##VIDEO ID:Atx-Aco18go## [Music] find our seats please we're ready to get going with our he session is 1:30 I'm going to get in a second I'm going to shift gears on you real quick I follow you I'm good we're going to go to the utilities master plan in just a moment uh I'm going to bring our tax collector up Mr J.R croll if you would come up sir and uh Mr Crow and his office has a check to give to the taxpayers of seminol County this isn't the so what do you have there yeah well want to present for the County Board of County Commissioners uh for total that we're sub this year for unused Revenue 42 4, 29,424 all right great thank you thank you very much so Jr if you would go over to the podium there and can you explain to the the audience where that money comes from and how it comes back to the County Commission please okay yeah sure um you know we we collect the money the revenue that we connect from from Mostly from property taxes that we take in we have you know small other taxes like the tangible tax and stuff that comes in but the big junk of it is going to be from property taxes in seol county and then we have our annual budget to what we use to run our office and we also produce Revenue because we are an agent for the DMV so with with with all this money that comes into our office we have you know once we spent up to our budget we still have money left over so so we contribute that back to the county and then it goes and distributes back to like the school board and you know to the uh St John's Water Management there's a couple other ones that get paid through there but that'll be that 4 million is the is the total with that I think 42,000 goes to the St John's RE Management of that so it's excess fees yes great well we we we sincerely appreciate your uh your diligence and and giving back because ultimately that assists and offsetting the tax Bur of the citizens and uh I know we we typically look forward to that every year and it has not always been historically there um with your predecessor and uh prior to that we had become very accustomed to that offsetting the tax burden so thank you all very much for your due diligence we appreciate it very much of course thank you enjoy your day congratulations on your reelection thank you congratulations thank you so much great all right next up is we are going to move to our next work session which was leftover from the morning session here at the board County Commission this is going to be utilities master plan water supply and conservation Mr Johnny Edwards Mr Edwards welcome this is uh good afternoon Mr chairman and Commissioners I appreciate the opportunity to present to the board today again uh it's the utilities master plan this is our second work session um I'm Johnny Edwards the inm utilities director uh and with me today I have Steve Riley of Jacobs Engineering who will do the majority of the presentation just a couple quick uh words before we get started um we had a lot of good comments in the first work session last week we provided details responses to the Commissioners uh on those comments and there is some additional work ongoing to collect data and summarize data for you um in addition to that Environmental Services um in response to the conservation plan is doing education Outreach uh and concert um conservation efforts that are ongoing and evolving um and with that I want to turn it over to uh Steve welcome Steve you could you give us your full name and address for the record please Steve Riley project manager with Jacobs Engineering located at 200 South Orange Avenue in Orlando thank you thank you so today um we're having our second Workshop session on the utilities Master Plan update pertaining to water supply and conservation our agenda includes discussing the current state of the County's drinking water supply the regulatory environment driving water supply planning possible solutions to secure your future Supply and a proposed master plan framework for future water supply planning so what we want to do today is to present that framework and before we proceed with any detailed planning we'll be getting um input and direction from the board so so this is an upfront proposal and a framework and and we're anxious to receive your input and approval to proceed with the planning phase so the current state of the County's drinking water infrastructure involves groundwater Wells you have uh four water four Regional systems each with its own water plants and wellfields they're shown here on this figure in the upper left is the Northwest system in Orange in the middle blue is the Northeast in the lower left is the southwest and in the bottom and green is the southeast systems and so each of these systems has its own wellfield and these are all constructed into the upper florid in aquifer which is about 500 ft deep and this is the aquafer that um if over pumped can lead to adverse environmental impacts not just within the county but within the entire Central Florida region um also FYI the areas shown in black on this map are called consecutive systems you don't have treatment plants in these areas but instead you purchase bulk water service from an adjacent municipality the current state of the drinking water supply as it relates to Quality the County's Wells are in compliance with current drinking water regulations and the county has an ongoing uh program for testing and monitoring of water quality from every well there's also treatment testing that's currently underway to make sure that the water quality produced at your treatment plans remains compliant with future regulations so the regulatory environment driving water supply planning from a quantity perspective uh revolves currently around your sup of use permit abbreviated as a cup which you get from the St John's River Water Management District um on this map here we're showing uh projected demands the red shows historic demands the black shows projected demands that we've created as part of this master plan project and the green line shows your consumptive use permit allocation for your Northeast and Northwest systems we're projecting that before your cup exceeds in 2020 9 you may be exceeding your allocation in the Northeast and the Northwest however when we look at all four regions combined we are projecting that you're going to stay under your cup allocation through 2029 one of the factors that's going to affect seol County in the future is the central Florida water initiative the cfwi and we expect it's going to limit the available uh groundwater for the County's drinking water production in the coming years and the goal of the cfwi is to protect uh Springs Lakes aquifers and wetlands within a 5300 uh square mile area of Central Florida that encompasses orange Oola seol pke and part of Southern Lake County it's led by the three water management districts the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Florida Department of Agriculture and consumer services and it's coordinated with water utilities in the region environmental groups business organizations the ad community and other stakeholders and some of the solutions longterm being promoted by this group are expanding our reclaimed water use developing alternative Water Supplies such as brackish groundwater storm water and surface water expanding water conservation which is the least expensive way to secure future Supply and conducting mitigation projects to offset any withdrawal impacts from from groundwater uh use so how much that affect seminol County uh we do expect limits to be placed on the county and the latest based on the latest information those limits to the county and to all other water users in the region will be a cap set at their 2025 usage and so in this graph here we're showing red as the historical demand going back to 2008 and we're showing the projected demand through 2045 which is the end period for this master plan project the green line shows the projected cap at 2025 moving ahead and you can see that 20 years from now we're projecting that if nothing is done in terms of conservation or reclaimed expansion you you're at risk of of over pumping your allocation by about 4.2 MGD which represents a necessary reduction of about 20% over the next 20 years so what are some of the possible solutions for the County Conservation expansion of of your reclaimed water system which would require increased use of uh your Yankee Lake surface water treatment plant which is considered an alternative water supply source and impact mitigation which could include recharging the groundwater aquifer to offset the withdrawals and all of these programs are contained in the County's new holistic water policy oops okay so first up uh conservation uh the county uh utilities department developed a water conservation plan in 2022 and it's currently being implemented by the environmental services department and the utilities department uh you see here some of the main recommendations from uh from that plan the first two involve state-of-the-art techn technology which the county is implementing including smart irrigation controllers and advanced metering infrastructure and the yellow stars on this list of of projects include the things that are already underway by the county the uh water conservation plan projected a potential uh savings through um uh conservation of about 2.7 million gallons per day over the next 20 years as mentioned the county does have an active conservation PL plan and a more detailed implementation plan is currently in in development by the environmental services department and it is expected that some additional human and Financial Resources will be required uh to fully implement it to its full potential a second uh solution for the future is reclaim water expansion uh this would involve uh instead of people customers using drinking water to irrigate their lawn they can use reclaim water and thereby save that higher quality groundwater and and bring you guys into uh compliance with the future regs we projected at least a million gallons per day can be saved by expanding reclaimed water in the Northwest you have an opportunity to construct reclaim retrofit projects phases four and five you've already done 1 through three and this would involve use of water from the surface water plant to meet that additional demand that plant is in need of some renewal and replacement work and possible treatment improvements in the Southeast you send your Wastewater to the city of Orlando Iron Bridge Wastewater Plant which is located within seol County and you're entitled to get that water back as part of the service you pay to them in reclaim water and right now the county is not fully utilizing all of that water source there so there's an opportunity to expand the reclaimed piping system in the Southeast uh using water from that facility to again reduced uh groundwater use and in the southwest um if if you move forward with septic to sewer conversion projects um consistent with the Dig once policy laid out in the holistic water plan um when you have those roads torn up to put in new sewers systems There's an opportunity to put in reclaim water mains and take that newly captured Wastewater from the sewer system treat it and bring it back to irrigate um areas within the Southwest uh this is a map in the Northwest system showing um uh reclaim retro retrofit phase 4 in alqua Lakes um this has already been designed it's been on the shelf for a number of years but never built and we believe it has an an opportunity to save about4 mg million gallons per day MGD of water phase five is in the heath uh subdivision in the Northwest also has been designed but put on the Shelf uh with a potential to save about4 million gallons per day also here and in the southwest this map shows the very southwest corner of the county and the dark areas are the areas in seol county that may be candidates for septic to se conversion so um to bring some of these things back this is the uh the projection demand that we showed earlier with a need to reduce groundwater use by about 4.2 MGD if you were able to fully realize the potential in the conservation plan that would lower that that uh Gap to about 1.5 MGD and if you were just to do some of the uh reclaimed expansion projects that I've shown up here you could get pretty close to that uh 20 45 Target um which is that flat line going from 2025 other possible solutions include well deepening this would involve uh retrofitting some existing Wells that are currently in the Upper Floor and deepening them to the lower floor in an aquifer which is much less likely to create any adverse environmental impacts managed aquifer injection systems would involve taking highly treated water from your L Yankee Lake surface water plant and injecting it into the aquer to recharge the upper florid and aquifer that would require testing to determine if it's feasible or not water Wheeling would involve piping water from areas with excess Supply to areas with insufficient Supply and water use redistribution or retirement this might be an opportunity with some of the U decommissioned golf courses that the county has acquired that had consumptive use permits with them uh that could involve um reallocating that water to your drinking water supply moving forward there's also a a regional concept that has been presented by the St John's River Water Management District um as part of their Springs recovery plan and that would involve taking treated water from your Yankee Lake surface water plant piping it into Orange County to where Rock Springs are located which is also fairly close to aiva Springs these two spring systems are of concern uh from uh maintaining their flows which are at risk if the upper florid and aquifer is over pumped and so by recharging uh the uh aquafer near those Springs it would help to preserve their their FL flows and and conditions and it is expected that anybody that this is very conceptual at this point but it is expected that anybody that participated in the program might might receive some increased groundwater allocation for their future Drinking Water Supplies uh water supply is not just about uh uh quantity it's also about quality county is currently managing compliance of uh drinking water quality through operations and treatment practices and uh we do expect you'll also be implementing projects and procedures in the future to make sure you stay in compliance with future regulations and some of that testing is currently underway at one of your at your water plant in the Northeast so to to summarize this is the proposed framework that we plan to apply as we move forward with the detailed planning phase for the master plan which includes uh implementing the water conservation plan and holistic water policy evaluating reclaim water system expansion determining drinking water quality operations and treatment improvements implementing the Capital Improvements programs to support those uh participating and coordinating with regional initiatives such as the central Florida water initiative and Regional water supply plans exploring Regional Solutions and projects and then preparing for renewal of your consumptive use permit which expires in 5 years as we uh conclude the presentation I just wanted to uh summarize again the work session schedule for the utilities master plan we had our kickoff uh in September when we talked about the demand projections today Steve has been talking about water supply and conservation and you see the three remaining uh work sessions ahead for treatment and transmission main capital Improvement planning uh and the final report uh planned for September of 25 and with that our presentation concludes thank you very kindly we sincerely appreciate you all being here today to give us this oversight on this second meeting we'll start at the far end commissioner Constantine will come across for any inquiries of our staff or our contractor thank you very much Mr chairman I'm trying to as all of us uh with the previous one uh lot of information trying to take it all in uh we've all I'm I'm sure been briefed on this couple of things that I would just want to um not add to this uh master plan framework for future but just to U emphasize conserve conserve conserve uh that's the that is is the cheapest way to um ensure that we have enough water uh the I'm looking at your exploring Regional Solutions and also evaluating reclaim water system expansion again I've mentioned this before about right now we have u a city sending a lot of reclaimed water over to Apopka and if we could find a way to send that reclaimed water or help send some of that reclaimed water up to um uh the Northwest that would be important and I think um meaningful part of the solution and I I've said this before and I think others on on this board have said this before but um I I have a real um concern about U uh using anything or