03.09.21 Pasco Board of County Commissioners Hybrid Virtual Meeting

[Music] he's already on the phone yeah it's gone it's good good morning everyone i would like to call to order the hybrid virtual pasco county board of county commission meeting of march 9 2021. at this time please silence all electronic devices and mute your microphones please stand with me for the invocation of the pledge oh merciful creator your hand is opened wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature make us thankful for your loving providence and grant that we remembering the account that we must one day give may be faithful stewards of your good gifts into amen republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice crawl adam clerk please call the roll district two commissioner district three commissioner starkey here district four commissioner fitzpatrick district five commissioner mariano here district one chairman oakley here today's virtual meeting when we do have items to vote for uh we will be voting by roll call vote uh because the members not one member's not present another members running a little late will be here shortly okay uh mr steinsteiner will you please go over today's proceeding with the bcc be happy to mr chairman on march 12 2020 board of the board of county commissioners declared a local state of emergency after the governor issued executive order 2051 the public health emergency and 2052 the state of emergency related to covet 19 which has recently been extended by executive order 2145 on february 26 2021. the board has chosen to hold its board meetings with quorum physically present utilizing communications media technology for the public and team members to participate a detailed notice indicating the board's intent to conduct a hybrid virtual meeting has been posted on the board's website on feb on september 25th 2020 the governor issued executive order 2244 moving the state into phase three of the governor's safe smart step-by-step order which was extended by executive order 2297 issued on november 24th 2020. large gatherings of over 50 people are still not recommended to congregate in any public space that does not readily allow for appropriate social distancing the state surge in general public health advisory is still in place with regard to maintaining social distancing and avoiding gatherings of 10 or more people the public is being afforded an

opportunity to make public comments either in writing or by the use of communications technology that has been provided the board adopted resolution 20-182 on june 30th 2020 establishing the procedural rules for hybrid virtual meetings such as the one being held today as with any public meeting you take action you are required to take public comment on any proposition pursuant to section 286.0114 florida statutes thank you okay thank you now it's time for public comment citizens are given an opportunity to comment on any item coming before the board during this section the board also takes public comment commental items based on a future board agenda and other business under their pursuit due to covet 19 operations and safeguard the wellness well-being and safety of our citizens staff to and staff today's public comment will be held as follows first we will take public comment from those who have pre-registered for webex link and are currently on cue after we will read after we will read the entry record the public comments documents powerpoints videos that have been identified by members of the public to be read for out loud played in the meeting received and filed finally we will take public comment from those currently signed up at the kiock station comments are not to exceed three minutes per person this new format does not waive the request for when you address the board comments are not to be direct for any commissioner or team member but rather to the issues this provides mutual respect between the board members and the public for webex and kiock's participants after stating your name and address for the clerk the timer will begin and start a countdown after two minutes one beat will sell letting you know that only one minute remains after the time is up two beeps will sound letting you know your three minutes are up and you should close your comments webex participants will be disconnected when their time is up and kiok's participants will be asked to move away from the kiocks madam clerk do we have anyone signed up to speak at the webex four people had pre-registered however one person logged in and now they are at the kiosk and would like to speak from the kiosk okay no one i don't have anyone else um logged in um that have pre-registered at this time okay just is there any comments to be ready to

record or i have uh one email we'll be reading the record to be right into the right let's do that before we do the kiosk yeah the email is from rob park address is 9614. erin cut off lando lakes florida three four six three nine agenda item 38 40 comma 42-sun lake boulevard project commissioners i am objecting to spending this amount of money on a project to facilitate new growth in pasco county where there are too many many where there are too many existing areas that needs funds to correct infrastructure deficiencies existing citizens are being ignored pushed aside and inconvenienced for the sake of new subdivisions or business this is particularly what the sunlight project is for new subdivisions and businesses i understand growth is needed and in many and in most cases the direction pasco is going is beneficial to all but not when existing residents quality of life is degraded i live on aaron cutoff and it has been turned into a high volume high speed shortcut all for the sake of getting to the new subdivisions and businesses about five minutes faster erin cutoff is designed as a connector road and according to the comprehensive plan collectors do not form a continuous network and generally discouraged through traffic and discouraged through traffic there is no reason to use aaron cut off using the state road 52 and us-41 intersection leads to the same place and only takes about five minutes longer if it is necessary to spend this amount of money for new projects then an equal or greater amount of money needs to be allocated to correct the negative consequences of the new projects in the case of the erin cutoff it is if it is so important to have a shortcut build the collier parkway extension as the shortcut sooner rather than later there are no doubt many similar roadway issues i believe you are probably creating another shortcut issue by improving bell lake road under the guise that it will be better i asked for this objection to read out to read aloud so that i can attest so that i can attend the fdot us41 and carson drive meeting at the heritage park thank you thank you okay let's uh just have one person left at the kiocks there's i think um two individuals at the kiosk uh one was kathy julian who had pre-registered to be on webex but prefers to be in person of kiosk okay let's have her speak first hello my name is kathy julian i live in newport richie i'm kind of surprised to see that two of our county commissioners

didn't attend the meeting in pub in person today um i thought that's part of what they were paid to do my issue with what's going on in our county is the mask mandate i know you were talking about it earlier i could only catch parts of it because i was walking into the building we went to the wrong building because the building you're in we're not allowed to be in some reason um i have a huge issue with the mass mandate one of the biggest things is you guys have never voted on it as far as i can find um you had a county administrator put it into effect it affects all of our lives and our elected officials couldn't even vote on it that's distressing as a member of your community um the other thing is i i'm not sure if you guys are aware of what this is doing to the youth in our community we have a childhood friend whose son attempted to commit suicide in september because his senior year of high school was destroyed and succeeded in committing suicide in january his name is dylan buckner you can look it up it's become national news that's way too close to home for me because it's a girl that i considered my little sister growing up whose son committed suicide due to these crazy mass mandates and the lockdowns we need to get over it um and move on apparently that's not anybody's eldest vision besides mine that's really all i have to say um and i appreciate you guys all ignoring me have a great day thanks for your comments there's someone else at the kiocks is anyone else at the kiosk to speak okay do they have mia yeah yes um my name is stephanie ramirez uh basically i just wanted to talk as well um on the mask mandate and you have to state your name and your address oh 6149 11th avenue newport richie florida 34653 oh thank you yes so my concern is i'm a mother and ever since these locks down lockdowns my concern is is my children going to have a normal life um i worry on a daily basis of whether they will you know still be be depressed because our normal activities that we were able to do back in the day actually is not accessible to them as much as possible going into a business and they are asking you to wear a mask when my family feels that it's highly unhealthy for us to actually wear it i could go into the reasons why but i have a feeling that you guys actually do have an understanding or an idea of how wearing a mask is not only healthy

but it's unproductive it actually does not keep you healthy it actually um wise literally still allows a virus cell to actually go through because the size of a virus cell is absolutely significantly more smaller than the size of the bacteria cell so the masks don't work we know this it's actually been proven even dr fausti himself has actually said it himself so my concern as a parent and i wonder if you guys have the same um questions is my child being affected by this i don't know if you guys have to deal with the daily basis of trying to figure out how to keep my children happy trying to figure out how how we can take them outside and not make them depressed of having to go to these businesses that are forcing you to wear something that you know is unhealthy to wear so i understand that there's a percentage of the population that can be affected by covid however this percentage is always been a possibility affected mainly because if they got influenza if they got pneumonia or anything that basically could affect or hurt them keep in mind this has always been this the cause if they had underlying issues they had a risk to actually be affected or possibly die because of it so it's no different than pneumonia it's no different than influenza so i really urge you to rethink about this mass mandate because it's really it really affects the mental well-being of our children and that is the future of our world thank you so much thank you for your comments is anyone else at the uh kiosks to speak there's no one else at the kiosk okay thank you okay that ends the public comment portion of the meeting we now move on to the consent agenda and i have a pull sheet i have c37 withdrawal b48 withdrawal c19 i guess that's withdraw so anybody else have anything to add to the list they won't pull or come in them if not i'll entertain a motion uh proving the rest of the items second okay i got a motion and a second my roll call vote district two commissioner moore aye district three commissioner starkey aye for commissioner fitzpatrick aye district five commissioner mariano aye district one chairman oakley aye motion pass five zero okay so these items are withdrawn we're gonna have to vote on okay so move on to the regular agenda okay we will go to r 79

