cellular communications, so I built out part of the mobile network that allows us to enhance these technologies. So, drainage, raw land development, infrastructure, private sector to now public. I'm pleased to bring that skill set to you all. While at the city, I've been honored to be recognized as the 2024 Project Manager of the Year, our first PSL, Heart of PSL awards through the Communications Department. I WAS ABLE TO ATTEND THE BLOOMBERG HARVARD CITY LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE FOR THE LEADING CITY PROCUREMENT REFORM WITH MADAM ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER CHRISTINA, OUR DIRECTOR OF OMB CAROLINE AND DIRECTOR OF PMD NATE. SO THAT WAS AN INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY. I'M GLAD TO BE AMONG THE CITY COLLEAGUES WHO HAVE HAD THAT AS WELL. I have also attended the 2025 American Public Works Leadership Institute. I'm a certified project manager. I carry a litany of DOT qualifications. Quite frankly, too many to put on this slide. I have been afforded the opportunity to become a stormwater management inspector. I have completed our cybersecurity training awareness, which might sound silly, but shout out to our IT folks. Yeah. And then as our responsible charge for DOT, again, I joke, but I carry a number of certifications from the Department of Transportation for our local agency program. One of the roles that I have on our team is oversight of the sidewalk program. Today what we want to talk about, and this being my third consecutive year being able to present to the city, we want to talk about the overview, our cost per mile, again what comes next with our master plan, and then move into staff recommendations. I want to stop for a moment and recognize this photo. We've been able to add furniture via benches, trash receptacles, pet stations, to a number of our projects recently. And the feedback we've gotten from residents is that these are the amenities that level up. These are the things that take us to that next spot. I was grateful to see that we were able to plant some trees in this location so that in a few years we're going to have shade so that bench is going to be used, not just walked by. This was a project that was completed by our continuing contract holder, Southern Underground, with Everett Torge and Greg Thomas supporting the project. So this turned out very well, was built effectively. As we pause on the funding and partnerships, this is a carryover slide because it's important for a number of reasons. There is a through line today, not just in this room, but across the county, across the state of what do we do when the funding changes? What we've been able to do over the past several years is utilize a combination of those funding sources. We'll continue to take those efforts, where and when they're applicable, but of late, we've been able to utilize CDBG funding dollars. We have a request in for the next iteration. We've utilized LAP funding dollars from DOT on several projects, and we've been able to collaborate interdepartmentally with the folks in parks to bring design to life for others. Beginning in 2006, Sidewalk Master Plan was initiated without being a 10-year plan. We wanted to progressively expand the network, which we have done. Between 2006 and 17, 35.5 miles were constructed as part of the sidewalk program, with 48.1 miles constructed as part of roadway projects. I appreciate the half-cent slide that showed earlier how many miles, I believe it's 8.64, of sidewalk that also occurred in the Floresta project. Because we sometimes miss that metric is that we're really expanding through the complete street. In 2018, the voters expressed their appreciation, desire, and need for sidewalks. I want to pause because while all of our infrastructure affects residents, these sidewalks are in their front yard. These sidewalks are personal. These sidewalks affect their abilities, and more importantly, they bring their communities together, which is going to be the thread that we tie into our next planning session. BETWEEN 2018 AND 2025, APPROXIMATELY 24.6 MILES WERE CONSTRUCTED. AGAIN, THAT FOCUS DURING THAT TENURE MASTER PLAN WAS TWO MILE RADIUS WITHIN SCHOOLS AND ON MAJOR ROADWAYS TO ALLEVIATE SAFETY CONCERNS FOR INCREASING TRAFFIC VOLUMES AND SPEEDS. Moving us into today, we have an anticipated amount of 5.8 miles of sidewalk remaining. However, as we've discussed, inflation and rising industry costs will continue to reduce that mileage completed, which we will get into shortly. This is a slide that I brought to you last year. We've refined it some to be reflective of the real cost increases, and I'm gonna verbalize a few other points to you. What we see here on the slide is that design, CEI, and construction have all increased. We get that, but the percentages are extremely high. What we're trying to do, and if you see on the pop-outs to the left, is that while in 2025 a full comprehensive cost to design was approximately $1.5 million a mile, by utilizing our continuing contract, we were able to reduce that to a cost of on average $730,000 a mile. There is a cost savings there, there's a time savings there, and there's a connection with our community that is invaluable. Additionally, in 2526, we saved approximately $360,000 by utilizing our in-house design services. Project Administrator Everett Torge was extremely supportive on the Green River Parkway Trail resurfacing project, which we did receive LAP funding on. And he was able to not only help support the design of that resurfacing, but it went through the DOT ringer. So we know it's good. So congratulations. We're going to be looking to kick off that resurfacing actually in the coming weeks. Do we have any questions about cost per mile this time?

I just have one question. Where did you get the numbers from? That's all.

Sure. So I took contracts from each of those years. Additionally, what I've done is I've looked at a difference between our half-cent sales tax or locally funded projects and then when we have grant applications. Madam Mayor, I took note of your comment earlier about what do the federal provisions do, how do they increase our costs, our time, et cetera. It is a balancing act. What we can see from 2025 alone, where we had a half cent and a lap project, is that the grant funded project came in at about $1.4 million a mile. Half cent came in at $1 million a mile. There's increased costs for CEI and design on those grant funded projects typically. But to answer your question directly, Madam Vice Mayor, these numbers were taken from actual contracts, and then I've averaged out that per mile cost. So, for example, in 2025, the project was 1.3 miles, and so then I broke it back down.