concern about using surface water and anything we can uh before we start using surface water as an alternative or as an additional water I would be in favor of I again I I am very concerned about taking surface water from without without definitive proof uh taking surface water from the St John's to be using as U as uh drinking water and I could go on for I'm done right good that's great news commissioner lockart follow that yeah um I'm going to put a timer on these things to show that I spend less time talking than everybody else but that's okay you didn't say anything Bob that's true the others are all laughing not you not at you if we can't have some fun up here why are we here and I don't mind it being on the blood ront of either okay so um conservation obviously if those efforts have to be aggressive I think we've all talked about that in Prior meetings at nauseum I think from my perspective the question is what's the next layer because conservation in and of itself doesn't get us where we need to be um I was here as was commissioner delari but in two very different capacities when we built the surface water treatment plant um and the Yankee Lake plant and lived through that whole process and and there the lawsuits and everything that went along with that it was it was quite an adventure I think there's three three different lawsuits um I believe we we we won all of them we did but there was a cost there was um but now here we are some 15ish years later maybe closer to 20 at this point and um and we have a very expensive plant that sits on the banks of the St John's river that is not doing what it was originally intended to do at least not at the at the the quantity the volume that it was in intended to do so we we have this remarkable asset a beast if you will that's just sitting there and and we aren't fully utilizing it um it is a beast it's massive it's just not it's not pumping what we need to be pumping with it and that's why I think some of it's deteriorating um so when you look at the recla the retrofit um subdivision retrofit programs also having lived through that and I was the district commission Aid at the time in those particular neighborhoods there was a lot of angst and a lot of um changes hard physical changes hard con conceptual change is hard that all being said I don't see any other project or plan that that you've proposed that doesn't involve some type of pain um even conservation for some people is going to be painful but let's just let's just assume we're all on board with the a aspect that next step and it's funny I remember Blain Dera I'm going down a rabbit Trail here he was the president of the he thr Master Association at the time he was so sad that we did not finish phases four and five because he wanted he thr to entirely be on on reclaim and so um in a way I kind of feel like it would be fulfilling his his wishes to get that project done but I also want to know what when you bring back to us if you're bringing back to us in a whole plan I could you rate each option AC with including the the level of pain that will be needed to to implement because looking at just the benefit is one thing that's certainly we need to understand the benefit of it but what it's going to the skin in the game to get there financially from a resident how long neighborhoods will be torn up all of that I'd like to see on one page to really evaluate that is that a possibility when that time comes yes we do intend to do a comparative analysis of all these options everyone including the um issues you mentioned okay um could you also talk about uh because I know there was probably some cringing in the audience when we talk about the um the the uh recharge um and I don't want to use the wrong phrase because I know that one word off can be the wrong name and I don't want to give people a heart attack unnecessarily recharge yes can you please describe the difference between that and what some of the other deep well injection type Concepts that have been thrown around sure that I think we may be even piloting when we talk about deep well injection that usually has to do with disposal of a waste stream of water um whether it be water from a uh a Wastewater Plant that can't be reclaimed or water from like a a reverse osmosis type water treatment plant that is a Brine and it's pretty common to build deep injection Wells um to dispose of those kind of waist streams um those um those are of unknown feasibility in Central Florida they're extremely popular and feasible in South Florida and they typically go down to 3,000 ft or so below the um the ground level for injection of that waste into a zone that is um protected from coming back up into the drinking water supply for managed Aqua for recharge that' be a totally different thing that would be um using highly highquality treated water to inject back into the um upper Flor and aquifer where you're already getting your water from and it would basically just be sending that water back in to recharge that aquifer and protect it from overpumping so they're they're very different one is a involves a very high quality water product being injected into a very shallow zone of the aquifer system and the other would be a um a disposal method okay that that isn't even being practiced in this area and it's unknown whether it even work okay all right thank you I I'm looking forward to our our future work sessions and seeing how the Ben Franklin T thank you commission delari thank you first of all thank you for presenting we actually had two meetings in my office I want to thank you for both of them uh and in one of the meetings I went through the responses that you've given some of them it's not that I disagree just that I don't think it's fully vetted yet to all the responses so I'm looking forward to to the continuing of the uh dialogue and the questions and the answers of the responses so I'm looking forward to that not going to go Page by page but I'm going to try to summarize what I think uh one of the things I'd like to see is an overall uh issue regarding over pumping because when other people surround us p over pump it affects our aquifer because there one aquifer and I really think that we need to keep people accountable because by not doing that other agencies are going to cause us as much Yanks even though they'll get penalized we should know what's happening before the state actually does something so we can make sure that everyone's keeping accountable uh one thing I would like to see in here that we talked about is uh in 2016 uh they passed a Senate Bill 552 which is the protection of the Springs we didn't really discuss that yet and I'd like to know how that's going to be in the overall master plan because that's really one of the big things that's the the can are in the Min shaft the Springs uh you can actually see what's happening to the groundwater with the flow of the springs and what's coming up from the Springs uh we talked about injection of service water into the uh acfer one of my concerns I I share commissioner Constantine's concerns as well with that but you know with some of the forever chemicals that are there already I want to make sure that we're not affecting those forever chemicals and I don't know how you do that but you're going to have to be the engineer that shows us how that will make sure that it doesn't happen because as we have in the past we've been sued by several people and uh that's not someplace I'd rather go just yet and then over the years we have talked about water wheeling and about moving water with uh our road projects we've never done that yet and I'm hoping someday even if we keep on bringing it up that our staff will look at the water wheeling and figure out how we can capitalize on when we rip up a road that we only rip it up once because we've talked about that for many years and uh we haven't done it yet so I'm looking forward to that as well as uh Steve you talked about the existing golf courses and I'll pick on Deer Run for a minute that was one of the reasons why we bought Deer Run was to cap that and to hydraulically model that that over to our other uh Southeast water plant and uh looking forward to and our staff has actually spoke to St John's regarding that and uh that was part of the agreement of purchasing that golf course so that needs to be in our our plan that and then back in the day we talked about Yankee Lake we spent a lot of money upwards of plus or minus about $60 million to build Yankee Lake we've never really used it to its fullest extent our Consultants back then it was CH Tom Hill and those CH Tom Hill got bought out by Jacobs uh you all convinced us that we had to build Yankee Lake and we've never used it to its full capacity yet and I know that St John's did give us some money to offset some of the cost it wasn't a lot but it was some so the residents of this County basically invested in a water plant that we really haven't used yet and I have some yank yst with that uh and I just want to make sure that what we are recommending that it is feasible and we are using it to its fullest capability and then we purchased that we built that plant not using it to its fullest capacity and now we have to go back and renovate it because we haven't been using it I'm not convinced yet we need to do that it may be best just to decommission the whole plant we do have a structure that's there for 55 million gallons per day we're only using I think it's 5.5 million gallons per day of our permit which we're not even scratching that surface yet and uh I still remember Matt Alvarez uh in the background telling us what we had to build we had to build and it's going to be the future and that St John was keeping everybody accountable for it and then in 2013 when everyone was supposed to reduce their cup St John's basically said or the state whoever it was that we didn't need to do that and made it a little bit easier and now we're here in 20 24 that we spent a lot of money and it's now been a number years after 2013 because that was the original deadline that was still going to generate another deadline and so before we start putting more millions of dollars into infrastructure I need to know policy-wise what is is truly the policy moving forward in Central Florida and I know they're going to be talking about the water initiatives and everybody in central florid of water ini that was before 2013 that's what everybody agreed to and to invest $60 million plus a minus into a water plant that we're not using it's not an easy pill to swallow or a glass of water to drink and I just need to make sure that we're doing that uh uh and then it comes to the regional plan I think we need to get more active I think our staff needs to be more active sitting at the table so that we are looking at it from where if we're going to hold ourselves accountable we need to hold everyone accountable so that the 2013 doesn't happen again and that other people are not over pumping that's going to affect us and that we are asking people to enforce the State's plan that happened in uh 2013 552 and I've not seen any of this yet and I think that we need to start asking how are we keeping everyone accountable not just SEMO County if we're going to be spending money everyone needs to be accountable and that's a whole that is part of the policy that we should be incorporating so I don't want to see a master plan that this is great we need to do it and 2013 happens again it's too difficult to do it people can't afford it and it's not going to happen and we spent another $60 million end of my report thank you commissioner her thank you great presentation um I'm a big fan of implementing dig ones to add the reclaimed I think that's where the Dig once was referenced I do think that the North West section of the county is already built the way it's built the plantings are the way they are we're going to have to water it for a long time we need to figure this out I do think it will be rather painful and I understand why Blain Darrow would have wanted it to happen all at once cuz he already took the bullets for doing it from the first half of the neighborhood and we would take them again when we start digging in others but uh needs to happen I think to align with the notion of conservation is the the most effective way to do this I think we need a definition of what AGG aggressive conservation means we've used the term rather Loosely I don't we say it's going to hurt and people may be bothered by it I will confess to you that I don't know what that means to me as a house owner does that mean I can't get the shampoo out of my hair does that mean I can't run the washer if I don't have one of the new fancy Dancy ones does that mean you we we need some definition around that as we're having these discussion so that we all understand what we're driving to I would also say that if we're going to go down the conservation path and it is the least expensive thing then we ought to be budgeting for Education because what we do now is dancing around education staff does a wonderful job of creating material but we're not out there with TV ads we're not out there meaningfully educating the population we're not educating the kids in the schools we're not like we're not we're not we're not but it takes money and staff so if that's the path we need to be on part of the plan needs to be how do we execute that because we seem to fall short at execution more often than not um I believe that when we bought these golf courses it was presumed that we would reallocate the cup so we ought to be taking the steps to do that now I don't need to wait for the plan to do that um and with regard to Yankee Lake uh I can't fathom this County just 20 years ago which is not a long time spending $60 million and then then us deciding that we're just not going to go forward with it I don't know why we never used it I can't race to the bottom I would rather lead by example and us be the county that everybody else is looking at in how we're doing this and how we're ahead of the game in terms of using less and being under the cup as opposed to saying if everybody else is not doing it let's not do it either I don't think that's what you were saying but I I don't want to be in a position where we're not leading by example so I would like to understand what we can do with Yankee Lake and what it will cost us because 60 million 20 years ago is probably two and a half times to three times that now and we're talking about maybe not proceeding with it I Carlton Henley's still alive he'd be crazed if he heard this conversation so I would like to think about that just a little bit differently okay um thank you commissioner her there was a statement made in your early presentation about future regulation compliance so explain to me how we are future regulation compliant if we don't know what that future regulation is one of the um bigger biggest things on the horizon is the posos regulations which go into effect in 2027 and 2029 and um currently you are doing a pilot test right now at your country club water plant in the Northeast to determine if some of the technologies that you currently have at your water plant will be able to remove that P to within regulatory requirements that's that's the big one that's looming out there okay cuz because I I get concerned when we're telling the public we're future compliant for just any regulation because that's left up to people that are North of here um to come up with those and different agencies that may come up with different standards that we will have to shift gears and and and adhere to not knowing what they're ever going to be um the 2036 map it looks like around 2036 is the timeline if we deploy what's suggested to be deployed at least in this portion of the study thus far is when when we will be right there running parallel with what the cup can handle and that's 2036 out so I think what I'm hearing here is if we deploy some of these mitigation things that that like commissioner her indicated we're not sure what those are whether you wash your clothes twice a week once a week every other week whatever the case might be which will make my wife happy by the way uh if we go to every other week but the reality being is at that juncture we've deployed at least at this time everything we think we are able to deploy so what do we do from 2036 on and and I think and I don't need the answer right now but on the next visit I'd like to understand what are the next steps Beyond 2036 because what I'm seeing is if we deploy what's recommended now then we'll be good at 2036 instead of 2029 so we've bought arguably seven years if all those measures work but we haven't gotten beyond that to the 2045 timeline so whatever that might be um I think it was already mentioned the the uh golf courses that were purchased I know Miss orberg if she's here yes she is uh prior to those purchases