good morning bob greg pasco county budget director we have the flight show hi well good morning that was part of our budget process this morning i wanted to have a discussion with you all about uh the fiscal 22 budget in particular if you could go to the next slide please in particular we wanted to talk about where we see the economy going next year during the fiscal year 22 budget time period and then look at how that economy what's happening with the economy how we're expecting that to impact our revenues and expenditures next slide please and the next all right so as you may recall when the coronavirus and the pandemic first came upon us we experienced the economic recession which is defined of course as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth and so for the first and second quarter of the year the calendar year we were in this recessionary period because of the coronavirus it's interesting to note that the depth of this economic recession was much larger than the depth of the great recession of the 2007 8 9 time period but on the bright side it was only two quarters it was so much shorter in length than the great depression and so as you can see in the third and fourth quarter uh we've experienced economic growth so that recession in itself was one of the shortest in uh in us history being only two quarters long and so we're expecting this economic growth to continue as we begin to roll out the vaccine and as more and more people get this vaccine we're expecting folks to again uh come out feel free to come outside to to engage in activities and so on and so really as the we're expecting the economy to kind of move along it's kind of a very slow pace until a substantial portion of the population is vaccinated and whether that be april may june whenever that is once we have that substantial portion of the population uh vaccinated we expect the economy to grow very fast pace and i've seen some estimates that the economy in the second half of the calendar year could grow as high as eight percent per year so next slide please and so this is uh interesting so just a little explanation on this the first bar the red bar that is the year over year spending consumer spending on each one of those goods in may of 2020 and the second bar would be year-over-year spending for november and as we can see

may was when the pandemic really took hold and things began to shut down and as you can see food and beverages from grocery stores right we were fewer of us were going to the grocery we're going to restaurants we're going to grocery stores and so grocery stores the sales in the grocery stores skyrocketed almost 15 from the budgeting standpoint most of what you purchase in the grocery store is not taxable so this shifting our expenditures from restaurants to uh grocery stores was a revenue loss for us and then the next thing you see here is non-store retailers this is what the federal government calls online purchases you can see the online purchases during the pandemic skyrocketed and they continue to remain high the only other area that has really increased here is this area of sporting goods musical instruments and so on so i guess the more we're locked at home with nothing to do the more we're spending on on musical instruments and so on so i'm expecting some really good bands coming out of this coming out of this pandemic and you'll notice the rest of these this is really what's driving the economy this is where we'll look in a little bit about our unemployment rate these are the areas where we'll see that our unemployment is we'll notice the gasoline stores most of our sales taxes most of our revenues have recovered during the recession with the exception of gas gas tax and so you can see here why gas tax still remains so low next please so you can see during the when the resection started when the pandemic came along in february march the the numbers in the little box that's the pasco county unemployment rate you can see the unemployment rate in pasco skyrocketed from 3.4 percent to 14 as all of those kinds of things that we just saw on the previous slide began to shut down the gas stations the restaurants the department stores and all those things but since then we see that the unemployment rate again dropping to about 5.2 percent in december and we're expecting that unemployment rate to continue to fall during next calendar year as things begin to open up and as as folks get back into the economy now we're not expecting it to get back to that three three and a half percent rate but still it's going to get down into the four four and a half percent unemployment rate next please and so luckily we're in an area that is expected to see growth even above the national average so if we're expecting a national growth rate of eight percent we're expecting the tampa region to be even

higher than that and the industries we're expecting most of the growth is in construction this financial services and in this other catch-all area called other services and we have some evidence to point towards the the fast-growing tampa region the first one you can see here the tampa bay startups raised over 180 million dollars in 2020. so these start-up businesses have gotten investment from outside sources to the tune of 180 million and that was much higher than 129 million that was raised in 2018 and this was even during the pandemic next slide please we look at the economic small business job growth index and we can see the number one city on here is tampa at almost 98 percent and the only other city on here in the florida is miami so tampa is leading the nation in small business job growth next please and so a phenomenon that had begun prior to the pandemic but was certainly accelerated during the pandemic was this idea of corporations relocating to the south from the northeast and from the rust belt moving down in here into the into the florida region and this was just accelerated during uh the pandemic where folks are trying to get out of the you know trying to get out of this very crowded area and social distance down here with the rest of us related to this is another phenomenon that was accelerated during the pandemic where residents are moving from the northeast down here and if if they're anything like me it's we moved down here to we're tired of scraping the ice off of our windshields and so we see a lot of that so during the pandemic again folks were tired of being in crowded areas they couldn't social distance and so now they're moving down here for the quality of life next slide please and so what this is leading to of course is a shortage of homes we can see the bottom line here which is the existing home price the mean existing home price in the last last year or so took a sharp spike and that sharp spike generally indicates a shortage of these existing homes and so this partially explains the reason why there's so much new construction happening in our region next please apologize for this this didn't turn out too well but that is a map of florida there and so john burns has looked at the housing market for the major cities in florida and you can see the very strong housing markets are tampa and sarasota with the strong markets being in naples west palm and so on and i think

you just have to step into our building department to realize that that is probably very accurate that the tampa region is a very strong housing market next please so not only do we have a very strong housing market here's evidence of that housing market in fact two of the top 50 planned housing communities in the united states two of those best sellers are right here in pasco that's starkey ranch and bexley next please of course all this growth does come out of price and that would be uh inflation in our area is more than double the national average of inflation so as we are going into construction the demand for these scarce materials is causing the prices for all these construction materials both vertical and horizontal to increase and that's where as the county that's where we're going to see the inflation hit us the most is during in construction both building road construction and that kind of thing next please so just to summarize here we are seeing our economic indicators pointing towards strong growth in our region and as the vaccine rolls out as people become more comfortable getting out we really expect the economy to really take off thanks please alrighty next and so what's the impact of all this good good economic news on our budget for fiscal year 22 well as you recall in fiscal year 21 we were very conservative because the budgeting for this year because the pandemic had just started it was having an impact on our revenues but we weren't really sure what the total impact is going to be on our revenues and so we were really very conservative we didn't bring on very much new spending at all we believe because of the optimistic economic forecast that we can now turn to investing back in some of the things that our customers would expect funding some some new initiatives and so on there is the new stimulus bill does contain language that would allow us would allow cities and municipalities to recover lost revenues as a result of the pandemic however the language of the bill is not clear and we won't really want to wait until we have the guidance from the treasury department before we make any recommendations on how we should be spending that money next please so as we talked about new home permits this is just single family homes and at the end of the year we were seeing single-family home permits coming into the building department at record levels at 600 homes per month and we thought well we are at the peak we can't possibly get any higher and then we turn the calendar into january we had almost 900 single-family homes

in january and so we expect this to continue the important part here is that new construction is a big determinant of taxable assessed value which is one of the inputs for property tax revenues so one of the things you'll note is that a new house that goes into permitting today won't reach the tax rules for two years and so if we look back even look back to the 2020 so those new houses that were built in 2020 will be in the tax rolls for the 22 budget year and so even in 2020 which is whatever color that is purplish so even that was a pretty strong growth and so that's we'll begin to see in two years next please and so because of the strong value uh construction yes so you're only showing new homes but on that slide what about permits for commercial and industrial is there a slide for that we don't have a slide but for that but we do have the information for that and the actually the the permit value for for commercial properties is way above where it is historically so we're so we have all these new homes coming in and then commercials coming in to support all the residents you know i recall always hearing that the um homes maybe don't necessarily add to the tax rolls that much as compared to the services they require so it seems to me a really relevant number for the commission is the value of the commercial industrial property coming online which really adds to the tax base without taking a lot of services so i i think in the future that's really important number to put in here so commissioner we we watch that and look at that but you you really can't break that down by month because commercial permits come in a variety of sizes and shapes and so you could have a month where you have 25 or 30 permits in a real low value because they're all tenant improvements that's still all new commercial or you could have shells or you could have multi-family complexes so it kind of the data there is much harder to look at on a month per month basis we can do an annual and we have that yes that's good numbers yeah mr yes if i'm not correct it wasn't um 20 20 up approximately 18 18.7 percent from 19 on the commercial so i get a few seconds i have the spreadsheet i mean 18. i watched eighteen point nine percent increase from fy nineteen twenty yeah yeah let's definitely check that trend now yeah the the twenty