That's good to know. Yeah, just because people always ask, well, where did you get the numbers from? And, you know, did you use something you read somewhere? It's nice to know that we took our actual contracts because that's the real cost. That's not... Oh, it just happened to go up this percentage. Like, no, this is the actual percent.

You mean it's not on ChatGPT?

Listen, there's a lot of stuff on ChatGPT, but I don't know if they went that level of detail that she did.

Or Google AI? Or was it Claude? Claude's the new one? Or seems to get their information from that supposedly...

super accurate well we asterisk when we use our ai right so i want to share verbally a couple of other numbers that are of import while we do see costs increasing i want to make note that in 2020 the cost on our contracts for project selected averaged for concrete four inch concrete right because we're building sidewalks while there's other components i want to talk about the concrete costs 2020, that was approximately $39 a square yard. 2025, approximately $72 a square yard. 2026, we see $60 a square yard. So we have to ask how. If everything else is going up, why did this go down? And it's because the business management of our city. And I have to thank and applaud you all because you have made us a more competitive city. So we're seeing an increase in bidders. When there's only three folks, they can charge whatever they want. But in 2022, we had three bidders on a construction project for Sidewalk. In 2026, we had 10. That's why we see a reduction in costs, and that's exactly because more vendors, more contractors want to work for us. So thank you for the support that you've given to the community, for the outreach that's gone statewide. We've seen vendors coming in and bidding from outside of just the Treasure Coast. It's made us more competitive and more attractive as a client. Awesome. However, with funding, with the remaining number of miles, we do see that we are approaching a deficit. We'll be discussing in one-on-ones following the workshop some potential scenarios for how we can positively impact construction of these projects with respect to the deficit. However, we have seen a cut in some funding for the 27 fiscal year. And what that's leaving us with is approximately $4,600,000.

Where are these locations? Do we know?

We do. We have... That's separate. Ironically, I have a slide with those locations that we took out for this presentation, but we'll be going over in our one-on-ones. But just speaking off memory, we have the Parr Drive sidewalks. We have Torino Parkway East. We have Torino Parkway from Topaz. We have Blanton Boulevard just south of the Torino Regional Park that's coming online. We have Eyerly Construction. However, that is already included as earmarked. We have... A COUPLE OTHER THAT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO BRINGING TO YOU AT A LATER DATE. THAT'S FINE.

THAT'S FINE. THANK YOU. SO THE FUNDING DEFICIT OF 4.6, IS THAT FOR THIS YEAR OR IS THAT THE FUTURE YEAR, LIKE A FUTURE YEAR?

IT'S THE REMAINING TENURE PLAN.

OKAY. BUT WE'RE COVERED FOR THIS YEAR CURRENTLY?

WE ARE. WE HAVE OUR FUNDING FROM 25-26 IS SECURED. HOWEVER, THE 26-27 BUDGET, WE DID SEE A REDUCTION OF APPROXIMATELY $1 MILLION FROM ROAD AND BRIDGE, WHICH WILL ELIMINATE OUR ABILITY TO CONSTRUCT JUST ABOUT A MILE.

Again, another conversation, like another thing to add to the list for discussion of if there's any additional revenue, if council decides to utilize that, what would that be? I would like to see us add that $1 million.

And historically, we use that 304 to support the design and CEI phase, the functions of them. So what we'll be bringing to you is how can we utilize some of those existing contracts to eliminate some of those costs effectively, but still providing a high level of service on the project.

Yeah. I just hope, like, I know with everything going on, I think the goal is not to get behind, you know, and especially when, you know, I think the desire of the public, too, is eventually to see sidewalks in their neighborhoods. And it's also a very long-term plan because that's going to take a long time to do over time. But until we can finish this, we're probably never going to get started on that. Yeah.

Well, yeah, and that's going to beg them, depending on funding and what things look like, that's going to beg a much bigger conversation because some people, it's kind of like the same as the streetlight situation. You have people that want them, and I've seen people that say, no, I don't need that. So that's just going to be, like I mentioned, a much bigger conversation that's going to take quite some time to... address but again it's going to be all about funding funding funding yep um but did you say that we would have a delay or we wouldn't have enough funding to address um the area around torino regional

No, right now we have Torino as the applied for project for CDBG funding for approximately 800,000. Our team's been working with Catherine Sala on that, so I'm unsure exactly when that determination will be made. However, what we know about the Torino project sidewalk in particular is that we don't have residential driveways. So that's the perfect opportunity for us to get in there and pour concrete, do our sidewalks, make our soil adjustments without the need for formal design and to get in there more quickly. So we are confident in our ability to deliver on the Torino and Blanton projects, especially because we understand the proximity to the Torino Regional Park is critical.

Yeah, that is critical to make sure that connectivity is there for sure. Yes, ma'am.

As we look ahead to the future, this has been a three year project of mine is we're looking at the policy planning principles and preparation of our next plan. We've got a considerable number of locations that have been recommended by residents. appreciation goes to Beth Zoka and Jennifer Romberger and our community outreach and customer service support teams in Public Works because they've done a great job of taking the one PSLs that we come that we receive with preferred locations and providing that and then I have been the steward of that information which you're going to see on the next couple of slides our policy maintains continues to maintain that we want to connect communities as safely as possible. I was on our Kessler sidewalk project two weeks ago and I was talking to a resident in response to a one PSL and this resident had some frustrations but really he had accolades. What he said was I'm frustrated with my sod but I see people from my neighborhood that I've never seen before. People didn't walk here. Now there's people walking every day. There's every age. And so to have that experience with a resident who's expressing frustration, but also gratitude, I think is reflective of the city's ability to provide for amenities and adjust when there's concern. So with that specific project in mind, Kessler is a busy road. connecting Darwin to Becker, now we've got families out there utilizing the sidewalk in a way that's meaningful. And that's direct feedback from our residents, which we appreciate.