uh I know she looked in and had conversation about the cups that came with those golf courses and how they could or may not may or may not be able to be transferred over to us also some mitigation credits I think on one of those golf courses but the thing I didn't hear with the golf courses which is one of the big reasons I supported the Waka purchase and I don't want all the golfers in the community to lose their mind because I'm not talking about tomorrow but in the future that was identified as one of the most highly desirable recharg areas in the county so if you look out 20 years or 25 years or 30 years whatever that is I'd like to have an understanding what that might look at is it a portion of that Golf Course do it require all of it it was my understanding early on and talking to quote experts before we purchased it would not be necessary to take the whole golf course that it could be utilized in conjunction with the golf course for recharge but it would have to be separated etc etc so I'd like to know what that might look like into the future and then finally on the Yankee Lake situation I would not be a proponent of wanting to mothball Yankee Lake and and start all over um it's my recollection and I wasn't here but as as a member of the public listening to some of these hearings it was my understanding that there was a plan for either Lake County or Valia County to come on board and that's why I was advocated to build Yankee Lake to the size it was built then which they would help us pay for it and ultimately it's my understanding those counties backed out at some juncture so it probably be well for us to be educated on what that really means um and then finally I want to make sure that folks my district understand this has nothing to do with your personal well yet no telling what Tallahassee might do but um you know this is the public utility um servicing your your water supply and not necessarily your your well that said I would urge you to conserve as much of your well water as you possibly could as well um so those are my thoughts I look forward to the next update and report I understand this is a living document that is going to you know develop over time and we appreciate the work you're doing and and hearing our concerns and so forth so thank you all once Mr just my comments weren't to say that we shouldn't do anything that wasn't my comments my comments was stating because I want to keep everyone else accountable because if we are looking at policy we need to make sure that whoever is overpumping doesn't over pump and that they are following the regulations and the policies that are set by the state including us instead of us being being the front runner and then everyone's saying that they no one has to do anything I want to bring everybody with us understood that was my intention anyone else commissioner her I just have a question just to make sure I'm understanding the charts if I get to what I think is slide 20 or page 946 in the book I'm online I'm sorry I think the reference to 2036 is only with aggressive conservation corre but if we add in reclaimed then we get to 2045 do I understand that correctly yeah and the4 the uh the latest information we have is that The Regulators understand that overnight you just can't stop at 2025 they they intend to give all the permites time to get their programs in place conservation reclaimed Etc so that they're really looking at all the utilities getting getting to that 2025 cap probably in the 2040s they they understand it may take a decade or longer to to ratchet down that groundwater use right and I would tell you when I sat on the cfwi board that none of this is engraved in stone completely at this point um there are agricultural interests that have weighed in uh many cities as well as counties uh there are you know some of those entities who have already deployed uh conservation efforts way in advance of some of this and we're not so certain that they're actually receiving the proper credits that they should receive and then finally I would also ask if we can check into the Ybor Ranch had a cup we should explore uh we can possibly transfer that albeit the the state purchased it but the county was a co-applicant and facilitated making that happen so I think we should have some conversation with our state Partners on um if that cup can be transferred now that that is put into conservation so outside of that that's all I have anyone else thank you all very much we appreciate the update and uh look forward to the next one thank you thank you all right next item up is we are going to move into our public hearing Bai judicial I will be looking for accepting proof of publication please mov second motion second all those in favor I I oppose like sign hearing none motion carries unanimous I will ask the County Attorney Miss Kate Lor to read into the record the rules of public participation thank you Mr chairman while the board welcomes comments from all persons with an interest in these proceedings Florida law requires that the board's decision and quasi judicial actions be supported by competent substantial evidence presented to the board during the hearings on the applications competent substantial evidence is such evidence as a reasonable mind would accept as adequate to support a conclusion there must be a factual basis in the record to support opinion testimony from both EXP expert and non-expert Witnesses persons presenting testimony May rely on factual information that they present information presented by County staff information the applicant presented or on factual information included in the county staff report to support their testimony all persons who Present written materials to the board for consideration must ensure that a copy of such materials is provided to the clerk for inclusion in the board's record of the proceedings and the official minutes Mr chairman thank you very much Miss Lor and has any commissioner received or have any expar and if so identify how it was submitted I have none to submit none none here so no exp parte very good again if you if there's anybody here to speak on this matter make sure you fill out the appropriate form get it right down here to Dominique with her hand held up do not wait until the last moment because if you do you're you're liable not to be able to be speaking so if you're here now please fill out a form get it up to Dominique so we can get you all staged and moving through the first one we're going to start with is the Master's Academy special exception Amendment and this will be presented by Miss Kathy Hamill our staff will give the presentation the applicant will be given an opportunity to also speak at that point we will go to public input after public input we will give the applicant if they so desire a rebuttal if needed Miss Hamill thank you Kathy Hamill development services I'm presenting to you tonight A or this afternoon um an amendment to the Master's Academy special exception this amendment will allow the placement of three temporary Portables to permanent placement the Master's Academy special exception was approved back in 1998 for a private school up to 12th grade um there have been a couple of amendments since that time one in 2013 for an all purpose room which is also a gymnasium and in 2018 for an administration building in 2021 they requested the temporary placement of three portable classrooms during Co due to the tolling that took place during Co they were able to extend the temporary placement for 18 months to May 31st of this year they are now requesting to have those three temporary Portables permanent placement this will require an amend Amendment to the special exception due to the increase of the square footage of the school this amendment will not increase the number of students nor the staff it will not have an impact on the traffic um or the surrounding areas the permanent placement of the Portables is consistent with the approved use that has existed since 1998 and the request is consistent with the special exception criteria listed in the staff report um on October 2nd the pnz voted to recommend the BCC approval of the amendment and we are recommending the BCC to approve the special exception Amendment for the placement of the three temporary Portables I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have any questions for staff commissioner lockart I just curious I we seem to we keep referencing three but the site plan only has two there's two pieces of the site plan yeah there's oh there it is it's under the fold a test look at that hiding I only saw the two one and two there it is okay thank you so much okay any other questions for staff look at that you just fold it and it's right there you go unfold amazing you just scroll concept okay is the applicant here and does the applicant wish to make any presentation or statement to the board of County Commission if so please come forward state your name and address thank you Mr commissioner and Commissioners um my name is Marcus mening my address is 1235 Stone Harbor Road Winter Springs Florida 32708 and I do not have anything to add uh that was adequately um shared with you already but if there's any questions you would have for me I'm happy to answer any questions for the applicant nope commissioner Constantine just one um it seems that you know when you when you put Place Portables on for temporary they always become permanent it happens in every school seen it all the way through the state when you say changing this from temporary to permanent do that your intent is to truly keep them permanent or is that's just uh you know the context of what you're here for today with a special exception yeah you exactly it is not our intent to keep them permanently um but it is really the only next step we can do to keep them um for longer period of time until we can build something that obviously would be more aesthetically pleasing and beneficial in many ways for the students on our campus so we actually had two portables on our campus I think in the early years um early 2000s that were there um and people thought those would be permanent and now there's a building in the place of where those two were uh and it it clearly looks much better and so uh that would be the goal here as well anything else for the applicant seeing none thank you very much sir thank yourself at home and we'll invite you back up if necessary Dominique are there any folks from the public that wish to speak on this matter no sir seeing none we will close public input and go to board action this is commissioner deli's District thank you Mr chairman and uh I've been on their campus quite a bit not recently but quite many times and just like they've said they have put Portables up in the past as a temporary and then as years go by they convert them to permanent commissioner Constantine and they do a very nice job at it and uh they do a phenomenal job for the uh all the students in not just SEO County but the surrounding areas and with that Mr chairman i' like to make a a motion to approve the amendment to the existing private school specialist exception to allow permanent placement of three existing temporary portable units located at 1500 Lucas Lane oo as presented here today second motion and second any further discussion see none all those in favor I oppos like sign hearing none motion carries unanimous thank you very much next item up is item 38 Ronald Reagan plot rezone Miss Caitlyn abgar will present miss abgar good afternoon Caitlyn abgar planning and development services for the record um the applicant is requesting the approval for a rezone from A1 Agriculture and r1a single family dwelling District to R1 single family dwelling district for a proposed single family residential subdivision on approximately 4.76 Acres located at 6200 North Ronald Reagan Boulevard the applicant proposes to develop the subject site as a single family residential subdivision in compliance with the R1 zoning classification with a minimum lot size of 8,400 ft and a minimum lot width at building line of 70 ft the parcel currently has split zoning the Western half retains the r1a single family zoning district and the eastern half retains the A1 agricultural zoning zoning District the property is currently developed as a single family residence the request for the rezone to R1 is to allow the property to be subdivided into single family lots the proposed subdivision intends to include the current residents on the Eastern side the number of lots is formally undetermined at this stage but the applicant is approximating about 14 Lots as allowable and in compliance with all applicable regulations the property has a future land use of low density residential which allows a maximum density of four dwelling units per net buildable acre access proposed is via Ronald Reagan Boulevard which is considered an urban minor arterial operating at a level of service a there is an existing sidewalk along Ronald Reagan Boulevard the developer will be required to provide internal sidewalks for the development that comply with the Land Development code of semal County the requested R1 zoning classification does not require a plan for review during the rezone process therefore at the time of preliminary subdivision plan review the development will be evaluated for buffer requirements the r one's zoning District does not require open space the subject site is currently located within the city of Sanford's utility service area but will be transferred to seminal County service area and will be required to connect to Water and Sewer there is an interlocal agreement between the city of Sanford and seminol County for the service boundary change and it is pending the memorandum of agreement for final execution in compliance with seminal County Land Development code section 30.3.35 conducted a community meeting on July 8th 2024 um staff finds the request to be consistent with the seminal County comprehensive plan and compatible with the trend of development in the area the standard dimensional requirements within the R1 zoning District provide a transition between similar lot sizes to the west and larger Parcels to the east um an additional note staff did receive an email and opposition this is included in your agenda packet for your reference staff recommends the board of County Commissioners adopt the proposed ordinance enacting a reone from A1 Agriculture and r1a single family dwelling to R1 single family dwelling for a proposed single family residence residential subdivision on approximately 4.76 Acres located on the northeast side of Ronald Reagan Boulevard Southwest of Nolan Road the owner and the uh engineer are here just in case fa enough questions any inquiries of Staff see none is the applicant desire to make a presentation or address the board you're good F great thank you very much all right we will go to public input Miss Dominique are there anyone from the citizens here desire to speak on this matter we have one speaker Cindy holler okay welcome Miss holler and I would remind you keep this specific to this development and we're not talking about what's happening somewhere else in the county but specific to this unit so please go ahead so good afternoon Cindy holler my address is on the record so I was bouncing around the agenda if you'll just State your address we'd appreciate it 1731 be Drive Sanford thank you uh so anyway I was bouncing around the agenda last night and I was reading some of the community letters and some of the concerns about flooding and I would ask if the developer would consider putting forth a bond to ensure no flooding for 5 years just to protect those citizens and that's what I had wanted to add thank you thank you Miss holler applicant wish to have a rebuttal to anything that was said please come forward yes hello my name is Vincent paluso my company is American engineering and surveying I'm registered licensed professional engineer in the State of Florida and your address and my address is 422 4 Newton Hall Drive Orlando Florida 32826 we um have had a great experience working with the county um we have looked at the issue of the drainage there is an existing drainage ement we're going to have to accommodate all existing flows onto the property as normal County and and St John's River Water Management District standards require and we cannot exceed any flow off the property beyond the existing flows that are currently uh historically there so that is all going to be very carefully looked at and reviewed by staff and reviewed by the St John so I can guarantee that there will not be any flooding that will be caused by our development thank you okay thank you all right we will close public comment and go to board action this is my district so I will move for a motion to rezone from A1 agricultural R and r1a single family dwelling to R1 single family dwelling for