i think that's a good story the twenty almost doubled the value of the commercial almost doubled at yes commissioner we saw a 16.7 increase in 20 of above 19. and our property um the new commercial valuation was almost 600 million dollars and that's 106 above the 19 valuation yes ma'am okay to 600 million yes ma'am yeah okay yeah i think in the future those are great slides too yeah yeah i just that that just keep in mind total while great that's still a small very small segment of our total number because so you're talking 600 million in the entire new construction when we pull it up was 2.6 billion so two total permitting was 2.6 billion only 600 that was commercial so the reason we watch single family is it's so it's so much more from a volume perspective i know but i it's still you know we've been known as a bedroom community and i really want to tell the other parts of our growth highly yeah now i understand i just it's it's a lot more scatter shot so it's hard to see trends in that on a monthly basis okay yeah and that's that's a good point in the future we'll we'll add those and that's a good point because as we meet with the rating agencies when we go out for loans that's one of the things they point out is that we're no longer a bedroom community here in pasco they're impressed with the amount of commercial industrial that's coming online and so because of all this uh building activity that's been happening for the past since the end of the great recession we are expecting taxable assessed values for fiscal year 2022 budget year to be somewhere in the seven to ten percent increase somewhere in that range next please so next i'd like to focus on the importance of tourism to the overall economy of the region and so often we think of tourism as bringing in that tourism development tax but here as we attract more visitors to the area you can see that those visitors spend money outside of the hotel and in 2019 visitors to our area actually spent half a billion dollars in our local economy and to put that in into context taurus spend it is equivalent to about 13 percent of our overall overall sales tax revenue in the region next please and so on this next slide is a lot happening here but we get a weekly report and the first chart there is our weekly occupancy rate of all hotels in pasco and the bottom one is the average daily revenue for all of our hotel rooms in pasco and here we wanted just to point out the importance of sporting events to our local economy and you can see the super bowl there

on that week of february 6th even though the super bowl was held in tampa the average daily revenue for our hotels in the area spiked in that week exceeding where it was the year before next slide please so the next slide here shows this is the green would be the revenues that we received from the tourism development tax in 2019 the blue with the circles is the what we received in 2020 and you can see there beginning in april when the pandemic was really hitting us as the travel really slowed down you can see the difference in the amount of revenue that was brought in from that tourism development tax during the months of march april may and june beginning in july august in september it has begun to recover and then you can see the purple line here started off well and it's uh we expect it to do well again as the economy begins to open up next please and so half cent sales tax revenue this is a shared revenue with the state this red line that we put in there that was the monthly average revenue that we received for half cent sales tax in 2019 which was the year before the pandemic and then we mapped this is the monthly revenue that we received you'll notice in december january there's always a spike because of the christmas and the interesting thing here is in may if you'll notice that huge dip in may that's about a half million dollars lost in just that one month because of the because of the economic downturn and then beginning again in september we can see that those half cent sales tax revenues are above that red line and in fact our january revenues were just much higher than they were the previous january next please now we look at penny for pasco which again is the one cent sales tax you can see the orange line there again in april may you can see how quickly that dropped out that was about 800 000 loss in those two months in their revenue but then beginning in june july we began to recover and then as we look at the revenues again for this month we can see i mean for this fiscal year we can see that those revenues are much higher that's that purple line are much higher than they have been in years past you'll notice those spikes that occur coincidentally every quarter the reason for that is because those are internet sales tax the state holds those and then gives them out to us every quarter and so that's why it kind of jumps around like that next please here's our one required doom and gloom slide communication service tax is 1.86 of your phone bill and we use those funds we use that revenue to fund the 911 emergency operations center

and we're losing about three percent per year on that revenue you can see in just the last decade the revenues have declined from about 6 million we're expecting to be right around 4 million in fiscal 22 and so because of that loss of revenue we are offsetting that loss of revenue with general fund dollars to keep the 911 center operating next please so we look at gas tax so most of our other sales tax revenues have recovered gas tax is one that we're keeping an eye on again we have the 2019 monthly average here and this first local option gas tax which is what we use to maintain existing roads you can see that it is really has been struggling we had the giant dip again in may when the pandemic was at its height and just in january it's just uh once more exceeding where it was in 2019 so we're keep an eye on this we'll see if this is a trend that's going to continue whether it's actually going to continue to recover or it's just a one-month anomaly next please so second local option gas tax this is the gas tax that we use to build new roads add new capacity as you can see since the recession since the pandemic hit we've really had difficulty getting back to where we were in 2019 next please so on the right side we have the u.s energy's uh short-term energy outlook the u.s department of energy believes that uh usage of fuel is going to remain low until the towards the end of fiscal year uh calendar year 21 and for us that's good news because that's october and that's beginning of our new fiscal year for 22. so we're expecting these gas taxes to at least to have recovered to where they were in the 2019-20 when we began budgeting for our 22 uh budget year mr chairman yes sir okay just repeat that again you think the demand for gas will remain low for how much longer well the department of energy says towards the end of calendar year 21. so in the october time frame the ironic it is that the gas prices continue to rise for some unknown reason isn't it this really doesn't kind of contradicts why they are but i'll leave it at that very good next please and so the the interesting point here is that gas tax revenues you can see some of those are are in the positive and that's simply because we budget revenues at 95 percent of what we were expecting had we budgeted those revenues at 100 all of those gas tax revenues would have

been in the negative next please okay so although most of our revenues are recovering we are expecting increased revenues coming into the next fiscal year there are some increased expenditures we want to look at first of all is the county share of the medicaid and so that is increases in the neighborhood of three to four hundred thousand dollars per year so it's up around almost eight million dollars a year that we pay for medicaid here employee health care as you know uh health care inflation is one of the highest inflationary rates in the country and we're certainly not immune from that and so we right now are planning to increase the amount we budget per employee for health care by 500 employee retirement we expect that to increase the state has already mentioned they've announced that they've increased the what they call the assessment fee which is the overhead charge for managing the employee retirement so they've already announced an increase there and that's cost of that is half a million dollars for all funds in the in the county and in addition to that we're expecting increases property tax and property insurance workers comp and and you can see although we're not building four new fire stations this year and two new libraries we've got a plan for those to come online in the future and then the state keeps telling us we need to do this update of this thing called the comprehensive plan so those are just some of the things that are on the horizon that we've got it that we've got to fund with these uh increased revenues coming online next please and so finally we just want to talk about the budget calendar and what you can expect moving forward so may 1st is the deadline for three of our five constitutional officers for their budgets june 1st we will get their preliminary taxable assessed values from the property appraiser and that will give us a pretty good idea of where we think the property revenues will be for the next year we'll get the final assessed values from the property appraiser on july 1st and then at your july 6th meeting we'll set the trim for the following year and that is all i have i'd be happy to answer any questions you might have mr jerry report just mr moore hey thanks just one thing i want to make a statement to you mentioned about like super bowl weekend for for example health sports um obviously help with tourism in the economy but kudos to the county and the dmo and um

center ice and rad sports because actually what happened that weekend is there was the hub the big hub that was here for a month and a half hockey teams from all over the nation they were here that week at a super bowl weekend and there was also a huge gymnastics meet this that weekend here in pasco county too so actually talking to the team and the dmo what actually drove room nights up that weekend yeah the super bowl was a little bit tiny bit but it was really because of this huge hockey um tournament that brought in over 4 500 room nights during that time as well as the big gymnastics meet so that goes to show you obviously the decisions we make here the benefit they have to the entire community and the economy and you mentioned sports and youth sports and these amateur sports are huge they actually bring in more revenues than professional sports do it's just a fact so i did want to state that so again kudos to those two facilities and uh our our dmo team and i also want to state and i think this you know because of decisions this board is made as well as county administration to keep paso county open yeah that's one of the big reasons yeah big reasons why we're seeing the success i know obviously yes unfortunately people are hurt looking and we know that but at the same time good decision making keeping the businesses open not shutting businesses down was a huge and positive impact on the community as a whole that's why our own current unemployment numbers are it's six point what point down even more than i looked yesterday the national is six point two but yeah five point five point two so there you go so we're below the national average so again kudos to everybody thank you and um i know our our citizens in the in the business community as well really appreciate it yeah thank you good job very good report thank you mr chairman uh yes sir i just want to say that uh you know the discussion earlier with um the homes that we're having uh increase i think one of the great things that a high-end home you improve your demographics you're probably improving your workforce and it's going to bring better retail better employers to the area so i think you know like do home homes actually help the tax base i think they actually do especially when the high end is a short one is going to increase it but it does make it more mark and uh commissioner points are right on the mark as well thank you thank you i had a quick question