Awesome.

Again, as we look to the planning, we'll continue to recognize how to connect communities, not only between each other and to existing sidewalks, but to local economic hubs, to other local infrastructure amenities, passive parks, green spaces, and more. The principles remain that we intend to provide multimodal access to all, regardless of mobility. And we are intent on maintaining the ADA compliance that drives our transition plan at the city. Continued preparation looks like ongoing conversations with the TPO, the school board, with residents, with you all, with staff. And we're taking all of those things into account. Lastly on this slide, I want to recognize that we are exploring alternate procurement delivery methods. What I mean by that is what might it look like to take a chunk of funding and have five projects designed, projects that have deep swales, projects that have drainage issues, projects that we know we want an outside consultant to do. IF WE WERE TO UTILIZE A PROCUREMENT METHOD WHERE WE COULD DESIGN IN BULK AND THEN CONSTRUCT AS FUNDING BECOMES AVAILABLE, IS THAT PART OF THE CONVERSATION? I JUST WANTED TO CLARIFY THAT LAST NOTE ON THE SLIDE.

I THINK THAT'S ONE OF THE THINGS THAT WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FOR A LONG TIME IS WHAT METHODS CAN WE UTILIZE IN ORDER TO GET AS MANY PROJECTS DESIGNED AND READY TO GO SO THAT When funding becomes available, it's shovel-ready, and we can move forward in getting it done. Yeah. I mean, so that is absolutely key, especially with all the things that are going on right now.

Well, I appreciate that support. We're going to paper it and bring it to you. To really drive it home, we want to connect to communities. The families of Port St. Lucie are what make us who we are. The research is underway and it's stemming from Dr. Barr's high performing public spaces. We take that mantra into what we're doing. How do we connect people with publicly accessible spaces, generate economic, environmental, and socially sustainable benefits to these local communities? We've got feedback that the sidewalks are positive, and so how can we expand on that? How can we bring amenities into our stormwater treatment areas? How can we improve the swale liner and be adding these other infrastructure pieces? We'll also continue to reflect as a smart city where the planning strikes a balance between these resident-driven requests, user data, information, local destinations, and then again, fiscal responsibility. That's going to culminate in the collaboration with our internal and external stakeholders. It's not going to stop anytime soon. What I've provided on slides 10 and 11 is a preliminary list of locations for consideration. These have stemmed both from initial tenure planning where the project locations had not been selected for that plan. So it's a carryover from the initial work that Mr. Knott and a few others in Public Works provided for. So some locations didn't make the cut last time. We're not ruling them off. We're putting them back on the list. as well as resident driven requests. Then we have the staff noted the staff identified locations for connectivity. What we've shown is the linear footage. However, we'll be able to break down what those phasing that phasing may look like and then dig more into it. So here are just this is not a comprehensive list and it's intended for reference only. It does not indicate prioritization at this time. We have a few other columns that we'll be bringing in one-on-ones that discuss amenities, council districts, and some of the other great information. Shout out to the ArcGIS folks who have built out that portal in such a way that we are able to leverage the technology that our in-house team has built and show the layers. So I can see in real time where am I missing a connection. Where do I have a school that doesn't have enough support around it? So the implementation and the more recent rollout of that ArcGIS improvements, I got to personally witness Director Swirk geek out as an engineer. He was really pumped. He shared the link with all of us. And it's been a tool that we use. So we're continuing to grow that chest. And thank you to the internal teams who have built that for us.

so i would be interested to know and i'm guessing uh the rest of the council would too since our one of our main goals has been to make sure that that school connectivity is there that's always been a number one priority with regard to sidewalks so um i obviously i'm not going to hone down on this these two lists but if there are any on these lists that um are connected or need to be connected, then I think that's really important to make sure that it stays on a priority list.

We agree entirely. What we've done is taken the list and We cast a wide net with the first plan, right? Now we want to try to utilize something like a scoring criteria that, again, we'll look for your support on. And part of what I envision for that scoring criteria is connectivity to a school, connectivity to an existing sidewalk. ELIGIBILITY FOR GRANT FUNDING. AND THEN EACH OF THOSE HAVE A POINT PERCENTAGE SO THAT WE CAN TRY AND SYSTEMATIZE HOW WE'RE DOING THIS AND TAKING INTO ACCOUNT. WERE THEY RESIDENT DRIVEN, ET CETERA. SO I APPRECIATE YOU CALLING THAT OUT BECAUSE THAT CONNECTIVITY TO SCHOOLS IS CRITICAL ENOUGH THAT WE WANT IT TO BE PART OF OUR CRITERIA. RIGHT.

GREAT. THANK YOU.

As we move into next steps, with respect to all the changes at the state level that could be coming, what we'll be looking to do is schedule one-on-one sessions with each of you so that we can prepare and provide in more detail some of the information that we have shared today, with the goal being to come back in October to a special session or what it may be and provide to you the next iteration of a 10-year master plan to seek your support.

Okay, any questions? Go ahead, Steph.

I actually do, and thank you for bringing up about the schools, because I had that underlined there, because that was our top priority. It's scary that we're going to have that big of a deficit. It almost seems like we can't do it all, and prices are prohibiting us from doing it, so we have to prioritize schools. The probably has nothing to do with sidewalks, but I wanted to ask about the sidewalk on Milner that stopped at the street because the fire district was building the new fire station 18 and it's not been completed. Is that the fire district's responsibility or was that hours once they got finished?