a proposed single family residential subdivision on approximately 4.76 Acres located on the north side of Ronald Reagan Boulevard Southwest of Nolan Road second motion second any further discussion commissioner lockart oh I would just like to say to is it Mr PLO yes um I'm very familiar with this property from when it was owned by the fuses and the Bradbury um Feud that was going on and so to hear you to hear you say that you will be committing to handling the storm water the way that you are I think you will be improving um immensely over what had happened there many many years ago and that is a longstanding historical drama that you are stepping in and helping to fix so thank you yeah there's an existing drainage easement and all flows into that easement will be accommodated either rerouted around the edge of the property or um dealt with with the expanding our our pond on our property whatever is required by the code so there will not be any backup any blocking any extra flow everything will be modeled and accounted for and permitted when it comes to the flooding anything else from anyone else all those in favor I oppose like sign see and none carries un unanimous thank you all very much thank you very much next we'll go to the county attorney's report M Lor Commissioners I just wanted to take a moment and remind you all that next Tuesday November nber 19th is the date scheduled for the board uh swearing in ceremony for the returning Commissioners and the reorganization of the board where you all will vote for chairman and vice chairman that's pursuant to your operating policies and procedures and just wanted to remind you that we'll be back again next Tuesday very good anything else that's all for my report I have a question uh can you bring us up to speed on the Clerk of the Court's uh lawsuit that the clerk of the court is suing the County Commission well nothing thing's been filed yet officially we did receive correspondence from legal counsel for the clerk um outside councel request or sending us a draft complaint for declaratory action um regarding the board's funding um or the clerk's argument that the board is not properly funding his Article 5 sies expenses um in the letter from the attorney he uh suggests the board engage in pres mediation with the clerk I have spoken to each of you individually about that and received your feedback one-on-one I welcome your thoughts um as a the body and the Sunshine um on that um you know my position throughout the budget season was that the Florida law provides that the $2 fee from the from the $400 recording fee that goes to the county is dedicated to clerk technology expenses and that there is language in the statute that limits the County's obligation to just that $2 and and that's where we ended up with the clerk well thank you and and my position is we we have talked about this in depth uh with the budget hearings uh I think we've covered that at least three times in budget hearings and and Mr Malloy at the last hearing was not here himself but sener representative instead um and I think my clear understanding from our staff is we are doing what the County Commission is supposed to do um and the argument is not to the level he desires to do uh rather than what the law requires is that a fair analogy correct his his ask was beyond the $2 fund that the county receives so you know the last time that the clerk sued the county uh was over the right to invest the investment funds on behalf of this County Commission which cost the taxpayers an excess of $100,000 in legal fees and time in the courts um it's unfortunate um but I have no appetite to to sit down and have some kind of mediation when I think at least this commissioner I've made myself very clear and I think several others have but I won't speak for them in public hearings of what we believe should happen based on what our legal council has told us and and and have told the clerk in those public hearings so that's my position anyone else commissioner her I would support that position um and actually I might take it a step further and say that if we Prevail that we ought to charge the attorney's fees back to his budget as well I mean we can't just keep suing each other at the expense of the taxpayers because we don't like the answers that are clearly supported by law but I would also like to ask to go back to the former statement that you made um County attorney and that is that we'll all be back here next week I had previously indicated to the management team here that I am not going to be here next week it is the first time I have ever left the country for a week and it was a pre-arranged trip that um I cannot miss so I had asked if there is a procedure for us to change the date of that meeting so could you expound on that please sure your board operating policies and procedures call for this swearing in and reorganization to occur the second Tuesday after the election which falls on next Tuesday the 19th um there is a provision in your operating policies and procedures where the board can move to suspend those rules those are the rules you put in place you can suspend those rules it would require a super majority vote of the board to suspend the rules and then you could collectively pick an alternative date to have the reorganization and the swearing in I think that's the way around the policy that you have in place and is the swearing in and the reorganization intrinsically connected um not in my opinion no but I don't think they have to occur on this so the swearing in could still happen next Tuesday for anyone that's already predetermined to have family be there and the reorganization could uh we could change the date if this board so chooses I believe that's a possibility yes so out of respect I'd like to be there for the reorganization I'd like to be there for the swearing in as well but I'm willing to say no to that I'd make a motion that we uh suspend that rule and pick a date where all five of us could be there for the reorganization second motion second discussion so we we're asked being asked to wave the rule correct so on the service I don't necessarily have a problem with that except I asked for the rule to be waved on behalf of a citizen two meetings ago that arguably on its face does not look well that we would we would suspend the rule on behalf half of US versus a resident and citizen who has a problem with what's moving through with staff and all they were asking for was us to wave the rule to Fast Track it to us so with that said on this topic no no no no no no no no on a different topic commissioner that wasn't um suspending a rule that was in our code correct so and this this is in the board's code is it not this is part of the board's operating procedures which is adopted into the administrative regulations of the county correct right and commissioner lockart yes the provision you referenced a few meetings ago was regarding a code provision we do not have or you do not have the same authority to suspend code Provisions unless you revise the code so one was doable and one isn't doable wasn't one was not doable and one is doable according to our own provisions yes okay fair enough okay further discussion I just think out of a just out of collegiality it makes sense we would want all of us to be here no matter which one of us would be missing to do a reorganization you we wanted to have a full board here for selecting the county manager and the County Attorney I think we'd want the full board here to select who's going to serve as chair for next year of course certainly okay all those in favor signal I I I I like or yeah those not in favor like sign approved thank you for for for the reorg for the reor correct okay so so that's suspend your rules for the purposes of the reorg so I would um suggest you all entertain discussing a new date I don't know if you want to do that here we just do it on the third I could just do it at the next meeting the next meeting following this when the board meeting is on December the 10th 10th that will be our next point of order just be careful when we pick a new date because of signature Authority the signature Authority could be an issue it has been in the past because we did change the date at one point and the chairman has to sign certain documents that had to do with I understand that I just want to make sure that going the opposite way too soon versus not statutorily I just I think the current chairman would remain chairman until a new chairman was selected whoever is the chair today has signature Authority until we have a new chair agreed okay just want to make sure so if I can certainly it seems then to make sense if we're doing that would there be anything that would harm anybody's position mine being one and swearing in to just do them both at the same day and postpone that also um again commissioner can't make it on that one um I I you know unless there is something by law that says we have to be sworn in and we are jeopardizing our own election process I'm I have no problem in putting both of them at the same time I have several people flying in okay then that that's fine I I did not want to harm anybody's opportunity I know that my mother wants to make it and she's going to try to get out of her bed to do it so whatever the case may be um I'm I'm happy and I would never want to harm that commissioner delori so okay that was my question so last question one more question do we have to be sworn in I've looked into this and since you're all incumbents I think it's more of a ceremonial practice right now um if there were a new commissioner coming on to the board it would have to be done on that day on the 19th but we're not in I'm not suggesting for anyone else other than if you two do it all on the same day and it's only me I may just bypass it I'm not the ceremonial type I skipped the whole wedding got married at the courthouse on lunch hour 7-Eleven for the reception so I could do that all over again for this we can all 7-Eleven up for the reception am I swearing in at the 7-Eleven parking lot okay anything else on that but it was a nice 7-Eleven wasn't it it was the 7-Eleven in downtown Sanford and it was a six-pack of bush the record do it all again Lord so was was there a motion for the 10th to be the reorg or was that just discussed you mean the first meeting there wasn't a motion you just want to do it the next I don't think we need to make a motion but if you need a motion I'll make a motion to the reorg will be on December 10th during the normal BCC meeting the first first order of business at the end of the meeting correct yeah like we just like we we used to do that years ago I just want to make sure it's at the end of we decided okay it needs to be at the end of the meeting because all of your documents will have the current chair end of the meeting Charity for the all all those in favor I oppose like Signs see a none carries you name I'm sorry who seconded moving to thank you good chairman yeah thank you yes we took a detour we yeah I know okay wanted to Circle back to the clerk discussion just to get direction from the board before we we end end that discussion before we move on so so what is the flavor Mr her weighed in I've weighed in I'll tell you what I shared with um the attorney in our one-on-one conversation you know I feel like mediation under normal circumstances is a is a reasonable Next Step but we have tried tried um multiple times through staff and through other communication to try to um see eye to eye on this and it's it's not happening so I just assume go ahead and move to the next step and uh if we're ordered to mediate then you know that's what we have to do but I'd rather just cut to the chase commissioner Constantine being part of the previous Wars which I thought was a waste of time and we ended up doing exactly what you know was intended to be done uh I'm a little disappointed and in the clerk doing this again I actually asked the staff if we can hold the 86,000 or whatever it was that we had on the previous budget for this until we have worked that out that we gave him today in consent order or consent agenda um but I I don't see any I think we all know where we stand which was we are united on this we are doing in our opinion the right thing um our you know whether it be our appro our budget folks our County Manager our County attorney has all said we're doing the right thing so I mean if we're required to do a mediation great but uh I don't see where it's going to change anything unless unless the clerk changes okay thank you good direction yep thank you you're good I am perfect anything else that that's it thank you thank you all right next up is going to be the county manager report Mr chairman and Commissioners just a couple items I'll have Mr dur Parks and Recreation director just give an update on semal forever for a few minutes and a few appointments and then I just have one other thing okay so we're going to move to a presentation the SE seal forever Arc update Mr Rick dur Mr Durr good afternoon Commissioners for the record R dur director Parks and Recreation Department and this afternoon we'll give you a brief overview of the activity of the semal forever program and the appointed Arc process and I'll I'll get to that acronym in just a moment but it'll generally follow this outline um basically it's a pretty short uh presentation for you but I wanted to give everybody an opportunity to get an idea of what the ark has been doing since they were appointed uh by you on the November 14th 2023 meeting so these seven members were appointed from all different walks of life residents within seminol County and they have come together as a group uh worked to appoint Dr J exom as their chair and since that time they've been working with a core group of staff from both the Parks and Recreation Department our natural lands division um working with the county attorney's office and a and a cast of thousands uh to be able to bring this for you here today so first The Arc met on January 25th at buba Soldier Creek uh Park they've been meeting once a month these are publicly noticed meetings um they usually last for several hours and then basically they set the schedule for the entire year with the notion that we needed to be able to advance the first two things on the list after the adoption of the ordinance that was done at the end of last year uh of both developing an application that would be available to the public as well as developing a criteria for how to evaluate potential acquisition projects moving forward now this was not done in a bubble uh we tried to learn from Lots of different other programs that are out there throughout the state including Florida forever and a number of other counties who have been involved with something similar uh but the idea was was that we needed to understand sort of the the latest thinking on a number of these other projects and hopefully learn from uh other folks as well also including taking a look at how we had done originally the uh application and evaluation process as part of our original natural lands bonds that went back to 1990 and 2000 so between May and October the arc also invited in folks from nearby programs and those folks uh graciously gave it their time to be able to ask questions uh let let our ask specific questions Lessons Learned uh really understand how they uh worked with both their advisory boards as well as to come up with criteria for evaluating properties The Arc reviewed criteria as I said from other programs including our own but we also developed a couple of tools for them to use and that was working with GIS um and I'll show you what those look like in just a moment to help them be able to establish some of the base data that they'll use to help draft the criteria and then also evaluate these properties moving forward so a final draft of the criteria was approved at last month's Arc meeting um we're going to spend a few minutes looking at that outline but uh just a note in both um September and October meetings The Arc took that draft criteria and applied a couple of test best case samples and that was really to get an idea of how this process might work and they took a couple of a couple of parcels that the county already owned so we were just looking at our own properties and then going through the evaluation process and a lot of things were fine-tuned um lastly it was vetted by the county attorney's office to make sure that we had a a presentation for you here today to be able to move forward with so some of those tools that were developed using existing GIS layers and pulled into our GIS system was then made available to the AR members it includes uh the Florida natural areas inventory rare habitats map so again it's additional detailed data showing exactly what's on the ground uh here in simel county and then from this they'd be able to take