um you said this cell phones for the 911s were going down 3.2 percent yes um how can can we raise those numbers or why are they going down so much because more and more people have cell phones nowadays the reason for the decline is first of all it's it's a favorite topic of our state legislature so every legislative session there's they're taking something away from that and at the same time there's fewer devices that are taxed so although everyone has a cell phone we no longer have fax machines we don't have the phone in our house and so the number of devices that are subject to this tax is declining as we move forward so is your fees at price actually going down per device or you're saying there's just because more people seem to have cell phones now and there's usually five people having a cell phone in a house compared to one house phone so is the unit rate less than what it was before it's the same tax rate but there are fewer devices that are subject to that tax and then as we have our folks who move to the area they come down and they keep their old phone number and so those phone numbers the state doesn't know that they're local and so they're not charged that tax well on the commissioner on the yes on the cell phones on the mobile devices the the cst is charged based on the zip code or the billing address for those devices so if you're paying by a credit card so those that come down in the winner if they're paying by a credit card with a billing address another state they don't get charged florida sales tax communication sales tax because they're getting billed based on where their billing address is to that account so there's a pretty big gap there is there a way we can change i guess legislative that if they're using our cell tower so it's based off cell towers instead of being based off of their billing that's something that we can bring up with yes or no folks yeah and i think we should bring that up in fact i mean that seems like a common sense change yeah this has been a topic of discussion that we the county has taken to tallahassee every year i've been here you know and so and we continue to see this there really isn't an appetite in the legislature for at least recently for making an adjustment yeah there's so many people that live should be on our agenda i have out of state phone numbers so they really need to be paying the 911s in this area and yeah i have a now state phone number but my billing address is in pasco county so i pay in pasco county that's the one billion addresses

okay so it's based on the billing address of how you're billing your your however you're building whether you're paying be a credit card or bank or whatever it's based on that address your service address if your service address is in another state then that's where you're getting charged and most of them if they would change their address to florida actually see a reduction in the sales tax on their bill because most of the northeastern states charge more than the state of florida does on their bill or maybe cell towers or something very good okay regular report thank you thank you now we move to um i think we're moving to 114 144 r144 this german good morning chair commissioners um i'd like to thank you for this opportunity to bring forward for confirmation the appointment of mr roy major as our building and construction services director for administration mr major comes to us with a plethora of experience in both public and private sector he has served with st john's river water management he's worked for hillsborough county and wre is a licensed engineer also a certified planner it is with pleasure that i bring him here today and as you were asking questions regarding the status of permitting activity within the department i did include that information as a part of this agenda because we do realize that we have a lot of um challenges with service delivery when we're experiencing an unprecedented amount of work that is being presented to us as a branch and we are working extremely hard to keep that work level up we're excited that just in my meeting monday with the team we had brought our turnaround time on our single-family residential permits from last in december it was 18 days we're now down to 13 days our level of service that the industry is looking for is 10 days and we're working towards that um i feel that with mr major's talents with regard to change management which is what i feel is important and in common upon us to address with service delivery looking at processes and also enhancing our level of service he brings those skills to our team and i mr major is here to us answer any questions that you may have if you so choose um with that said i'll answer any questions that you may have of me we're just very happy to have you here yep i was gonna finish that after we get

entertained got a motion in a second all those in favor by roll call vote district two commissioner morgan district three commissioner starkey aye district four commissioner fitzpatrick aye district five commissioner mariano hi district one chairman oakley hi and with that congratulations and welcome aboard uh i've known roy for uh 12 15 years anyway he actually one of the things he did for me swiftman when i was cheering there is he set me up for uh throwing out the first pitch at the indians game in lakeland so but i thought he was with swift but he was with catherine was there at the same time i said saint john's i'm sorry i was thinking of a northern record i'm sorry we look forward to his talents and and help with the team because he's a very good addition to the team and and we need that so excellent welcome very very excited and i would really like to thank the actors the other assistant county administrators for helping me with the search and review and interviews for this opportunity mr chairman uh commissioner mariano i just want to uh welcome as well i think it's a uh sally you're doing a great job i think this gentleman is going to be such a tremendous addition to the team i'm very excited to have him on board and great job with everybody that helped you interview to bring a great gentleman with us yep thank you i i really appreciate the kind of word mr chair i i appreciate the kind of words and i'm ecstatic to be here you know i just i'm just looking forward to go and go and get going and you know if you're expected to be here we're just as excited as a uh you know this this is you know the opportunity of lifetime and i just i just can't wait to get going i need your cell phone [Laughter] careful i understand i know it was pretty interesting when sally first told me about him last week and she mentioned roy major and i thought a minute and we were talking on and next time i said really major like that i recognized i said i think i know him so but he's a great great addition to the team that we have here at pasco and will improve along with all of our staff doing a great job thank you welcome aboard it is i've got five minutes is um is he doing it virtually he was i think the intent was he was going to be here in person okay so which is fine so if you want to start misleading his business and then you can break when he gets here okay we'll start with a little business

uh all right mr moore thank you sir um hey first item of business um there are two parcels available on the list of lands available for taxes that are currently needed by the county um talked with county administrator county attorney's office they asked if i would bring this forward during miscellaneous business today so we can get it on um they're available to anyone who so if you know if these list of lands available for taxes are available to anybody that wants them um so it's important that we we get this done today um one is for seven thousand four hundred dollars one is for four thousand one hundred dollars the first one is for a future project and the second one is needed to be able to maintain the existing right-of-way um so i'll read through this but if the board is interested hopefully they are um i'll need i'll make a motion to approve these um the first parcel is let me go to my larger writing because it's hard for me to say um i would ask to approve the county's purchase of parcel numbers 23-23-21-0010-000-010 in the amount of 7 343.78 and the second would be parcel number parcel number 34-25-18-00-002 in the amount of 4095.91 funding for the first parcel in the amount of the acquisition cost is available in the public infrastructure engineering services road and street land row lucucci row improvements project two zero three six six um and that's roll up code seven two seven five four nine and the funding for the second parcel and the amount of the acquisition cost is available in project number rpm-00 rhodes program maintenance under roll up code two six nine three seven the first one is on the east of state road 575 it would be needed for the future realignment of intersection of the intersection of state road 575. it's 0.33 acres and near the pine products road in sr 575 and the second one is the bend at causeway boulevard staff will be bringing a resolution at the next meeting to bring causeway boulevard into the county's road system for maintenance this is the southwest corner piece with the bin and the acquisition of this parcel will be provided the space they need to maintain that section of road and possibly improve the safety of that corner bottom line is they're there now somebody could grab them if that were to happen you may run into a situation now it's going to cost us more because we're going to have to go to the road process

the road acquisition process or you know you actually could get to the point where you have to do an imminent domain and that costs a lot more right so if there's any questions feel free to ask me we have a second mr biles or mr um steinsnitter but that's a motion if i could have a second okay okay the motion a second by roll call vote district two commissioner moore aye district three commissioner starkey aye district four commissioner fitzpatrick aye district five commissioner mariano aye district one chairman oakley aye motion passed five zero good thank you sir um hey um library grants i want to congratulate our library team on two items that were approved on consent today from the florida department of state and division of library services first there was one for a books by mail program for homebound residents who can't get to a library that's great obviously not just during covet but for our seniors and our homebound people um as a whole the second is for a mobile makerspace and those were items c68 and c69 combined there with 70 a little over 70 000 um in grants for those programs so kathy pearson please um congratulate the library team so all their great work on getting that any time we can get those grants and save our taxpayers dollars here locally that's a that's a positive also another kudos there was a central permitting audit recently it was a clean audit so it was on c4 so the clerk's office conducted the unannounced audit of the cash funds in central permitting it was completely clean no findings or suggestions even the forms were all up to date and filled out properly so charlotte sherman if you could tell your team and pass on our appreciation for their great work that they did and thank you to the clerk for all the efforts and work you did too um one last thing trying to get through it before we i don't see the senator here now he's here oh he is oh there he is okay real quick um just two last things the united states premier hockey league season has come to an end that was a great event at advent health center ice just a large number of teams that put in about 4 500 room nights here in pasco county before because of them being here um they stayed at saddlebrook and set up obviously as you know whether it be saddlebrook or any of our other hoteliers um they were this was a very big need for them to have these heads and beds um i spoke to the commissioner i dropped a puck one day they're great people they're very very thankful to pasco county for staying