I can speak to that. The site plan did not actually require the fire district to put that sidewalk in. We are in design right now. One of our project managers, Tim Murphy, is spearheading that. Because there are significant elevation issues or swale issues, the deep swales and drainage needs, we're actually having, I believe, Culpeper Interpreting provide the design so that we can construct that, and we'll be providing that infrastructure.

Because I thought that was supposed to go all the way to Midway. It will. And it's, when did we open, 18?

Last year.

Last year? No. 25. Yes, something like that. Work continued.

Oh, excuse me.

All right. I appreciate it. I didn't know if it was the fire board's or fire district's responsibility or if it was the city to get it done, and we need to get that completed in my eyes. The only other thing is, of course, you all know that I've been receiving inquiries because of the – SIDEWALKS NOT BEING MAINTAINED AND MOWED AND EDGED PROPERLY OR WHEN THEY SHOULD BE, ESPECIALLY IN THE SUMMER WHEN WE HAVE ALL THE RAIN AND IT'S LIKE EVERY OTHER DAY YOU GOT TO MOW. BUT WHEN THE GRASS STARTS INVADING AND CROSSING OVER THE SIDEWALK, IT BECOMES TO ME A SAFETY ISSUE AND UNSIGHTLY SO WE ARE NO LONGER CLEAN, BEAUTIFUL AND SAFE WHEN IT COMES TO THAT. SO I KNOW I HAVE PASSED ON ALL OF THE CONCERNS ON THAT AND THE RESPONSE HAS BEEN GREAT SO I APPRECIATE IT. BUT THE VENDORS ARE TELLING THE RESIDENTS WHEN THEY GO AND TELL THEM AND SAY AREN'T YOU GOING TO EDGE AND THEY SAY NO, THAT'S NOT INCLUDED. SO COMMUNICATION. THANK YOU.

ANYONE ELSE? NO. ALL RIGHT. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. THANK YOU ALL. SO, KATE, I see, I'm looking at almost 3.30. Is Chris coming early or is he scheduled to be here right at 9.30? What does that look like?

So with your city manager's guidance, we've already moved Chris up earlier. So he can be here at 8.30 tomorrow morning. I think that today we've had Charlie Pru here to give the debt portion of the presentation. Perfect. And then the investment, I believe the investment portion will be first up. And then Chris. Or you can have the investment. I think you have a consultant coming in for the investment report. So Chris will be here as well as the investment report in the morning. And then we'll go right into the budget. If that works for you, Madam Mayor.

Okay, so we'll we'll do debt and investment tomorrow. We'll just do the debt portion today.

Okay, if you'd like to do that. Charlie's here for that.

Let's do debt portion today and we'll end for the day and start fresh in the morning. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council, City Manager, staff, and residents. As you can see, we've got a nice new CV there, Charlie Prude, Deputy Finance Director. I've been with the city 17 years, and that's my entire professional career with Port St. Lucia. I was just talking with Jay Liss. I actually have a picture on the wall out there when I was a kid. So I grew up in parks. I've been to many of these buildings. So it's a true honor to continue to serve in the community and work for the city.

Oh, and you're a black belt.

Yes, yeah, so shout out to Kate, who started that initiative, and I continue to go down that road. It gets real mathy when you get into the black belt, but it is interesting nonetheless.

He's like an efficiency ninja, I think.

Yes, yes. So if you really want to go to sleep, we can start going through some of those formulas.

That's so funny.

I digress. We are here to talk about our debt. And so, you know, before I get into, you know, the nuances of our debt portfolio, I really kind of want to, for the benefit of the residents, to talk about the term debt, why we have debt. Debt is often met with a negative connotation, almost like it's something bad, but really for the city, it's a strategic tool. And why we issue debt is to invest in large-scale capital projects. And so those are our roads, bridges, parks, public buildings. We do not use debt to pay for salaries or operating expenses. So why does the city choose to issue debt? We don't have to. But why would we choose that route? There's a couple different alternatives, a few actually. So if we didn't want to issue debt and we, let's say, had a $20 million project we wanted to complete, we could simply save, right? And so we could save $1 million a year for 20 years. And after 20 years, we could spend that $20 million on that project. However, with that, for those 20 years, you're going to be fighting inflation, right? And so you're going to be charging residents of today for a future benefit that residents in the future will take part of but had no payment for, right? And so that is a potentially not the most prudent way to approach a capital project. You could also use PAYGO, so pay as you go. Similar scenario, you could pay, let's say, you could afford $1 million a year for 20 years, and so you could do $1 million worth of project in year one, $1 million worth in year two, and so on and so forth, and chip away at the project.

You may never get anything done.