individual Parcels that would come in uh via the application process and be able to locate exactly what some of those uh those different habitats are parcel by parcel they also took the information the very latest information from the state on the Florida ecological Greenway and that entire network as well as a full accounting of everything that everybody owns here in seel County so whether it's a state agency aabon the federal federal government you name it have a full accounting of all of those properties going forward and make them part of that toolkit for the arc the general overview of the criteria follows almost to the word the ordinance that was developed and approved by the BCC back in August of last year that really set the set the structure of the program and it's mainly organized around five main topics if you will and I've bolded those areas up front that really uh Summarize each of these criteria and there are multiple ways to evaluate under each of these number one the vulnerability the diversity of species number two connectedness to other conservation lands number three potential uses for both passive Recreation or Environmental Education and those were things that were within uh and that delineation was within the ordinance as well and then lastly the importance of water which you just spent some time uh reviewing the uh the master plan as well and really understanding how a potential acquisition could provide U opportunities for either groundwater recharge protecting our water supply as well as flood protection moving forward lastly there was a set of criteria that were sort of the others or other other items to consider as we move through this some of which are are rooted in the uh ordinance others are um Lessons Learned as part of uh other folks taking a look at these kinds of things and they include the following F ing five items on this list again these are sort of sidebar conversations that say if some of these special considerations do come up as part of the evaluation process that we'd be able to quantify what those things look like and be able to provide good information coming back as part of an overall analysis or scoring so that brings us all the way up till today um really what we'd like to be able to do and this is why we're bringing this forward to you is we' like to be able to go live with the process so there's been a lot of work that's been done behind the scenes um and it's about time that we'd like to go ahead and line up this calendar with The Arc as well as the development of next fiscal Year's budget so that we can go live begin to take in anyone who has expressed interest in the program uh and for the record we've been contacted by about nine different parties over the last year that have said when you're about to go live let us know we'd like to be able to take a look a more detailed look at the process and potentially um fill out an application so staff will be able to reach out to those folks once we do go live and this will be something that'll be posted up on our website in a downloadable application form and then be able to submit uh to the county then to work with The Arc and have staff work with The Arc to then evaluate those applications based upon the draft criteria that have that the arc has come up with at this particular Point as of note uh item bullet number four this was something that was just recently brought up about over the last month month or so called the markand conservation planning tool this is a discussion that we've been having uh with the East Central Florida Regional planning Council and stesy University I was there and um and to as that tool is being evaluated this could also be uh a helpful use of to the ark uh to help go into a deeper dive into um really being able to detail the possibilities of each potential uh AC for anything from um flood plane mitigation to groundwater recharge you name it to be able to help this board prioritize any Acquisitions going forward into the future so that particular evaluation can happen parallel to what the arc is is working on right now and will be working on over the next year so to bring all of this home uh we've got an application that we'd like you to be able to allow us to move forward with and going live we've got the criteria that has been tested and used by the uh seminal forever Arc uh we'd like to be able to move forward with that and then last but not least as we are putting this together we noticed a year ago we had some folks in order to stagger the terms so we wouldn't have an arc board completely devoid of appointees at any given time um these four members were appointed to a one-year term and their one year is expiring um so at this at that point we would need uh by the at least by the December board meeting uh either a motion to either uho point or reappoint those particular members or anyone else you'd like to see on the arc uh moving forward so that being said that is the conclusion of my presentation I'll be happy to answer any questions you have thank you Mr Durr any inquiries Mr Durr commission Constantine then commissioner delari well I just wanted to congratulate you and the board um arc on such a complete uh criteria anal is it it it looks great it um and um I'm I'm looking forward to you turning it on live and seeing what happens we did talk you know it's not just people that come in and want to sell their own property anybody can present any property but it it's always helpful when they're uh willing sellers absolutely so that is wonderful and the only other question I wanted to ask the attorney or my fellow Commissioners since one of the requests was the appointment a reappointment if um I don't have any problem right now appointing my person um if if if if everybody feels comfortable with the ones and I know they've all been working really hard um at the end of our discussion I'd make the motion to approve the the members uh for another two-year terms okay commissioner delari thank you first of all I would like to also Echo commissioner con's comments about uh you and the board did a phenomenal job and there was a lot of hard work put into it as well as the citizens that present it to you uh I do agree with commissioner Constantine that I have no problem reappointing my person as well so when if it's appropriate I have no problem with commissioner Cony making a motion for all three of them if we all agree and uh the only question I have is that in the outline I just want to make sure that there's something there about outside agencies as partners absolutely so in the special considerations column uh one of the categories that was brought up let me go back to that real quick it doesn't need to be agencies but other other entities any other any other entity or potential for matching funds or Partnerships is on the fourth bullet right there I just want to make sure that that's clear on item number four that is correct yes it is it needs to be broad but clear absolutely that's was it we're good commissioner her I just I I think I need clarification with regard to the discussion that we had this morning about the equestrian branch and this process and would that normally go through this process with the vision that you have for that that is not a bajillion soccer fields for the record um this is one tool of many that you have in order to acquire property the distinction with this particular tool is that that it's focusing on both conservation and passive Recreation um the design and construction of potential soccer fields for example would not fall under this because it is limited to passive Recreation so Green Space open space conservation land and that whole gamut right there so it would not necessarily fit within this definition of this particular ordinance for that property thank you so so let me so let me explain my my thought process because I threw that out there this morning in a list things go ahead commissioner lockart you got well I know I'm sorry I I I realized that that caused some consternation and I think I was looking at it from a a perspective of anytime this County wants to invest money in purchasing land that is going to be we don't know exactly what the end purpose is going to be but we know that there is a conservation element we know that it is not going to be active or at least the intent is not active Recreation like soccer fields that we separate and apart from the funding source we have this fabulous group of volunteers and criteria that have been established that I would just think moving forward if we're going to be making a very large purchase why not run it through the criteria and the team and let them say yeah this makes great sense or there are others that may be a a a better priority granted we may be using it for green infrastructure whether it's what whatever that may look like but this can also be the seminal forever funds can be used for green infrastructure purchases as well so to me the property this morning was actually the perfect fit for a seminal forever purchase but the fact that we were using sales tax funds is made it not have to be a seminal forever purchase do you see what I'm you see where my bra to I totally see what you're saying so I don't get yelled at I want to be recognized here so I'm being recognized he looked at me y go right ahead um I think there may need be to me may need to be another briefing maybe I have it wrong but I don't think it's intended to be passive eventually oh at the the property yes property from this morning that that is correct yeah the the several Concepts that we had shown you said there were going to be active elements there yeah there's a lot of elements that are still being considered that's correct there were still of passive components and infrastructure that that was talked about as well but this particular uh tool if you will is really limited to the passive or natural lands properties true total P that's correct so then I want to go back and vote revote on this morning okay I think I think we need some clarification I thought this morning's discussion and that was that when commissioner her made her statement that look I will actively oppose soccer fields and act you know building something that's going to be drawing a lot of people and I'm on board with that for the record I I took a leap in an assumption that that meant that other highly intensive uses of that property were off the table so MPA yes I think we just need more education with regard to that because it's somewhere in between all of it so from my perspective I don't want to mix the two together my when then my world is two different things I was briefed in depth on the WB I was briefed in depth on this I understand the difference between the two I had no problem following I know what was said this morning um I think there's going to be more information coming forward on the WB what ultimately can happen there and what staff is intending to happen there uh but I'm not I'm not a fan of running it through running that kind of non-passive through this program it was never intended for that um so I I would not be a fan of that and Mr manager you had something yeah I just wanted to say just a quick comment and the purpose of that purchase this morning was to land bank this property because of the development pressure not saying it would or wouldn't uh occur this property would have to go through a public process this board hasn't decided what they want to do with that that the reason that we did not go through uh the seminal forever was because the potential soccer fields that were uh that were originally presented to this board so it is like a blank slate so when we come through that if it decides to be passive we could definitely have it again go go through this process it was it is on our sales tax list as a potential project so that is the reason that we uh put it where it was at but that definitely can change on the board's direction as we move forward and the transportation improvements that could be done there okay all right anything else from Mr dur that's all all right thank you very much appreciate now I'm going I'm going to the go ahead Mr dur no no you're welcome to sit down this is not a public hearing item but we are going to invite the public up who desires to make any statements regarding this Miss Dominique if you'll call them up please Cindy holler it's our only speaker pardon me Cindy holler that's the only one miss holler she doesn't say ni Cindy holler address is on the record so um I just appreciate everybody who is on the U Arc and all the time that they put into this and the work that the county did and I look forward to it being a very successful program thanks okay next up is going to be District commissioner reports first up is can we call the question Mr chairman can I make a motion to reappoint the four Arc members for the a two-year term I think there's three there's four there's four four second this's four the four we good at large there's three districts and onege I'm sorry I'm looking at the wrong column we've been here too long so we're going to make one motion on all of them is that correct yes sir okay and the Secor agrees with that second agrees all those in favor I opposed like sign carries unanimous does that also until the semal forever application and the criteria Dev vote by the AR hopefully there's another motion for that oh I thought I'm sorry that's what I I thought you all want do you have second motion uh sure and and I I did not know if this recommendations they needed a motion but it does I see the word motion now so I will approve the seminal forever application process and the motion to approve uh the the criteria developed by the arc second motion second any further discussion any further discussion about anything else we reviewed today you better hurry up and take a vote all those in favor I opposed like sign carries unanimous thank you okay can we move now to commissioner delari thank you Mr chairman I have two quick appointments and the first one I like to appoint is Michael Harvey to the skyer which is Seal County Industrial Development uh board effective November 12th 2024 with the term ending uh December 31st 2028 and to include the appointment of John SLE to the TDC tourism Development Council effective November the 12th 2024 term ending uh December 31 2025 second second all those in favor I I opposed like sign carries unanimous continue commissioner thank you Mr chairman I just would also like to uh acknowledge our deput County Manager I believe there is a birthday coming up within the next day or so and I just wanted to wish a happy birthday happy birthday Trisha happy birth Trish end of my report Mr chairman thank you next up is commissioner Constantine District 3 thank you very much um just couple things we've got uh October 30th there was another meeting the Statewide opioid uh abatement Council that as you know our sheriff is the ex officio chairman for the attorney general and on the 30th also um the Orlando regional realtors association had a new office and welcome home if you haven't seen that building unbelievable um it's a Taj Mahal quite frankly uh but the interesting thing is is that U both um uh mayor demings and I were there and when he was talking about Orange County there was a scattering of of folks when I when I got up from about seol County more than half of the people there were from seol County and all of them wanted to buy homes in seol county and one of the reasons might be because nich just named us the number one school district in the state which is pretty darn cool um also the we had the wamore road project completion ceremony which I know everybody be very happy about that um hopefully uh it will U there won't be any more blockage of the road right John uh and uh also um I know and that that'll be it because I think you all probably cover a few other things that already happened I will say that the central Florida Zoo Asian Lantern Festival will be coming up again starting on the 15th I know we're all excited about that it's always a great event and um on the 19th before we have the swearing in there will be a Sida meeting at 8:30 I would like to also just say um to all the veterans out there and we always say we have 30,000 I think that that's growing all the time but um to happy Veterans Day I so pleased that so many communities did such great events for that and I would also want to congratulate the citizens of seol County and I say that because our sales tax initiative which I think is extremely as we all know how important it is if if anyone does not know it passed with the highest majority of any sales tax initiative in the state um only Orange County's one half penny for the schools came even close and secondly our two Charter amendments with the 82 and 85% were the highest Charter Amendment approvals in the state so that says a lot about