open and that's what he said i sat right we were sending in a meeting with him he said thank you thank the governor thank the rest of the commissioners and all the county employees for staying open so we could come here because if you weren't open we don't know what we would do and there was a couple other options but they preferred to be here in florida and be in pasco county so we're very very grateful for them um i talked to some of the kids too around there like well you don't want to go back to the north we want to stay in florida well we would love that we would love to have you here year round i was going to talk about the cra thing but i'm going to go ahead since the senator's here well we'll move on and maybe i'll just throw that back out at you guys after thank you mr president time for you and welcome to the bocc oh good morning good morning with the chairman we're always happy to have you here is it okay to remove this yes more than six feet um well first i want to thank you for allowing me to come i won't be but a few minutes this morning i i want to thank your county attorney and his staff and uh addressing one of the issues that we had brought to your attention and that was dealing with the business tax receipt issue that we uh of course here in pasco county um uh we were hoping that we could make some changes to what i understand uh and reading what the the uh county attorney sent to me that would be difficult because of uh the laws that were put in place and it's very uh almost impossible to make any changes and uh i was probably there when we made those changes but um uh of course today i i wish i wish there would be an opportunity for the county to address it uh it's so archaic uh i one i believe that uh it's it's extremely difficult too i think it's unfair that someone that owns opens a business up with a gardening or a lawn system a lawn and gardening service is paying at sometimes the same that uh uh rates if you will that like a walmart is paying and i think it's sometimes it's unfair but there's not much that can be done i'm hoping that maybe you can look deep and and and see if there's anything that can be made done to make it better i also would ask you that uh if we're going to have a business tax receipt requirement in pasco let's enforce it i'm here to help in any way i can and i'll give you a perfect example uh when you were extremely generous in providing money to businesses uh late last year after the covet situation county got money and you were very

fictitious name you don't need to register with the state that's where the case is if you're not obviously if you're not incorporate or have an llc in the state of florida right i mean that's one way you could cross-reference right but if not if you're not if you're not filing your articles of corporation every year in the state of florida obviously you're right you run into that then you can but there's also the sales tax right so who's registered for sales tax but not everybody's big sales as we as we know i found that i was talking to dr zingali of course the head of the department of revenue great guy and he was telling me there's still a few businesses in pasco that are charging the higher sales packs but he said not to worry fasano pasco is getting it we're making sure of that you're getting a little bit of bonus but uh yeah yeah yes sir yeah that's good but i do think there's a way that we can cross-reference and then send out a nice little letter or figure out some way but um maybe we do some kind of pr campaign but i do think people should be complying and it's not fair to when the little guys are and the big guys are yes because it's not that much it ranges it ranges on the amount of employees you have what kind of business you have and i'll give you a perfect example you could have let's say a medical doctor he or she needs a business tax receipt but if they're if they go to like if if they go or belong to five different offices each one of those offices need a business tax receipt yeah each location each location that's correct we can all help you know whenever we go into a business just ask all the county employees you know you don't see my name on the little thing up in the right yeah right you don't see that they don't got one thing right now but it's not displayed where is it supposed to be displayed at it needs to be displayed as soon as you walk in it has to be displayed visibly where normally they put it where you're you know checking out cash you know cashing out your ticket or whatever but it has to be clear that you have a business tax receipt you know they're not at that ex i mean it's not like they're thousands of dollars you know 13 exactly yeah yeah it's not mr chairman so it's and it's not and i hate to say it's not uncommon and without naming a business obviously but i was doing it wasn't in past good but i was doing some i was doing some consulting a few years back for a business in hillsborough county and um

i was without trying not to give it away right i was working with them on some contracts and things and he did and with that they needed to submit their um either occupational license or business tax receipt well we they're like we've never had one i go oh no you need one and this wasn't this was actually and they were within the city of campus they actually needed one for the city of tampa in hillsborough county both if i'm not correct back then um and they didn't have one either and this was a very large organization we didn't know we needed one yeah well you can't go forward with this unless you'll get one so i would i highly suggest you truck on down to the tax collector's office and get one if you're not getting this other business that you're going after so right how many times will have gotten a call especially when that new uh they call it the tampa ball it drives me crazy the mall in wesley chapel i call it um but um the outlets yes yeah i want to go one night and change the sign let's do it together how many businesses from there uh would call us up and say now they're calling from their corporate office they're ready to open up their major store in that area and they don't have a btr we've had to tell people do not open that office up send they've had to send people one of their employees to the tax collector's office down the street or westley chapel office to get a btr so they could open up as as they announced because they had announced they're going to have grand opening that day totally clueless yeah is there a letter or a flyer a standard letter and a flyer that we can um post it's a great question in my opinion i don't think someone should get a uh a co until they show proof that they have a btr i think that's a very i don't know if it can be done legally the county attorney but it would be it would be something that would be required to get your final co that you have to show that you have your btr if it's required so i think the businesses right there technically the building official has to issue a co if it complies with the florida build building code gotcha and we can't it can't require them we can hand them something a form yeah something yeah need a packet or something okay or you know as part of the process just inform them right right give them something and just so you know it's approximately six hundred thousand dollars to to the county

that you get in business tax taxes and if if we're all correct which i think we are where we have many that are not do not have one it's it's monies out there that uh taxpayers uh are not receiving you know and it's good for us to know you know it helps us with the demographics of the county i think as well yeah you're right one one last thing sony you need to go but you made a statement earlier and i i and i agree with this either it's everyone or don't do it at all correct well so make a choice right i mean either you get rid of it totally or we make sure everybody's compliant because it's not fair right so again especially like you mentioned the one and two person mom and pop plays i have one for a consulting business so you know um and by the way i don't know if i need it for real but this one because i might have been you know because but but i still have one right um but you're right i mean so everybody plays we don't do it at all right it does help um sometimes with the sheriff's department as you know business tax receipt um it also um i think having a business registered in some form or fashion with the county helps a lot as well um i you know if somebody complains about a business and you find they don't have a btr right away they're in violation of of uh your county uh ordinance or county code god bless you all have a wonderful day thank you thank you very much keep up the good work appreciate it all right all right this last last two things and i'll be done well i wanted to make let the senator go so we didn't have to the last thing you had yeah i just wanted to mention that county administrator is going you're going to the meeting tonight if they have it yes okay back to the cra which we talked about many times and commissioner starkey obviously brought up last time too just just as a reminder one of the statements i just want to make sure and i know you'll handle this is that um they made a statement in that meeting that um they didn't have the authority to change the boundaries what should they do so hopefully they listen and watch this and including that in the notes and realize that they are the ones that change the boundaries it's not the state that changes the balance well that's what i we use to explain that to them as well so you know there's one street in port richie that has a higher taxable value than the two neighborhoods that newport richie pulled out just one street so yeah of course of course so and then lastly just again

kudos to the team um to chief fossa um his team his cert team mike napier for the excellent job they've been doing especially in the 55 and up communities i know we all get them but i get emails all the time or calls and what thank you thank you so much i'm like well don't thank me i'll pass on your thanks to somebody so somebody else that was actually there doing the job um my wife actually i'll thank her you know she was actually giving vaccines this week and she volunteered to get vaccines on saturday for school board employees and the sheriff's office um so many people out there whether it be nurses or mas or paramedics emts and such that are out there doing this on a daily basis they're the ones that are putting the shots in the arm so thank you to all of them so thanks that's it all right okay i've got your list here um first just a comment about the hre i know um um i think this board is uh and i'm not sure if you know what that is but that's the um it's kind of a team that we have that combines the county attorney's office and the development services office together building department to go after high returns on buildings and residences that need to be knock down that are unsightly dangerous become havens for criminal activity and it's been working really really well i just recently um was given a sheet of a lot of the statistics of what they've accomplished and i'm hoping we keep that good program going and it doesn't get dismantled or changed um but i do have one suggestion for the hre team and for us and and this came up when we knocked down the old helen ellis walk-in building on us-19 um it took us five years to get the owner of the building who was a doctor in texas to um to uh sign on on or to take it down because he took it down the county did not but um what happened after that was a couple months ago or a month ago it turned into a homeless camp right on 19. not in the woods not hidden from view but right next to a bunch of existing buildings right there in plain view of the whole world it turned into a homeless camp it was um freaking all the businesses out around it we were concerned it was going to take a long time to get that doctor to respond again but fortunately actually sheriff's office was able to contact him quickly and they were able to make everyone leave i have not gone back yet to see if we've cleaned up all the trash that piled up

on that lot but but something that came out of this whole episode is that whenever i think whenever we condemn and um take down a property part of that process also also needs to be a no press trespassing sign or signs and a registration with the sheriff's office so we don't have to make it a two-step process it's all done at the same time um because that could have been a disaster for us if we had to wait you know all to get the uh the doctor to respond like last time and if it took a year if it took even six months to get a no trespassing sign on that property it was it was bad so um okay uh so i was approached by the civic association and gulf harbors actually this has come to me a couple times and they want to put signage on the back of the canals especially for say emergencies or addresses you can't you know when you're when you're on a canal you don't know what street you're on and so they asked the county if we could they could make street signs similar to what we have on the street and put them have someone volunteer to put on their property in the on the back so you know what that street is um behind on that house frankly i remember when our code enforcement had a boat was going through gulf harbors they could they had no clue what address they were looking at when they saw violations it was very difficult for them um so we did get an email from staff that said that something we could not do and i'm i'm not sure why and maybe i don't know if that's law but uh we i would like you to look into this a little more if you reform me the email because i've not seen that sure and um and we even said well we'll we'll pay for the signs um and i adopted my street if you know if one person puts it on there at least you know what street you're on when you see an issue in the back of someone's house understand i'll afford that offer huh mr chairman yes commissioner i mean if they're say they probably don't have any public property anyways you're gonna have to go back to somebody's yard probably where the signs go on so i don't i mean if somebody wants to put a something like that back so somebody wants to put it in their backyard shouldn't they be able to put it back together if they're willing to pay for it and just give you the dimensions and who to call to have a maid if somebody wants to put it