Again, you could have challenges with inflation, and you could also drive by that same road or building for 20 years and say, wow, this thing is still under construction. They started this in high school, and I'm still driving by this today with my kids. From the city standpoint, issuing debt to get the money up front, we get the project done timely. And then we could spread the cost over 20 or 30 years so that future residents that are benefiting from that capital investment help pay for it. And so that's the approach the city's taken for a lot of our projects. It is a balancing act. We don't do it for everything. We do it strategically. So it's just another tool in our tool belt that we used in order to get the vital services and infrastructure to our residents. And as we talked about, the main benefits that we use, we spread that project over time. And so that allows future residents coming into the city to help pay for these roads, help pay for these parks, help pay for these public buildings that they're going to be privy to and utilize. We do have a debt policy. We are governed by it. So all debt is first approved by council. It is authorized by the Constitution. And as I said before, we cannot use debt for operating. It has to be used for capital projects or we can use it to refund existing debt. and when we say refunding and you know when we look at our debt portfolio almost everyone says we're funding such and such bond is because we do refund a lot and what we're doing is essentially similar if you uh did a refi on your mortgage so we borrowed debt um at four and a half percent the interest rates rate went down and so they're at four percent and so we'll essentially refinance and so we can REALIZE A NET PRESENT VALUE SAVINGS AND SAVE THE TAXPAYERS MONEY BY REFINANCING. AND WE DO THAT A LOT. I DON'T THINK WE'VE EVER WROTE A DEBT TO MATURITY. NOT THAT I KNOW OF ANYWAY RECENTLY. AND SO IT'S YOU'LL SEE IN A FUTURE SLIDE WE SAVED OVER $100 MILLION SO FAR JUST BY BEING PROACTIVE AND ENSURING WE REFUND WHEN APPROPRIATE. Getting into kind of the numbers here, we're starting that middle column. 2010 is kind of our benchmark is where we start. That is the height of our debt. And you can see that highlighted column, the city of Port St. Lucie with 164,000 residents had a debt of about $1 billion. And we often talk about that as the kind of the peak of our debt. And we were, I think, about fourth in the top 15 cities. So these are the top 15 populous cities in Florida. And we had the fourth highest debt in 2010. Last year in 2025, we have dropped now to the sixth lowest at $580 million. That was our debt portfolio last fiscal year at the end of 2025. That is a total debt reduction of approximately $460 million or 44%. If you look at all the other cities here in that far right column in black, they have increased their debt.

Yeah.

And so there's only five cities here, the top 15, that have reduced their debt. And the city of Port St. Lucie, other than Pembroke Pines, has reduced their debt the most. We reduced it 44%, Pembroke 49%. However, if you look at the amount of Pembroke, 185 million, compared to the city, we have reduced it by 462 million. And so it's kind of hard to visualize what that number means, but that is a significant amount of money to chip away out in the last 15 years. So we are very proud of that number, and we're continuing to reduce that amount whenever possible. Debt per capita is also another way of measuring the total debt that the city has, and so that's essentially debt per resident. In 2010, we had the second highest debt per resident, second only to Gainesville. So that was $6,332, that middle column on the right there, per resident. Last fiscal year, that was reduced down to $2,229 per resident. So that is a total reduction over $4,000 per resident or 65%. And no other entity has reduced the amount per capita that Port St. Lucie has. And that is coupled with our sharp reduction overall debt principle with our increase in population.

So, Madam Mayor. Mm-hm. I don't want to be getting ahead of your presentation, but okay. Yep. So really quick. So we are having conversations obviously because of, we had conversations this morning about utility, how utility is changing, how we're going to have to expand the utility department. That's going to be a significant amount added to our debt portfolio. Tell me, in your experiences, from what you're seeing in the market, are these cities also incurring more debt too because of what's occurring? How much do you see these numbers changing in comparison to our best practices currently? And how are we going to make sure that we keep the debt as low as possible while we're trying to juggle the increase in infrastructure requirements expected, like what our residents expect? How are we going to do that?

Yeah, it's a great question. So if you look at the most of the larger cities, they're increasing their debt. Their populations are expanding. They have to fund certain vital capital projects. Like you said, a lot of this is regulatory. Like when you reach a certain population or certain capacity for utility plant, you have no choice. You have to start preparation for additional capacity or additional plant. Like there's no way around that. And so that's what you see. Funding via debt is a GFOA. It is a best practice to fund these large-scale capital improvements. And that is what you see across the board for these entities is them increasing their overall debt portfolio. And how we manage that responsibly is it's a balancing act. As I said before, you have to weigh everything on an individual basis and prioritize your needs. And we do as much as we can with Kate's team and grants and whatever we can do to offset that total debt principle. But it is definitely a balancing act. And based on pending legislative changes, it's going to get tougher. We're going to have to look at things a little bit more scrutinizingly, if that's a word, to ensure that we are taking on an appropriate amount of debt per the revenue stream that's going to be able to come in. And it also, not to get too in the weeds, but it also depends on the revenue source. When we talk about utilities, that debt is funded by the rate payer. It is not necessarily funded by the overall taxpayer. It is not paid by ad valorem taxes. IN ANY WAY. IT IS ACTUALLY FUNDED BY THE RATEPAYER. SAME THING WITH THE STORM WATER FUND. AND SO YOU KIND OF HAVE TO GET DOWN INTO THE INDIVIDUAL PROJECT OF WHAT IT'S FOR AND THEN HOW IT'S GOING TO BE PAID BECAUSE YOU CAN'T REALLY LUMP EVERYTHING UNDER AN UMBRELLA AND SAY WE CAN ONLY AFFORD THIS MUCH. IT REALLY GETS DOWN TO THE SPECIFIC REVENUE SOURCE STREAM AND SURROUNDING CIRCUMSTANCES.

And even if I know utilities has its own revenue stream because of the way they collect their revenues and you may and you and Steven advise across all of the departments. So has when we talk about that, has the utility department done its fair share of saving their pennies to be able to pay for as much in cash as possible before we go out to debt?

Yeah, so it's ongoing reviews of the budget. And then the way we assess how much like a question can arise, how much debt could, let's say, the utility systems afford, right? And so there's debt service coverage ratios and debt capacity ratios. And we monitor that. rating agencies, which we'll get into, monitor that. We have internal financial experts, Steven, Denise Jackson in our office. We have PFM, our third party advisors. We have our external auditors. It goes on and on. And so it's not just one or two people making that decision. We have a team of people that look on to see, can we afford this? And getting into some of these ratios, let's say our debt service coverage ratio, you originally, you kind of want that to be at least two. So you want your revenue to be two times what your debt service payment is. Some of the utility bonds are between 10 and 14 times. And so from a generalization standpoint, they're pretty good.

Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, just to kind of go back to the question that you asked as far as the utility. and savings. If you go back, back in 2003, 2004, 2005, was when the utility truly expanded our water plants, wastewater plants, and also forest mains and water mains. That's when the huge investment was made. Since then, we have not had any major expansion whatsoever, except for some water lines, forest mains, to be able to grow the system, but the capacity was there. the major expenditure actually occur. And going back to your question, what did the utilities do between those years and today? Well, basically, we did save tremendous, a large amount of money for the purpose of this construction that's going to be happening. A lot of the design work, a lot of the raw water mains, which is the basic salt water that goes into an RO plant, all that, injection well, a lot of that was done. Have we done some bonding, small amounts? Absolutely. but the real, true expenditure is going to be occurring. And it's the right thing to do because what you want is that you'll want to expand again for another 20 more years. And this expenditure is going to happen probably in the next five years in the neighborhood between $300 million to $400 million.

Yep, and I think that that's going to be a major point to make is what that expansion is going to do. And then for legal, we need to be watching carefully the legislative discussion because once that capacity comes online, if these discussions continue about capacity and sharing capacity, I want to make sure that we're legally protected and we fight any potential issues.

pulling of our capacity especially when we're going out to bond for and our residents are going to be paying for that for how many years actually you make a tremendous point we're being fiscal responsible of building our infrastructure waiting for for those houses to be built for somebody else that never planned correctly and think that they could come here and take our capacity away and basically have to give it away that's not right and that's not how it should work if a utility does not want to prepare themselves for the future that's on them it should not be in our city

I agree.

If I may as well, Madam Mayor, City Manager, The water plant on Discovery is an example. Currently designing that for 10 million gallons a day. You heard from John Easton earlier. The utility team is looking at if that reverse osmosis plant needs or should be bigger, it can be expanded upon, but not straight out of the gate building a 30 million gallon plant, but build it in such a way that we build it to 10, we make some wise investments. Should that plant need to expand, we come later and do that versus building 30 million that now creates that giant capacity there. And another point, looking at our capacity fees, When these projects are coming in within your five-year window, we look at the fees being charged for plant capacities. And so you support, and we did adjust our water plant capacity and some of our line charges a couple years ago because this water plant was coming online. And Glades, similarly, has fallen now within the five-year. And so it's important for the public to understand that we got our finger on the pulse here, and we're monitoring all these variables to see MAKING SURE THE IMPACTS ARE PAID AS MUCH AS WE CAN AND MAKING THE BEST INVESTMENT WE CAN.

THANK YOU.

So this bar graph really just picks those 15 other entities and where the average lies. And so kind of the average you see there is around $900 million, so $929 million to be exact. So that's the average outstanding debt across these 15 entities. Port St. Lucie, highlighted in yellow, is at, again, $580 million as of fiscal year 2020. And so we're pretty far below the average, which is quite outstanding when you think about the growth that we've had and us being able to fund what we've been able to fund without taking on new debt. When you look at Orlando and Cape Coral, they've all packed on new debt over the past couple of years. And alluding to the city manager's comment, you know, where we have kind of these long-term declines and then we're going to have a spike here in the next three to five years. This chart shows from the height of a billion dollars, you know, we've kind of steadily declined. And we've had little spikes here and there where we've taken on a little bit of new debt. But overall, it's a trend. It's continuing to decline. And I will point out, too, this is coupled with a decreasing millage rate almost over the entire same time period. So we haven't been increasing our millage to help pay off the debt. We've actually been paying off the debt while decreasing the millage at the same time and funding the vital services that we've been funding for the past 15 years. So it's a real kudos to the city council and staff here. And they're a strong initiative to reduce our debt obligations over this time period. And as I mentioned, you know, with the population growth has been significant. That has helped us, you know, because we've had an increasing tax base to help pay down some of our debt. But I want to reiterate that AVLORM taxes do not go to pay debt other than the Crosstown Parkway. Crosstown Parkway is your voted debt. That is a GO bond. It has to be voted by the residents. That is the separate line item you see on your tax bill. All other debt is paid by other revenue streams. And so just again, I want to reiterate, Avaloram Taxes does not go to pay our debt other than the GO debt. This is our debt portfolio as of the end of this fiscal year. So fiscal year 26, we're projected to have a balance of $549 million, starting with the largest, which is utilities. That's in green. And so that is the bulk of our debt at 46%. And then we go into our special assessments at 17%. And really, that is also a large part utility infrastructure, which was... ASSESSED TO THAT PARTICULAR PROPERTY OWNER. IT IS PAID BY THAT SPECIFIC PROPERTY OWNER THAT GOT THE BENEFIT OF THAT CONSTRUCTION. IT IS NOT PAID BY THE BROAD TAX BASE. WE DO HAVE SOME LEGACY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DEBT THAT'S DWINDLING DOWN. IT WAS SIGNIFICANT. IT IS NOW AT 70 MILLION. THAT IS THE OLD HISTORIC VGDI DISTRICT DOMAIN BUILDINGS. And then we have our G. O. debt, which is crosstown that is paid by ab alarm taxes. Only 58M dollars remaining on that. And then we have some smaller debt issues. We recently did one for the parks, PD and public works building. That is 7% of our overall debt portfolio. A little bit left in stormwater, 5%, and then we have a little CRA bank loan out there for 1% or $7 million. But as you can see, the lion's share here is utility debt that is backed by the whole utility user base and very healthy debt as far as debt is concerned.