our citizens and how they feel about this community and the future of this community and protecting it and making sure that we have the infrastructure to um to continue to be the premier County in all of Florida that's it okay commissioner lockart all right uh since we met last I had the opportunity to attend the ribbon cutting for recovery connections which is in Longwood uh George Margolis who we our community service department and some of our arpa funding has gone to working with them and expanding their services in seol County um was a very very well attended event and excited to have them uh have a footprint in a home here in suol County um I took a tour of the gardens that are behind the rescue Outreach Mission with parie bety he is a very passionate uh volunteer in our communities many of you may know him through rotary and other organizations he's involved in but feeding hunger now is his personal passion project and he is doing amazing things with aquaponics and aquaculture and um if it grows in dirt or clay or water par is growing it and then giving it away to as many people as possible including um helping to feed Folks at the rescue Outreach Mission he has a big big vision and is trying to work with the city of Sanford seal State College Orlando Health um he'd love to work with semal County our economic development team to put together a a pilot if you will a a type of Learning Hub that would help to engage people who are involved in agriculture and have agricultural businesses in seol County Agriculture is changing the face of a is changing um and connecting those folks that with the the opportunities to learn about that and Implement those uh those new ways of growing food and connecting them with nonprofits to feed um not just people in need but to help those of us who may want to supplement our our food sources for health reasons or economic reasons and I just was absolutely moved by his passion and his vision and I started walking around some Old State he campus taking photographs of where I think this greenhouse should go and um so stay tuned I think there are a lot of great opportunities our economic development team already has a couple of folks that we are working with who have a uh a type of organic fertilizer product that could be partnership so the more people you start to talk to oh and right there at that Heath R campus is Florida Blue which has a huge initiative right now and on the um I'm gonna I'm going to steal Maha the make America healthy again concept it's I'm not trying to be political it just came to my brain um and and they they could also see a potential through the chamber and their membership so the more people you talk to the more people are seeing the need of having good healthy affordable fresh food being grown at their fingertips so shout out to par deep and excited to see what happens next I'll let commissioner H certainly talk about the economic development Hub um the county manager and members of our team met with secretary Tyler and members of his team to talk about SunRail this past week and um the opportunities there as we know there's a an a a transition agreement in place um the county manager is going to get with each of you I believe and the other County managers um to to talk about moving forward in this next year and how we can set some benchmarks to make sure that we're seeing movement in the right direction on that we've we've had we've had a good year uh for the region but there is so much more that I think we all agree could be done and we just want to make sure we're all moving in the same direction on that we talked about regionalism today and transportation related to links and I I don't I I don't want there to I don't want to be in the splash Z I don't want SunRail to be in the Splash Zone of what's happening with our links conversation because they are they are different um Partners at least one um coming up uh Friday the 15th the Daughters of the American Revolution are having a historic marker dedication at the Sanford Museum hope to see you all out there I believe it's at 3:30 on Friday afternoon and before we get together again we'll all be celebrating Thanksgiving so Happy Thanksgiving to everyone enjoy time with your families and um reflecting on all the amazing things that God has done putting this country together that's it her congratulations to the foundation for seminal County Public Schools they had their annual fundraising event that is now called a night of impact you all may remember it as Arts alive significant amount of money raised and the event is really coming together in its new formation we did do on the 30th of October the economic development Hub ribbon cutting and it was really really well done the staff did a wonderful job at pulling it together we had a lot of attendees and it was what was interesting to me is to Simply first of all it was really difficult to get out of there because there was so much collaboration that happened right there at that event so the notion of the con the concept that we had of bringing people together will make things happen I walked out of there with two leads and people walked out of there with our organization it was just it was really well done and I think it will serve its surp as well uh on the 30th uh representative Cory Mills delivered generators to rescue Outreach Mission so that they would have uh the ability to keep hopefully refrigerators running although I'm not sure that they're big enough for the refrigerator but keep some electricity running to the facility in case of a power outage and I'd like to thank Alan Harris for agreeing to take custody of them to move them into and Darren and the team to move them into our um operation so that we can just deploy them out there that means we'll be maintaining them otherwise it's probably not going to have a good end uh let me just say that and uh Chris ham at the rescue Outreach mission was ecstatic to have the help I did attend the kids house 25th anniversary open house it's hard to believe that that is 25 years old I feel like I blinked because I remember when it started and so congratulations on 25 amazing Years also attended the 50th great day in the country in Ido this weekend and if you want to know every single person in Ido walk around with the mayor because it born raised and literally knew every single person there uh I I do want to give a shout out to city of Sanford for a fabulous Veterans Day very moving a ceremony that they host we know that's not easy to pull off and uh we appreciate being invited to that every year and then with regard to the penny sales tax and the passing with the percentage rate I want to give a shout out to the people that made that happen we had several CI Civic organizations in this community that leaned in hard for this one was the Private Business Association of seminol with a unanimous vote to support it the seal County Regional Chamber and Leadership seal and what I will say about those three organizations is this is the first time that I've seen a tax initiative where organizations work together as well as they did and that's because of the leadership in those organizations so I appreciate you and we all appreciate the work that you did to have that go over the finish line and that's it great well I want to wish Trisha happy birthday also commissioner Constantine who had a birthday this past week so now he's 22 Yeah but happy birthday thank well while my fellow Commissioners were out cutting ribbons for opening ceremonies and doing all those fun things I spent the majority of my life in the last couple weeks on the canvasing board for simol County and we appreciate you oh I'm sure you do you than us um but I want to thank Dominique uh the folks at sgtv our attorney's office um these individual employees were there you know 6 8 10 12 14 hours at a sitting um getting through this process so um thank you all immensely I know it was uh you know sometimes trying and sometimes just very long not knowing when it would ever come to an end uh of course we still have a couple more meetings to follow up on uh coming up on the canvasing board but they won't hopefully will not be that long so what I can say is with sgtv being there that uh there should be no question in this community's mind how transparent this process has been we have literally videotaped every aspect of it uh and announced basically to my fellow canvasing board's uh desire for me not to do it actually announce exactly what the canvasing board was doing at a given time while we were handling paper and those kinds of things um and I would encourage anybody from the public to spend a day or a couple hours the next time there's an election to just go sit and observe the canvasing board and and what the canvasing board actually does uh contrary to belief the canas board does not count every vote um you know we we have to duplicate ballots um we have to make decisions on voter intent we have to make decisions on eligibility to vote in some cases uh we have to recreate ballots that have been ripped or torn or somehow broken in the process but the C board does not count all the votes we do have to certify the equipment we do have to certify unofficially the outcome of the election then ultimately certify the equipment again and then do official certification which are the next meetings coming forward so um it's a lot it really is a lot um on that note I have asked the County Attorney at her convenience to reach out to the S soe and coordinate how the change over from a new soe will go with the old soe on a time schedule so everybody's has an understanding how that will go um outside of that that's where I've been for the last last couple weeks but I've been with You' all in spirit so thank you all for attending those and and we sincerely appreciate it if there's nothing else for the good of the order I'm going to go to public comment that is not on the agenda if uh there's anybody here from the public wishes to speak on non-agenda items we dedicate at the end of the meeting approximately 30 minutes to come up 3 minutes a piece to speak to the County Commission so Mr Dominique if you would uh call those names out and if we get them lined up we'll get you all through this process as soon as possible we only have one speaker chairman Leanne diu pardon me what's the name lean diu okay up up yes ma'am welcome hi this is my first time how's everybody Welcome uh my name is Le and Abu I'm the resident in distri 5 I am here today to propose a no no fine library to sem we need your address if you wouldn't mind real quick my address is 3210 East Grove Terrace C for Florida 32771 go ahead um I want to propose a noine library I prepar some notes here so uh I have couple episode with stf for library and that's when the idea coming from that um sometimes our life gets so busy I always borrow at least five to 10 books if they s in my car for more than 5 day we are talking about close to you know $ 1015 fine and by the episode that I have if you have more than $10 under your name you you cannot borrow more books so couple time interaction with them and um I do a little little bit research I think no fine Library should be ideal moving forward right now from what I understand I think winter Park is already have this policy Implement and um I think a vdo or koi also have this no find library so I want to know how can we propose this idea to the county um right here is say library should be a place that not teaching people how to take responsibility they are a place to ENC encourage lifelong learning exploration and Innovation so I hope I can bring more material moving forward to show you guys what the noine library is I don't think Library should be a place that using a fine penalty to consider its income or profit in a way so I don't know how to bring more material to show you guys but this is what I propos today well I would ask that you turn right around there Mr Durr right there is in charge of the libraries okay um if you'll just speak with him he'll give you his contact information and anything that you want to present if you can get to his folks that'd be great the one question that I have yeah is and I understand what you're indicating but how do you incentivize getting the book back so let people have it forever or how's that work I don't know the detail how we can do this but ideally you don't want to make people feel discouraged like my daughter one time we travel and she forgot a whole stack of books at home so that cost almost $18 and when I talk to them they say well you can either pay the whole 18 or would do this one time exception for you but for the rest of your life you can't really make a mistake again so that really put the idea of my in my daughter's in my life yeah I can never lay again blah blah blah but life happens and at the same time for me furthermore is you want to encourage them to do so if you late this time maybe you can donate something in the back to make up your mistake or volunteer some hours whatever you can do to make it up instead of kind of discourage them because they have this fine or penalty idea in in in their mind so that's what I want to propose and like I say I I'm a big believer in Sanford library or any Library we go there all the time to utilize the the space and the material and I think uh many feedback from a lot of Library when they go no fine not just they encourage people to do so but they actually find a lot of material that never got returned so sure that's from the thank you if you'll just get with Mr dur he should be able to accommodate thank you very much thank you appreciate it Dominique is there anyone else here from the public we wish to speak on the non-agenda items no sir seeing none anything else for the good of the order seeing none we are hereby close the BCC meeting thank thank you all for attending [Music] [Music] [Music] --------- ##VIDEO ID:Yuqzsuk6jB8## [Music] everyone and welcome to the Border County Commission meeting here in seol County the day is Tuesday November 12th 2024 is approximately 9:30 a.m. I would ask that you please take a moment and silence your cell phones any other electronic equipment you have whether that be iPads or other computer systems or game boys or whatever you may have brought in the chambers keep yourself occupied with our craziness now I just dated myself right Game Boy um before we get started I'd like to take a moment and congratulate three of our commissioners who have cleared and been reelected this year year to the board of County Commission commissioner Constantine commissioner delari and commissioner her congratulations on the election we are going to move to our invocation and our invocation is going to be done by Pastor Bob melhorn from the Integrity church and then we're going to ask Mr John slot to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance Pastor good morning everyone let's pray oh holy one we thank you for this glorious day and we thank you for seeing us through what has been an anxious season of apprehension with all the attention given to the elections and now father we're ready to move forward we congratulate those who serve who continue to serve and we pray your continued guidance and wisdom for all of them we're also mindful Lord that there is a greater election that your election of all all of us to uh discern the purpose of Our Lives to spend our energy and time serving you in the place you have put us and the uh the time you have allotted to us uh give us wisdom to to live out our days in a way that is pleasing to you a Holy One it it it feels to us sometimes like the whole world wants to move to Central Florida and this is a great opportunity new people new ideas new energy for us but also a great challenge concerns about space concerns about the environment concerns about infrastructure and so father give us the the wisdom to balance competing concerns I ask your blessing today Lord upon the Commissioners and their families bless all the employees of SEMO County and give your blessing upon all those who call SEO County their home I pray in Jesus strong name amen amen EXC I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all amen thank you Pastor and thank you Mr slot for being here to lead us in the pledge next item up will be our Awards and presentations and this uh Proclamation is for our uh veteran of the month and this will be read by commissioner Andrea Herr commissioner thank you chairman it is my honor to read the following proclamation of the seal County Board of County Commissioners recognizing United States Marine Corp Corporal Ronald dasto for his outstanding service to the United States and to seol County whereas the brave men and women of our army navy Marines Air Force Coast Guard and space force demonstrate a Resolute spirit and unmatched selflessness reminding us there are few things more American than