in your backyard and there and you got in the civic association and everybody agrees on the size and the style it's it's like no difference than putting a little something in your backyard right i mean it's so and i and you know for health and safety i think it's it's good it's a good idea to have a great identification from the back as well i've seen homes with them and they have the addresses on their sea walls yeah so and i think some places may require it so um again um also there i've asked for manatee uh signs to be placed out there in gulf harbors because i'm watching them get run over physic i am personally watching them get hit it's very disturbing and high tide and um and a no wake sign and i still i haven't got that back and i know it's been like six months um another issue that i want to bring up again is i drove by the parking lot at suncoast in 54 and we still have only one port-a-potty so i want to make a request from this board and i i would show you the picture of what that one looks like but i'm not going to discuss it before lunch this is the trailhead at suncoast in 54. it's absolutely horrifying and so i'm going to ask that we take out of reserves uh money to put one more porta potty for the women only at suncoast and 54 until they figure out something else it's done waiting it's a cleaning cycle and we're we're we're accelerating women need their own i'm sorry y'all are messy right can we label them who wants to go in a porta potty though you don't need to you don't need to do that we'll we'll work on that i've heard that already why can't we have two no really when you have a hundred people an hour using that thing you can't we really think parks is working on it i'm gonna make a motion that we get another porta potty at suncoast 54. will someone second that yes i could thank you yeah how much could it possibly be what i said because how much could that did it a thousand dollars we can handle it i don't i don't trust you guys anymore i've been asking for a long time to have that bathroom facility fixed and nothing's ever happened and i'm getting lots of complaints so i think if we have two who do you can go into one that's cleaner than the other who knows after that man what's up who looks after that parks the parks we have a motion and a second mr chairman i know hello all right uh we have an emotional second by roll call vote district two can you learn more district

three commissioner starkey aye district four commissioner fitzpatrick aye district five commissioner mariano hi district one chairman oakley i'm not gonna leave you by yourself thank you all right two bathrooms that's one person fifty-four um okay uh by the way thank you just just like uh senator fasano was saying about the btrs um i'm gonna say that we have a real problem i brought this up before um with the lack of landscaping and i'm gonna show you again in a month or two what i'm talking about i want you guys to pay attention when you're driving is there a particular business it's everybody it's everybody when the landscaping goes in and we worked very hard and there's a there's a real you know when a new building comes in and it looks so nice it really is good for the county but when we let them take out all their trees one year later and the hedge disappears and everything's gone we're back to where we were in 1970 and i encourage you to drive down state road 54 or state road 52 and look at what's happening when we don't enforce our ordinance so we've been sending out letters and they don't right now they don't have a lot of teeth we have a few that have uh responded i'm going to send out another we're going to start sending out other letters to the database we're building and say second notice but at some point i think um you know if if we don't require them to keep their landscaping or maintain it let's just go back to you know how we looked in the 60s and 70s and there was say don't you don't have to put any landscaping in because it looks really bad you'll have a bush here and then nothing and then a bush over here and one tree and then a dead tree and then 50 feet of nothing it's it's i don't understand why we're not enforcing it and i think it's a real problem so um then lastly um i'm going to be going to tallahassee next week and meeting with department of deo doe in the governor's office on appropriation we have going through for amp skills but also on some county stuff so i don't know if anyone else is going up so i'll be going with but i'll be up there the 16th and the 17th back on the 18th and that coincides with our fact legislative day so um okay that's it for me okay and screenshot of this as well okay so i had a few um i appreciate the staff coming together

and i did go on the ridge road extension tour i'm looking forward to being able to drive on it and during the summer months i would like to recognize gina in our office she went above and beyond for one of our residents as citizens in pasco county so i'd like to thank her now the vaccines as of march 15th the executive order will be shifting the age requirement downward florida floridians eligible for the coronavirus vaccine under the state policy will be long-term care facilities and staff people 60 and older frontline front line health care workers and sworn law enforcement this is going to include k-12 teacher employees or employees for kindergarten through 12th grade and firefighters age 50 or older so we are expanding and i know they also spend expanding the locations from publix and walmart sam's club cbs and other locations as well are coming on board to help vaccinate i know you commissioner starkey you mentioned the high return enforcement i do know graffiti beach on ridge road the owners um will be tearing down their building which one graffiti beach on ninth level yeah across from the old publix and near congress on so that will be done by may 1st um i like thanks sally and her staff i noticed uh the walmart their parking lot has been getting cleaned up as well as i do have to follow up with mass and congress but i believe they will have clean that up area as well we do have going back to and um different businesses and their landscaping we do have the commercial redevelopment landscape grant program it is 20 000 for a business i do have a question on it is for commercially zoned unincorporated areas but a lot of our areas on 19 are incorporated so how can we help do does do the incorporated areas have their own program that can address that would be the cities city would take care of that so they do they have programs like this okay because i want to make sure it's not just they are in pasco county yeah and a lot of the issues are in 19 and a lot of the 19 areas are in the incorporated areas so they won't be eligible for the grant but they are part of pasco so we do need to figure out how to beautify those areas as well i would like to also i know i spoke to someone um want staff to just maybe just even expand it to the entrances of

different communities so some of these communities that are older if we can have a beautification day for the entrances of different communities and i know i've spoken to attorney um jeff if we can expand that area as well just to beautify up and down 19. and lastly i would like to thank staff for working diligently and getting our armed force flags on the dyas dyess hopefully this can honor our heroes it can honor it can say thank you for our active military our veterans and their families for all the sacrifices that they've made for the united states for our country so thank you again and i'm excited maybe we can all get a photo after they're here i didn't know if you noticed it you came in a little late oh yes i noticed we're missing the uh coast guard flag but it was it's coming in i was counting them but thank you hey mr chairman just yes sir just uh you made a statement about um some municipalities um that's one of the things they can actually use their cra funny this mr steinstein is shaking his head yeah they can actually use their cra funds for that because that constitutes a blighted area so they have the ability to use those funds that they essentially receive from the county to do those things whether it be landscaping beautification where they may do so when we talk about sierra funds and how they should be used that's one way they should be used can we stipulate we can't stimulate we can't do that no unfortunately how much money has to go towards no no unfortunately we have no authority over that via now we can that's one of the things you can always talk to your uh what the legislators about when they look to make changes um with the cra that would be but it would have to go through the state legislature to make any changes of of stipul stipulations i should say well a lot of our traffic is on 19 but a lot of our 19 is incorporated so you're right now how do we have a computer if you're having conversations you know with with um you know people from the the cities you can you know always bring that up and they can use those funds thank you i think i've mentioned everything on my internet they will be i don't know if they're there because i'm not there but they will be i'm sure brought those in this morning so they barely made our meetings but i

would thank their their order for the other side also so uh mr mariano thank you eric again for working hard on that thank you mr chairman um uh i'd like to say uh commissioner stark you brought up a good point about landscaping how we need to make sure we take care of our properties um a little road product library doesn't have land on it so i think mr bowles if you could take a look at that that would be something to do especially remodel uh that'll be done as part of the remodel okay uh on uh green key boulevard uh the city's got a some property and there's some actually a county a property at budding where they got a development coming in uh i think it's it's time we we take a close look at that and maybe bring something back to the board on it uh that ideal place to actually have a nice ride out so you can see a sun right now the road is very bad um there's enough room on some areas we put a trail out there as well so we could take a look at doing that and bringing something back at some point that could be good uh i want to thank uh parks department for putting in the uh uh approved today for a small boat ramp up at sunwest i think it's gonna be a good help and uh those who didn't get out there i didn't get out there obviously um but the shrimp and crab fest was a great success great weather and another event on march 20th on the acceptance of school program that's uh done a report on two areas came out highly scored uh one was it helpers and the others would see pines and staff working on some grants for that so and uh one thing i think we heard two people today talking about the mass coordinates i've got a lot of information coming in i had a lot of people still want me about it i'm happy to see this is leading the way with about 20 other things about getting rid of it and i say getting rid they still recommend it but they don't make it mandatory uh i will i would like anyone on the board have any second thoughts about changing that next coordinates all right that's all i have mr chairman thank you all right thank you uh let's start he had one other thing i didn't send it to um eric eric to uh put it up is it the tampa bay business journal article about m skills yeah yeah [Music] tracy there you go um