SO THE SPECIAL ASSESSMENT DEBT, THAT'S INFRASTRUCTURE DEBT, CORRECT?

CORRECT.

SO AGAIN, GOING BACK TO TERMINOLOGY, I THINK IT'S IMPORTANT THAT SOMEHOW WHEN WE PRESENT THIS TO THE PUBLIC OR WHEN IT'S PRESENTED TO PUBLIC, THAT YOU JUST PROVIDE LIKE THAT, BECAUSE THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND. THEY SAY SPECIAL ASSESSMENT. WHAT ARE THEY DOING THAT'S SO SPECIAL? AND THE TRUTH IS I KNOW THAT'S ALL INFRASTRUCTURE BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THOSE ITEMS ARE. THAT'S ADDITIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE DEBT. The economic development debt, like you highlighted, you said legacy keyword. That means that we are not taking on any new economic development debt. We voted, I mean, council even before me voted that that won't happen ever again. So the soccer stadium is not going to be bonded, correct? City of Port St. Lucie is putting in no money for the stadium, correct? In the sense of debt, it's like nothing.

No, there might be some confusion because they have a developer bond. That is not a city bond. It's not debt from the city. No. Thank you.

We're not paying for it. We're not funding money for it. It's private investment. 100% private investment.

Yeah, to your comment, I will do a better job. We use this terminology so much in finance, we just start rattling off jargon. And I will do a shout-out to our popular annual financial report, our PAFR. So we recently completed that, and that has a really good job of explaining these issues. bond issues very clearly and plainly and actually articulates what the money was used for by specific project. And so that can be found on the city's website under the finance department, the PAFR, popular annual financial report.

That is a great little report. It is. It really is. And I think when you look at what stormwater, like what you did, how long was that video? TWO MINUTES. I DON'T THINK IT'S A BAD IDEA FOR SOME OF THESE QUESTIONS THAT WE GET FOR YOU TO HAVE, LIKE, A VIDEO READY TO GO OR SOMETHING QUICK READY TO GO, BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY I'M THINKING. IT'S JUST WE PUT THE INFORMATION OUT. IT IS PUBLIC, BUT EVEN THE PAPHER, FOR EXAMPLE, PEOPLE, ARE THEY GOING TO ACTUALLY READ IT EVEN IF IT'S JUST A FEW PAGES? I think it's bite-sized. It has to be something very simple for people to be like, okay, I get that. That's infrastructure debt. And then if they want to see, well, what infrastructure debt? Well, here's a PAFR. It's going to tell you what that has for those people that want to read more. But I feel like people really just want information as quickly as possible, as concise.

Sure. We can work with communications to create a little short on our debt portfolio.

Yeah. I think it's just helpful, and I think it's one of those things where when a resident asks, we can just send them the video and say, here's an explanation of the debt. It's almost like we need, because we create those videos, but they kind of go into the ether sometimes, and they're hard to find. It's almost like we need a video log or something so we can actually just send a two-minute snippet of what this is.

Excellent idea. And so I spoke before about refunding, right, why it's important. So this kind of exemplifies that. So today we've saved over $100 million of the tax and rate payer money by just refunding, being proactive. And so as I mentioned before, it's not just Stephen or Denise or Karen or I. In the office that's looking at that, we have our third party advisor, Jake, with PFM. We have bond counsel. We have our external auditors. We have our rating agencies. And so we're constantly looking at when can we refund? Should we refund? What are the interest rates? And so we're very proactive with it. We do have a special assessment bond that is up for refunding in 26 that we're working on. And that's going to be another $2 million on top of this 102. So that'll be $104 million saved to date just by keeping on top of it. And so remember, our total debt portfolio is like $580 million. And so we've saved... 100 million of that. If we did nothing and just rode everything out to maturity, it'd be in excess of 680 million just by sitting there and doing nothing. And these are our ratings. And so for the average resident at home, what this is essentially similar to is your credit score. And so these third party rating agencies take a look at our financial statements. They take a look at economic conditions. They take a look at political conditions. And they give our bonds a rating, and that rating is a sign of risk, financial health. And so the higher the rating, the less risk. And so the less risk, the less of an interest rate you have. And so we've continually increased our ratings. So we recently increased our special obligation ratings to AA2. And so that is getting up there. We strive to be triple A rated. That is our goal. And that is essentially the blue ribbon, top tier, as good as you can get. We are monitoring these. They have increased year over year with the potential changes to taxes. We're going to have to see how these are affected. They may suppress. They may go down. And that's just fear mongering or anything. That's just how these rating agencies assess these. Because if we have less money to pay our bonds and less of a backstop, then they would potentially get a lower rating. And while that doesn't do anything to the existing debt, so the $580 million is locked in, but when we go out to issue new debt, let's say between $200 and $400 million that we're talking about, that can significantly affect the interest rate that we get on that new debt. And so that gets to real dollars very quick. And so if we did a $50 million issue, let's say, and we got an interest rate of 4%, but for some reason we can't borrow at 4%, and they increase it to 4.1%. That one-tenth of one percent is over a million dollars over the life of that bond, and that's on 50 million, and that's that one-tenth of one percent. If it was a half a percent or a full percent on four million dollars, you're talking about tens of millions of dollars. And so we're very sensitive to these rates. We try to protect them as much as possible because we know for the future we're going to have to rely on them to borrow the money that we need for the vital infrastructure coming in the future.

So when do we get these ratings? When do they actually provide us an updated rating?