giving of ourselves to make a difference in the lives of others and where as throughout our country's history generations of service members have answered the call to leave their families their jobs and put their Futures and even their lives on the line to valiantly defend our nation and whereas for many service members the sacrifice has ended in permanent injury or death yet their Spirit remains in the continued preservation of our freedoms and the promise of Liberty and whereas there are more than 30,000 living veterans in semal County who served our nation in times of peace and War through their service they kept America strong and whereas Corporal Ronald dasto enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in September 1965 and served honorably until January 1970 he served in the Republic of Vietnam from 19 from July 1967 to October 1968 he received the National Defense service medal Good Conduct Medal Vietnam service medal with one star M14 rifle Sharpshooter badge Vietnam campaign medal and the Combat Action ribbon and whereas Corporal Ronald dasto was raised in Boon Beach Florida and returned to Florida upon his discharge from the Marine Corps he moved to Winter Park in 1970 and worked for Avis renar and whereas Corporal Ronald dasto then used his VA education Bill to complete his Doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy he opened and operated a hypnosis Medical Practice in Winter Park for 35 years serving as a board member from 1994 to 2002 on the international board for regression therapy and being the founder of the hypnotic research Society he has traveled the United States and Canada providing training to medical professionals in regressive therapy and whereas Corporal Ronald dasto loves to fish and scuba dive he earned his captain's license from the United States Coast Guard in 2008 he was also awarded the quilt of honor and is a generous 46 gallon whole blood and platelet donor and whereas Corporal Ronald dasto has been a life member of the Marine Corps League from 1971 and rejoined in 2019 he is also a member of the first Marine Division Association and is a member of the milit military order of the devil doogs and whereas Corporal Ronald dasto has brought great credit and distinction upon himself the United States of America the United States Marine Corps and seminal County now therefore be it proclaimed that we the board of County commissioners of seal County Florida Express our gratitude admiration and respect for Corporal Ronald dasto for his outstanding service to the United States Marine Corps and the residents of seol County be it further proclaimed that this Proclamation is presented to Corporal Ronald dasto along with our sincere congratulations and recognition as seal County's veteran of the month adopted this 12th day of November 2024 second motion second all those in favor I like sign seeing none carries unanimous congratulations and thank you welcome home if you'll join us on the floor for a photograph and presentation sir let [Music] [Music] [Music] all right thank you very much Corporal for being here today I did ask him to maybe he might want to stick around and perform some hypnosis on some of us before this day is over might be beneficial uh with that said we're going to now move to our consent agenda and I will go to the county manager is there anything Mr County Manager manager that you are changing on the consent agenda thank you Mr uh chairman and commissioner just two items there is an addition of 14a which would be under Fire um and that is the unit B contract that you all have been briefed on and as well as item number 21 this is the links funding agreement I'd like to move that to after the links presentation this morning and you all can take that up at that time okay is there everyone good with that on the board okay and that's all the changes Mr great all right County attorney Miss Kate Lor would you read into the record the rules for public participation please thank you Mr chairman Florida law provides that members of the public shall be given a reasonable opportunity to be heard on propositions before the board of County Commissioners except when the board is acting on emergency or ministerial matters or conducting a meeting exempt from the requirements of the Sunshine Law individuals shall be permitted 3 minutes each for public comment or 6 minutes when the individual is an official representative of a formal Association or group the chairman May modify the maximum maximum time for public comment at his sole discretion when appropriate public comments on quasi judicial or other public hearing items will occur during the board's consideration of those items this afternoon public comments on pending procurement matters or on non-agenda items shall not be permitted at this time members of the public Desiring to make public comment must fill out a speaker form and present the form to staff forms are available in the lobby Mr Mr chairman thank you Mr Lor any commissioner desire to pull any other items from the consent agenda before we move forward commissioner lockart i' like to pull 20 and 27 20 and 27 for commissioner lockart any other Commissioners desire to pull any at this time so note 20 and 27 okay we will go to public comment do we have any speakers here this morning wish to speak on any of these items and if so which item yes sir we have two we have Ryan charlon to speak on item 29 and Daryl Carter to speak on item 20 okay if you two individuals would come up please when you get to the podium state your name and address for the record you will have three minutes we would ask that you keep it specifically to the topic in which you desire to speak on and identify which item that is please oh I'm sorry we we have microphone microphones everywhere there's so many microphones I don't know where to go uh good morning everyone thank you Commissioners and uh and the audience my name is Ryan charlson I am uh Council for Benchmark construction um I'm here to speak on agenda item number 29 which is the approval of the unilateral termination for cause of Benchmark Construction Company Inc um Benchmark opposes determination and um we're here to state that publicly um we believe a better approach would be to work with the county in order to develop a remedia remedial plan that would be mutually beneficial to the county and to Benchmark this will save countless money in attorneys fees and cost for both the county and Benchmark um a unilateral termination of Benchmark will undoubtedly result in a lawsuit filed by Benchmark against the county um the county may have counter claims against Benchmark it's going to it's going to end up in a dispute and this dispute is going to go on for a number of years based on my experience I'm board certified and construction law by the Flor bar I've been doing this for a long time and these lawsuits um tend to evolve uh as the time goes on uh Benchmark has a shity that's also involved and they're going to have defenses and are going to um oppose I don't want to speak for the sh because I don't want to represent I don't represent them but um it seems like they're going to oppose the termination as well and I think that if we collaborate and put our heads together we should be able to come up with a solution here um for example if you look at the dates on um the proposed unilateral termination it talks about how things with this project started for lack of a better term going off the rails in May June we're we're in November Benchmark hasn't been allowed on the project to conduct any work they could be done by now if you terminate Benchmark you're going to have to go through a whole new procurement process that'll take forever this project is the Talk of the Town so it's going to be tough to find people um I think you should reconsider determination of bench benchmark and uh speaking for Benchmark I can tell you that we're ready willing and able to continue with the project and I've been um saying that in my meeting with County attorneys both County attorneys in-house and outside councel and they're well aware of that um but I do appreciate the time this morning to speak with you directly I think you should reconsider this agenda item and save the taxpayers of seal County a lot of money and everyone a lot of Heartache I'd also like to point out that there are a couple things in the unilateral termination that are inaccurate obviously Benchmark um disputes deficiencies with its work but there are certain parts in here where it discusses Benchmark being provided with an opportunity to provide a remedial plan and that never happened thank you thank you counselor we appreciate it next please good morning Mr chairman Commissioners my name is darl Carter with Mor Carter and Associates I filled out the speaker card in hopes that I wouldn't have to speak this morning it was just in the event that there were questions that come up um I'm here along with Hal caner and several of my colleagues on behalf of WB equestrian it's agenda item number 20 so uh if there are any questions that come up I don't want to test your uh test your patience with a long with a long talk so we're here if you need us and thank you very much thank you thank you very much all right any other public uh comments or speaker forms okay we will close public comment and go to board action Mr chairman commissioner Constantine thank you could I before I make a motion or anyone makes a motion can I ask U our County Manager to um address 29 please yeah you can um only in the not not only in the sense of did we go through all the proper procedures I want to caution everyone this is not the venue to at this item number one not trying to um number two hopefully you all have all been briefed for new numerous times multiple times by multiple staff members where this stands so I would just with caution if you can help commissioner Constantine understand that um we'll try to get yeah actually I'll ask our assistant County Manager CH Christian Swinson who has been leading this project um briefly thank you Darren Christian Swinson is County Manager um yes I I heard the comments from benchmarks Council obviously we disagree with a number of them we have been working with them for a number of months we did not uh arrive at this decision lightly uh you may recall it was previously agendized there was a meeting uh prior to that where Benchmark requested that we remove it from the agenda and attempt to work with them which we did um we have been unsuccessful at this point and that is why it's back on the agenda and thank you that's all I wanted to know to put that on the public record thank you very much and with that oh I'm sorry commissioner lockart I'll just say as the district commissioner whose office has been working hand inand with the community um if they were here they would want to vote themselves any other comments from the commission seeing none I will look again for board action and with that Mr chairman I will move the approval of the Constitutional officer consent a agenda 2-4 and the county manager consent agenda 5 through 33 including 14a with the exceptions of 20 21 and 27 second motion second all those in favor I oppose like sign seeing none passes unanimously we have commissioner lockart want to pull item 20 commissioner thank you so much and this is in commissioner her district and so I probably already got the message that I needed to have knowing that she was not the one that pulled this from the agenda but I just feel like the last conversation we had about this publicly there were a lot of questions and um many concerns about the impact on the community and the eventual use of the property and the traffic that could possibly stem from that and what is the highest and best use for the county if the county were to take control of it um I don't see a fiscal impact statement along with this item um anytime we buy property and we seem to do it like golf courses occasionally um you know we we buy it and there is a long-term consequence financially there are always benefits but there are also Financial consequences when we purchase property I don't see anything about that in this item that contemplate that shows that that has been contemplated um we have a process in place via seol forever for prioritizing property that's going to be purchased and put either in conservation or for some other use whether it be um green infrastructure or what have you we're in we're finally close to the end of having the that committee that we've establish do that work um so I I'm just wanting to make sure that there has is discussion and it's been brought off of the consent agenda because the last public conversation about this had so many any questions and concerns someone from the public might look back and wonder well gosh how did that go from H lots of concerns to no discussion at all in a vote so that's my intention for bringing it Forward okay uh it's my understanding please corre correct me if I'm wrong there has been interaction with the public with questions that have been asked have you are you satisfied that that has sufficiently occurred yes in fact um if you remember when Mr dur did his Park uh Master Plan update we did talk about this property about doing the due diligence and bringing this property back to the to the board now we have not had Community meetings with with the the area um so that is something that if you'd like us we could definitely do that as the one of our next steps um but this is following up with the master plan presentation that we had done um last sum last summer yeah I think I think the anticipation would be is as you move forward with with what is going to take place over there that you would have Community meetings and of course orange Boulevard improvements are are taking place which will help address some of those traffic concerns um but this is anyone near and and also um go ahead commissioner her so I think the difference between the last time we talked about this in a fairly open public meeting and this time is that the thought process has changed first of all the opportunity to purchase the property is now it's either going to be sold to us or sold to development one of the two the so land goes for sale when land goes for sale uh what I was vehemently opposed to was and I'm not going to remember the number but I'm going to use the word bajillion so no everyone knows it's not the right number but a bajillion soccer fields going into that area so that we could host worldwide soccer tournaments that would absolutely drive a traffic pattern that the infrastructure cannot support what this is doing is securing the land for future consideration I will continue to oppose that um but the land being uh I don't necessarily know that it's going to be put into preservation but put into use for County purposes in some form or fashion that allows it to still be drainable uh which is a big deal out there as we all know from the recent hurricanes and used to some benefit of the citizens that does not drive a cost structure for the county that is beyond our ability to support all that to be determined um which is why I'm supporting the issue any other comments commissioner Constantine I would just tend to I don't intend to agree but in talking to the staff and everything this has the opportunity to support traffic improvements as well as drainage improvements and also the fact that uh you know reduce the um if you will stress on Redevelopment of that property and as as commissioner said you either buy it now or you buy it later or or somebody else is going to buy it and so I I'm I'm supportive of this I don't think anybody really knows what the future is going to be for this property specifically um I do know that we have seen some you know future uh plans but I do know that two of the things that need to be done is with you cooperate ation uh with traffic Improvement and drainage and whatever we do so I'm I'm supportive of this commissioner delari thank you Mr chairman uh I would agree with the all the comments we're having here today uh there is I believe 120 day period yes uh that uh we have to look at this to look for and discover continual discovery of any additional items but yes there is stor water issues in this area we've all heard of them as well as traffic and transp issues and uh by doing this it will allow us to address that holistically and uh I think uh we should be very thankful that the property owner is willing to work with us and uh we will uh move forward to figure out what those issues are and but I would also agree with commissioner her that uh you know we're not trying to build a regional complex out there we're trying to figure out what fits with the community and I agree Mr chairman that it's important that we bring the community the end to actually hear from them as well and to make sure their concerns are addressed so very