but um take a look at the tampa bay business journal and i think the county has a [Music] all right okay thank you mr viles yes sorry i have a few things this morning although i think y'all covered several of them already port richie meeting tonight the list of lands or two items uh you know the senator was hitting a chance of thinking before he bolted but mike napier identified the fact that we have people in lines for vaccines and testing so why don't we get them some information so he reached out kathy's team put together some you know one page pamphlets to hand out and the senators team actually printed them for us so that the health department can hand out information what's going on in the county to the people that are in line for vaccines so that was a team effort there and he bolted before i got a chance of thinking publicly but their team helped us out with that really appreciate that just uh an interesting note tomorrow will be one year since we had the first positive covid case in pasco county the 12th will be the day y'all declared the local state of emergency so we'll be one year in the pandemic since those two dates later this week and mike sent me some of his vaccine data this morning we are up to let me pull it back up get right report so he is they're at least 51 percent of our plus 65 residents have had at least one dose of the vaccine so that's massive project process in the in the age group that is most both vulnerable to the disease county wide we're at 18 probably approaching 20 we'll have had at least one dose later this week um which again is massive prior it's still a long way to go and his commissioner mentioned the governor signed executive order last night expanding as of next week the category is to lower the age to plus 60. and so that that will continue to roll out and change as we do that and so that's real positive again when you look at our numbers we're still behind the state average for counties but again that's because this region originally as we discussed you know two months ago was didn't get the vaccine as we should have per population and we've never caught up from a regional perspective us hillsboro pinellas polk manatee are still behind basically the same percentage behind that we were the very first when we weren't getting what we should based on our population base so we're in good shape as everybody said

you know we're getting pushed out we're making sure every drop gets into an arm it's just man we've still never made that gap up that we got shorted as a region not just a county but as a region you know in late december and early january so that's that's positive um you know and that's resulting in significantly less hospitalization we're down below five percent of the hospital beds are held by those that have coveted and so that's a very very positive number and the same thing on icu it's right about five percent of the icu badge are those that are positive for covid so very very good uh in trending the right way we're still our 14-day average of new cases is still right around 100. we we need that to continue to drop and we're our percent positive we're right around five six percent i think it's kind of the running average over the last seven days though that needs to get below five percent and we really need the numbers on the cases to drop and hopefully the next couple weeks of spring break we don't see you know another a peak coming after that but that's we're in a good spot we're trending well the cdc sam came out with some guidance yesterday with respect to those that are vaccinated but keep in mind it's not when you get your first shot or your second shot it's two weeks really after that second shot that you're considered fully uh vaccinated so we are watching that and mike and i have talked pretty regularly about you know what's the process in this in this going forward i will say pasco is open for business and has been open for business since the day the governor opened the state back up we just asked it and require the order that people wear their masks when they can't socially distance and they're inside in public spaces that's not too much right now until we get more people vaccinated especially that older group that we're targeting so mr bob is that 21 you're talking about vaccinated does that include those people that came in from another county into pasco too or did they separate those out so they separate those out in their database and so he can track the number of virus vaccinator those residents of pasco county that have gotten a vaccine from anywhere that's the number he's looking at all right the majority of those have gotten them obviously inside pasco county but we've had plenty of people that have gone to other counties to get vaccinated too uh and vice versa right because uh you know if you can get in the publix you know in lakeland and you get a slot you know drive to lakeland go get go get

the vaccine so um the one caveat to that is we don't have the numbers from the the vaccinations given about by the va they're working to get those numbers but so those numbers are all without the numbers of vaccinations given out by the va and the va has also been vaccinated eligible vets that are plus 65 at the various va facilities so that number is not including because that's not part of the state tracking system they should have those numbers here in the next seven to ten days incorporated into their numbers i think it's another five or ten percent yeah yeah wait right now thank you so i'm maybe i when i was reading this it confused me because she would say it's going to be 60 and older they're lowering it on march 15th and then they said frontline health workers and sworn law enforcement i thought first responders were already eligible regardless of their age but then it says k through 12 employees and firefighters age 50 older yeah technical language and so give you the answer the technical languages you are correct um it's firefighters 50 and older however all of our firefighters are required to be paramedics and we consider them frontline healthcare workers and so those that have wanted the vaccine we've tried to get the vaccine so we consider our paramedics frontline healthcare workers that have direct patient contact and so we have done that since his very first executive order came down paramedics because they are frontline healthcare workers when they respond to a scene and so we have been those that have wanted the vaccine again you still have a group out there that's not sure we have tried to get them the vaccine but we've done it the the number i saw in the middle last week we were about 550 county employees total i have gotten a vaccine and so total total that was last week and again so uh right under three thousand twenty nine hundred twenty nine hundred eighty depends on the day so we're continuing to work that um i have a whole packet of great news i'm not going to go through it all we'll send this out to you today or tomorrow i will point out that uh the project manager you all know of sam vinnick was awarded a 2020 professional year by the florida bicycle association for the work on trails so you know since you all know his name because of the trail work he does and the the other small project he's been working on um rage road yeah i want to make sure y'all were aware of that but we will said there is a ton of great stuff in here

you know across the enterprise another one is just a real quick i.t we started training or continued and we increased our security training a few years ago from an iep perspective we went from a 20 click rate on fist phishing emails to the last data shows us below 2 from a county employee perspective and that's one of the largest vulnerabilities to our security system and so by training our team members our employees on you know how to recognize those things that are related vulnerabilities on the network we've made a tremendous impact to help protect our data and that ultimately you know that is you know what we're trying to do is protect our data so we've gone from a 20 plus percent click rate you know two years ago to a 1.8 click rate today so while that's still you know the industry average is about four and a half the goal is zero right you wanna be at zero but that's significant progress and that's a team effort you know every employee uh has the ability to recognize something and and it's done a tremendous job really improving that system uh and i know you all know you know about two-factor authentication if you're logging into the network you know there's a bunch of other things that we're doing to continue to protect our data because we can't protect it enough as we saw you know not too long ago with the water plant just south of us and in the intrusion that it had so continue to work on that and mr chair i got a lot of other good news but i think i'm pretty much done for now [Music] yes ma'am [Music] um it's open it's well the building department's still taking permits in the first floor for now but for meetings and stuff the the meet the the building's open but this this this one because generally there's no need on a day-to-day basis for the public to be in this building you know it it's closed for now now we are continuing to evaluate those and my guess is over the next four to eight weeks there will be some changes in that [Music] so we have a remote work policy that's in place that we adopted middle last year and that is really going to be dependent on the operational necessity of the various work groups and departments so some areas are actually be more efficient working remotely some areas

are coming back into the office and what we're probably going to see is a lot of hybrids where you have to work from home so many days a week and then come into the office other days of the week depending on the again the operational necessity in ensuring that we maintain level of service but there is a significant advantage to certain skill sets and certain professions working from home because of how efficient they can be or working remotely we call it remote work policy not going to say work from home policy so um a couple months ago um are we still doing that i don't think so you got an answer coming i think the and that was a you know that was a communication issue on that one that has we've worked this off [Music] now this was we have worked to improve the communication process yes yeah and we'll continue to work to continue to improve that depend on it's okay i heard everything so yeah um something i heard this morning was uh on the news was a discussion of a vaccine passport that was coming and that um so you know i guess at some point i don't know how you're gonna if this is the case in the in the workplace if you're some people have had the vaccine and all these people chose not to get it is it business as usual for the people who decide not to get the vaccine or something i don't have really thought about all that yeah i guess it you know from an operational perspective that's a little bit different than what a business may do for their operation the the care is the supplement of kara's act extended the requirement to have the quarantine leave through the end of march that did not get incorporated at least i don't believe it did into the act that was passed the senate over the weekend and so the quarantine the requirement to allow your employees that quarantine leave expires into march what we are going to do from a policy perspective with our is until the vaccine is readily available and our employees have adequate time to get that if they want to they will still have quarantine leaves available to them at such point where we think there's been enough time for them to get it and they can make a decision yes or no and it's adequately available you know you can walk you don't have to make an appointment wait three weeks but you can go into publix and get it or whatever like you do the flu vaccine the quantum leave will go away and if you happen to