So usually they will come back when we issue new debt is when they start looking at them. And so S&P will schedule a meeting with Steve and I and the team and say, you want to issue $50 million for this? We're going to go over everything that's going on with the city. We want your ACFR. We want your financial statements. We want to know what projects you're doing. We want to know what's going on with tradition, what's going on with the soccer stadium, what's going on with this, things they hear in the news. And it's a rap sheet of pages and pages of questions that we have to answer. And they have their own analysts that will give us a rating based on their assessment. And they do take a look on similar ratings. It would be weird to have one that has a triple C rating or something like that. But they work kind of with each other, but they are their own entity. But it's very much when we issue new debt is when the optics really start to hone in.

Just to add a little bit to that, recently we had a couple of ratings this year, S&P and Moody's. One of the questions from S&P was current legislation.

Well, and that's what I was going to ask. Where's the discussion? Is there any speculative discussion that's occurring with these rating agencies? And then just for clarity of the record, I think fear-mongering, and you use that term, but I think it is important to clarify that this isn't... We would have nothing to fear if we had information. And I think the problem is there was the House and the Senate, I believe two years ago, it was not this last session, it was a session before, actually voted to do an economic study of what property taxes would do and how it would impact the state and cities and counties And unfortunately that was vetoed. And so there is no information speculative or estimate of how this is going to impact our bond rating. And so, and bonding, as we know, as we're trying to see to grow, to be able to expand the infrastructure is critical. So that's, that's why I'm wondering, is there anything out there that I have not seen a shred of information? No. Yeah. And so that's, to me, that's like, We'll have to cut. I mean, if these things change, we'll have to cut. We'll have to find a way to cut. People may not like the cuts to happen, but at the end of the day, if we're not able to bond, you know, it's going to definitely change how the ability we are to deal with the infrastructure needs of the city because it's a reality.

It all comes down to what the city has available to pay for the debt. And so usually when you issue a bond at a very simple premise, you have to pledge a revenue source. Let's say that revenue source is mobility fees or in half-cent sales tax. Well, there's always going to be a backstop to make investors feel safe. They say, okay, we're cool with mobility fees. We're cool with half-cent sales tax. But half-cent sales tax is on a 10-year cycle. It could go away. Yes. mobility fees could dry up because of economic conditions. So the investor says, I need something to feel safe and comfortable. And so the backstop is going to usually be a statement that says, any and all other non-ad valorem revenues, right? And so that's the backstop. If there's less of that around because we've had to shift ad valorem revenue or shift non-ad valorem revenue to pay for the Absent Avalon rather than there's less revenue to backstop these bonds and that's what these rating agencies look at There's just less money all around and so therefore the risk is slightly higher the rating is going to be slightly lower and your interest rate is going to increase and

AND I THINK, AGAIN, I'M ALWAYS OPEN TO THE CONVERSATION OF HOW TO DO THINGS BETTER AND HOW TO REFORM A SYSTEM TO IMPROVE. I JUST THINK THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION TO MAKE THOSE DECISIONS IS SO KEY. AND THIS IS AN AREA THAT REALLY IS COMPLETELY VAGUE. IF IT WAS TO PASS, LIKE, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? AND ON TOP OF THE DECLINING REVENUES, HOW WOULD WE BE ABLE TO DEAL WITH THE PROJECT LOAD THAT'S BEING EXPECTED OF US AS AN ORGANIZATION? SO THANK YOU. Well, the reality is we won't be able to.

That's the truth. Let's just talk, you know, if we're just being really honest and straightforward here, if you don't have the revenues and you don't have the funding to be able to do the projects, then you can't do the projects. Yep.

I think something else just to add is the ability to increase your military, if you ever choose to, that has been restricted. So that plays a component in the overall ability to go out there and cover your debt.

Yeah, it's excellent points. And to your point, Madam Mayor, we're kind of monitoring it because we don't really know yet what the implications are. And so we're kind of in that kind of waiting game to see what happens. But this, for anybody interested, this is our overall debt portfolio kind of split out. So you see our utilities there, our economic development, geo, special assessment. stormwater and CRA debt by issues. If you look at the name, the word refunding, again, is in almost every single one, is because we refund them whenever possible to take advantage of those net present value savings. And so, again, TOTAL OF $549 MILLION AT THE END OF THIS FISCAL YEAR. BUT THAT IS, I SAY IT EVERY YEAR, THAT IS SLATED TO GO UP. WE'VE BEEN VERY FORTUNATE THAT WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO SUPPRESS THAT. BUT THERE IS GOING TO BE TIME IN THE NEAR FUTURE WHERE WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO GO OUT FOR A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF DEBT, PARTICULARLY FOR THE UTILITY FUND.

And, again, going back to the portfolio, you know, next year, I definitely see how it's broken out. You know, as much detail as we can provide or layman detail we can provide.

Yeah, I honestly attempted to put the fund numbers in here as well. That's a lot of information. The backstop is usually multiple funds, and it got a little messy. But, yeah, we'll definitely go and take a look and see if we can maybe provide a slide next year that does a little more.

And in fact, besides the bond category would probably be helpful. And I don't know, I'd have to see it when you guys put it together is what's the funding source. So people could actually see it's like this is not funded through, you know, ad valorem. You know, this is how we fund it. And these some of these are declining revenues to when you look at gas tax and some of the other funds. And so. I just think that that information is what people are, at least from my experience, are wanting to see is like, where is the money coming from? Are my taxes paying for this? Why is my taxes paying for that? So I think that's important.

Sure. No problem. And with that, that is the end.

Any questions? All right. Great.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you.

All right, we've come to the end of the day. I want to thank everyone for all the great presentations and all the updates. I know it is a lot of work, a lot of hard work to put everything together, so thank you, Jesus, and everybody, and we will see you all tomorrow. We are adjourned.

Thank you.