get sicker and content you'll just become pto but that probably won't happen probably in may again that'll be a pop there'll be an hr policy uh change that we will make internally to the operation um from a business perspective you know our goal is to get you know everybody many people vaccinated so we breach heart immunity whatever that number happens to be and then just you know make sure that you continue to be safe and maintain social distances where you can and those kinds of things because they help with other transmittable diseases too right that helps with the cold that helps with flu all those other things that require people to take time off too so we'll be continuing to manage that but at some point some of the restrictions will go away right and lastly i just want to commend our our county for the policy of not wasting any vaccine i know there was recently a nice little article in the paper um but i've learned that some other counties are throwing away vaccines and um i think we have a very good plan to make sure that not one vaccine gets wasted and um that only benefits the public here in pasco county so yeah in in time we've gotten better with making sure we understand how many people are going to show up for events to make sure we get the right or closer to the right amount out you know initially there was a wide disparity and we've over time understood better the behavior and so we're getting better at making sure we we're closer to what we really need so we don't have as much excess on a day-to-day basis that we have to do the fire drill for yeah i know my mom got one vaccine and she got it because there was leftover um and then she got coveted and so now her she's still not doing well she's got pneumonia still months later or a month later so she's not she was not allowed to get her second shot so she did not show up on the day that she was supposed to go for her second shot you know so i'm sure there's a lot of that going on too i was just gonna mention i think it's very important that if they do schedule that they do attend or try to call in and cancel their appointment just to make sure that we don't have wasted vaccines and you know so you got to keep in mind it's not just the health department given it it's our imt the state's imt team that's working through andy foster at the eoc that's doing it um publix walgreens walmart when dixie cvs i think i'm missing one i think one of

the subsidiaries of one of those is also given in our region so there's a what's that right there's there's a whole variety of ways you can now get the vaccine um we managed to watch it so that we don't end up the way early on where we had more that we needed to get rid of now they're getting much more refined with with expectations and what what they're seeing is there a standard wait list that cvs or walgreens or one of these places can say oh well let's go back to this standardized wait list and use that wait list to see if so they're all working off their own individual appointment systems and you know part of that is not telling the privates how to run their business but say okay here's some vaccine you you get it out as best you can and here are the restrictions that the state has put on you and then let them do it and that's that's basically how they've done it well what a lot of people don't know is when you open that one vial or that one shot it has six shots in it or it has 10 shots in it so people don't understand well if you have five people giving in shots that day and they each use half of them and then you have 60 left over or whatnot so that's why we do have so many left that's why we could have so many left over at the end of the day also i was wondering i know this has been brought up before the masked mandate um didn't they say it was going to be recommended that 70 percent of people are going to be vaccinated with a low positivity rate before they are looking at low i i've seen removing the last monday various numbers i don't think anybody has a because herd immunity is based on the art or not factor the how contagious the disease is and so they're still doing research on some of that and so you know if you look at infectious diseases historically we have some that you need 99 of the community i think uh measles is one where you almost need like everybody vaccinated and then there are some where 60 of the communities vaccinated you have heard immunity so it really just depends on how contagious the vaccine is i don't think they have the final numbers i've heard various numbers from 60 to 90 plus percent so i don't know we have a good number on that yet i think the key there is watching our positivity rate watching our hospitalizations which are good because you know cases lead to hospitalizations but the more we hit the plus 65 community the less hospitalizations we're seeing because the younger group doesn't react like that now they can still have serious complications but they typically

don't end up in hospital beds and icu okay because i've also met with advent health and other hospitals but advent health weeds spoke more in depth on the vaccines and on coven 19 and they had made sure that people should be coming to the er if they need to be going to the er and they can also shut down other wings if there is an outbreak or something for coven 19. so they can make beds readily accessible right yeah they have a pretty good search capacity mr chairman jack byrano yes sir i just want to say uh that dan uh mr fosser and mike nabir getting with all the neighborhoods and getting these vaccines out they have done an absolute phenomenal job uh i've got as mr commissioner said tons of phones with people that are happy getting it done um so let me ask you a question again as far as like talking about herd immunity has anyone data to those that have had the disease and have built up antibodies as far as building up herd immunity using that data too or just straight vaccine no i think that's important i don't know if there's any reasonable consensus out there on what that really means and so i you know i think obviously we've seen different states take different approaches uh in in our state's been probably pretty aggressive with respect to open businesses but then kind of allowing the the local areas to kind of make decisions on other restrictions so i think that there isn't really good data out there on that that that is has kind of consensus of the scientific community and i think i've heard a lot of things from if you've had the disease you're immune forever to know you it's only like a three-month immunity so it's really kind of hard to tell at this point again i think there's a spot at which we will reach a pretty good a pretty good state if you will uh probably here in the next six to eight weeks with respect to vaccine availability the number of the vulnerable groups that have had the vaccine and that will result in really really you know positive impacts to the hospitalization rates and the in the capacity in our hospitals which allow them to do other things so i think we'll see some some some real positive results probably here in the next six to eight weeks um so that's kind of what i'm thinking and again we're gonna it's gonna be around forever like blue cold you know other sorrows are still out there it's just a matter of actually even doing our research on a field yeah so it'll become like everything else so all right thank you all right is that everything

that's all i have sorry for taking up so far i'm good thank you okay madam clark do i have a couple of things um uh commissioner moore had mentioned the development services on announced cash counts also um on c3 we provided a an audit of well actually it was a request from code compliance division for a consulting agreement to review the termination process of their use of the david system and that is through the memorandum of understanding from the department of highway safety and motor vehicles with florida and um my team the inspector general reviewed the user activity the cutoff documentation notification and removal of access and just want to say your team did an amazing job on that whole process it is highly regulated by dhsmv and they did a fantastic job so kudos to your team in the code compliance division on that and also they were wonderful to work with um with the inspector general so so thank you um the other news i wanted to share with you is we did hold our valentine's day ceremony it seems so far away now but it was just around the right just around the corner and in history there but we had 21 couples and it was kind of a rainy day so we ended up moving it inside at the jury assembly room and we had a great help with law enforcement to be able to give us access to that secured building on the weekend so greatly appreciate our pasco sheriff's office for that and it was a beautiful event and i was pleasantly surprised that the county's very own cherry from downstairs was married i got to marry her so this is such a beautiful event and her family was there social distance it was very healthy events from it but it was really beautiful and uh 21 couples there total couples married so far at our valentine for the past 13 years is 262 couples so we're making great things happen here in pasco county um the last thing i want to mention is jury trials are um coming back and that will be march 15th is the date that they're going to be getting jury trials we are ready uh for the jurors to keep them um so properly social distance and proper cleaning and disinfectant um within the courthouse so we are ready for that just wanted to make sure everyone was was also aware of the jury trials starting back that's it thank you thank you okay it's uh 12 o'clock but i have

i have an item all to bring up i have something else but i'll bring it up at the end of our meeting today uh i made a tour of the newport ritchie and if you would eric could you pull up i think i have a couple slides hacienda yep i went towards the hacienda with city manager debbie mann and had lunch with her and mayor rob murlow and pete altman carried me around the city and saw a lot of improvements they're making in newport richie um the uh the hacienda the picture you see in front of you that building was built in 1922 and they're in the renovations they made an agreement with the cra made an agreement with mr garrison who is renovating approaching the building so it will be a hotel and later on this year they'll finish uh do you have next slide okay let's see is that the parking garage or the kaiser there we go we have the kaiser university they have um a thousand student body 100 staff members over in in newport richie they're making you know building and transforming some whole area and that that city to going to be very beautiful to have this uh university there also uh the next slide is a uh julia swanson uh parking parking lot and that parking course is essential to the business in downtown and now they've they've actually been going through a lot of area down there and re revamping remodeling bringing in some new business and even we rode through some of the neighborhood that's close right there and you can even see the pride the residents and newport richie have in their homes because they've upgraded them they've painted them i mean they they really look great so you can you can take they they take very much pride in and their properties from where they live there so it's exciting to see it um i know my brother-in-law's doing a lot of investment there it's exciting to see the changes yeah for me i'm of course he's he's pasco person but i i don't see all this all the time so i i was amazed whether we took the boat ride for the river you know for the jasper class uh boat tour and uh or parade i guess was but uh where the river comes into the city and all i saw where we actually come to and then turn around came back out and uh it's kind of interesting to me but it's got a lot of beauty there and a lot of things to be proud of in that city now

i think their councilman all doing a great job i've talked to well pretty much all of them i guess they're about different things but their dollars for cra are working in the right way so it and it shows and it's going to get better there so with that i'll let that be for uh two months we'll adjourn for lunch and we'll come back at 1 30. [Music] you