well I'll move the motion to approve item number 20 second motion second all those in favor does the district commissioner not want to make the motion for her own go ahead I'll move to uh approve item number 20 would like to Second it no yall go right ahead second all those in favor under discussion normally we do motion second discuss um what I would just like to put out there is that we have a process in place we have invested a lot of time money and effort and citizen volunteers for purchasing properties like this we need to be mindful of the fact that every time somebody wants to sell a piece of property whether it's something like this or golf coures or what have you we do have other pieces of property in this County that are still waiting for their ultimate I'll I'm just going to throw out Rosenwald um we've had that property for 6 years we have not done what we said we were going to do we have other underserved communities in this County um that are waiting for open space and things to be purchased for the benefit of those communities and yet somehow we we and I'm not saying this is a bad decision but I'm going to get it on the record that we continually quickly are able to come up with 10 million here and 9 million there for golf courses and properties like this and yet we struggle to find money to do projects in underserved communities so I would just like to make sure that that's on the record anyone else commissioner her I would just point out that Midway has a significant amount of work being done that we put a million dollars into Parks out there there there is a lot of things happening at the same time it's it's not a just like the rest of the world it's not either or it's happening simultaneously I think the thing that I would like uh is for uh not right this minute we have a long agenda in front of us but we probably need some clarification with regard to why this would fall outside of a seminal forever and when Things fall in it and out of it because I see a distinct difference which but clearly we're not clear on that I could be 100% wrong it's is that every purchase of land goes through seminal forever that wasn't what I thought the intention was so we probably need some clarification there as well particularly for uh our citizens to understand and we are going to get an update Mr chairman and members today about the based upon the the criteria that was placed in the ordinance I think that the arc committee has come up with some suggestions so we're going to see that today so that was you know obviously a timely suggestion but remember this because of the drainage because of the transportation is a sales tax infrastructure project not a General Revenue project that's correct okay let's come on down the line make sure nobody else has any additional to say commissioner Lockard anything additional commissioner Lo I'd like to call the question commissioner her I would just point out since we're we're talking about districts and and issues is that my district could use a community center and I have not seen anything move forward in the Geneva uh the portions of Sanford uh for any type of community center on the east side of this County um a lot of my constituents would love to have that but I'm also patient enough to wait due turn to uh prioritize certain things and how things can move forward so um just want to make sure that my constituents understand that I am rooting for them and I am trying to advocate for them but we have to prioritize things as they come forward with that said we'll call the question all those in favor I oppose like sign seeing none passes unanimous item 27 commissioner lockart so I wanted to add on this item um and I know the there was additional information that was sent from the county attorney's office but I wanted to add additional Clarity in the form of a a motion which I I'm hopeful that you all received the language so that this isn't the won't be something that you're hearing for the first time but but as as the current um representative on the central Florida commuter rail commission um I just felt more comfortable adding a little more context and another layer to um the intent at least how I intend to move forward in this role and if it becomes somebody else that this would apply to them as well and so in the conversation of representing the board of County Commissioners on the central Florida commuter rail commission um I would I would like to make a motion that states the following that the seminal County Central Florida commuter rail commission representative be able to vote on matters such as agreements and policies in furtherance of the transition from fdot to the cfcc consistent with the governing agreements as amended in coordination with the county manager and thereafter being ratified by the seal County BCC so that you all so that I whoever is on that board is not making decisions and votes and then you not ever hearing about it or knowing about it but the county manager would be involved and then those items would come back to you for ratification acknowledgement if you will second can I ask for clarification Please Mr lari it' be for the county attorney uh when we're talking about large sums of money would that would be approving contracts based on large sums of money that would be required through sunel that this board would be abug for yes commissioner but it wouldn't be outside the scope of the governing documents that you've already approved if anything were to the way that the motion was phrased is that the authorities being given to the cfcc rep to approve agreements and documents consistent with the governing documents that are in place if anything were to go beyond the scope of those documents it would be my legal opinion that they would have to come back to the board before the cfcc rep could approve those documents so that they would also be having the ability to commit this board for future dollars that are going to be required that this board should be looking at because there are different votes on that commission it's either things that we pass civil majority uh super majority or unanimous and that's when there's issues that we're talking about dollars that's going to be large numbers that this board should be weighing in so that we understand what commitments we're making in the future because it could be in the millions of dollars worth correct we're to place right now in the transition where there is a lot of agreements being assigned and entered into in order to facilitate the transition and that so the the timing has become an issue with bringing everything on a board agenda with the with the advance publication of the agenda and at this time of does bother what I'm concerned about is committing this County to large sums of money as we move forward that this board may have issues with and the intent of this motion is not to allow the representative on the cfcc to commit the board beyond what it's already committed to financially okay as long as we're not agreeing to additional dollars that this board has agreed to Mr chairman if I may just as an example one of the items that is needing to be voted on is whether or not the funding Partners will utilize QuickBooks for accounting software 99 bucks a month like that's the kind of thing that has to be voted on that we're saying I would be allowed to go ahead and vote for that and then come back and let you all know there was a vote to utilize QuickBooks these are not high dollar high value understand that I guess for my clarification as long as it doesn't go beyond the figures that we've agreed to in our budget in our annual budget here whoever is sitting up here that's all I'm concerned about I think the key here the consultation with the count manager I think the key here is consistent with the operating agreement plan yep and that clearly dictates to me when I review it um so I don't have a problem with this so we have a motion second all those in favor I oppose like sign seeing none carries unanimously all right that takes care of our consent agenda next I can I clarify one thing please the motion that commissioner lockart made was for the board to Grant her the authority to do these votes I don't think there there needs to be a separate vote on item number 27 okay move to approve item 27 second with I just further discussion just clarification that was an amendment to the motion to the motion she made it it as an amendment to 277 I apologize I didn't realize it was an amendment she made it as an amendment to the 27 I thought it was a standalone motion commissioner no I I in in discussing 27 what I was adding to it was this language okay my mistake my mistake verify that was my intent if it didn't come across that way I apologize I just wanted to make sure they thank you no I I took it differently do you want to restate it for the record I can just to make sure it's clear sure as an amendment sure motion to authorize seal County cfcc representative to vote on matters such as agreements and policies and furtherance of the transition from fdot to the cfcc consistent with the governing agreements as amended in coordination with the county manager and thereafter ratified by the seal County Board of County Commissioners as an amendment to item 27 as stated so that's how it sounded like a separate motion mhm okay do you see what I'm saying so I I okay I'll I'll bookend it I predicated it with this is an amendment to 27 and I'll bookend it on the back end with as it was intended to be uh further defining item 27 I got it an amendment yeah that's okay I need a second I already seconded you okay I didn't hear you down there there was too much little chatter going on down there motion second all those in favor I oppose Lon carries unanimous Madam County attorney we are okay yes I didn't mean to over complicated we do that very well on our own we're we're off to a good kick this morning we keep up to it um so next up is our regular agenda items this will be a reduction of lean request Alexis good morning good morning for the record my name is Alexis Brioni I am clerk to the code board I am presenting item number 34 which is a request from applicant US Bank Trust TR lsf9 Master participation trust represented by broker Joyce Sanders for reduction of the co enforcement lean from the total of $86,500 to $11,000 the property is located at 1781 Carlton Street Longwood um parcel ID 01- 21-29 D5 ck- 250 B- 00204 case number 19 33 cesm in summary the violation was originally observed on October 19 2017 by the inspector concerning the violation of seal county code chapter 40 appendix a section 10 105.1 construction without the required permits specifically the installation of a privacy fence the original respondent at the time was notified with a notice of violation however the property foreclosed and the bank became the new owner thus receiving their own notice of violation before the case was brought to the code enforcement Board office this matter indeed um brought to the special Magistrate on March 14th 2019 and a findings of fact conclusion of Law and Order was ordered and concluded the respondent being compliance no later than May May 9th 2019 or a fine of $50 per day would be imposed for each day the violation continues or is repeated the respondent did not comply with the order given by the special magistrate and an order was imposed as of July 11th 2019 finding the respondent not in compliance with a recorded lean of $33,150 to continue to acrew at a rate of $50 per day until the violation is remedied this order was sent to be recorded in official records book 9399 pages 1035 1036 on February 5th 20 24 the permits were reflected in our systems as being obtained and an Affidavit of compliance was sent to the respondent with the total acred leane amount the applicant US Bank Trust TR lsf9 Master participation trust represented by broker Joyce Sanders is requesting the board of County Commissioners approve a reduction of the code enforcement board lean in the amount of $86,500 to $1,000 as the property is now in compliance for case number 19 33 cesm on the property located at 1781 Carlton Street Longwood personal ID 0121 295 ck250 b0020 and authorize the county manager to execute a satisfaction and release of Code Enforcement lean upon receipt of the appropriate payment from the applicant that concludes my presentation thank you m Alexis any questions for staff seeing none is the applicant here and wish to make any statement to the board please your name and address for the record please Joyce Sanders Florida real estate properties I live in Longwood Florida 3 uh 2484 West State Road 434 I am uh the listing agent for the property I was assigned to property in uh April of 23 I've been trying to get this issue resolved uh initially when I tried to get well I don't know what happened prior to I taking over the property uh it seems that the property was in a property management program with US Banks Hudson homes and it was transferred to the sale division which is when I became assigned to the property in April of 23 I've been trying to get it resolved since then uh one of the initial issues we had was that their the fence was ere erected but they're two lots and some County asked us to combine the Lots so that we could get a better understanding of the fences and the locations and who they belong to after I got the Lots combined then they came out for an inspection for the fence uh it was determined that uh because there's a pool on the property that was a major concern I'm assuming um that the fence was not in the right spot and there had not been a permit after that the neighbors on either side erected fences so we were able to determine that the fence that was of concern was not ours um then uh they wanted uh latches put on the fences and the latches were too low I met the contractors out there several times they just could not get it right for some reason the latch wasn't high enough then the latch had to become self closing uh again because of the pool ultimately uh we erected a uh a pool screen fence um and um I'm here to uh see if we can get this fine reduced um I don't know what happened prior to uh my taking over but we're in a situation now where the things are escalating and it's absorbing it thank you okay anyone else here from the public to speak on this matter no sir seeing none we'll close any public input commissioner Constantine this is your District well it it seems that um I thank you very much that you got involved in 2023 but this is an issue that's been going on from 2017 and from 2019 I believe also I heard that uh you know it has been acre and went to code uh code magistrate I also heard in the conversation and read that um uh that uh that they were sent to the bank information as well as to the management company and neither resp responded and again thank you very much for you responding in 23 you know whenever this Hall got uh um solved but it seems that there's an ongoing problem with Once Banks get foreclosed and get a hold of property that they kind of ignore it until they have to do something and they want to sell it um I'm just doing a little math here I will um they lean on $86,500 doeses seem a little exorbitant for a a fence concern but still I'll take that uh um you still have responsibility at least of 20% and therefore I'm going to 20% of 865 is 17 or 16,850 plus the 500 Uh u administ ation that's 17,350 and therefore that will be my motion that we reduce it to 17,350 Second motion second further discussion seeing none all those in favor I oppos like sign carries unanimous thank you all very much next we're going to move into our work session portion of the program first up will be item 35 which is the lengths future planning this Mr Tim JX along with Christian Swinson and James Bole and some folks from links W be presenting and if you will Mr chairman I'll just go ahead and kick this off if someone has the uh clicker if you can head to so this the agenda this morning for the links work session is we're going to go over the uh the purpose the link staff and our staff um as commissioner lockart knows we all have been working a lot for the last six months to look at our Transit options we're going to go over our current system overview we're going to have links uh talk about a proposed restructuring and then uh next steps and options and then we'll have staff recommendation as you all know this all started from our budget Public Work sessions over the summer um you had asked us to look at all options uh look at more efficiencies and how we can be more effective so with that I'll turn it over to Christian Swinson our assistant County manager who will be assisted by Mr J as well good morning Commissioners um for the record I'll just State my name and then I'll I'll go down the go down the row here just for the record so Christian Swinson assistant County Manager um to the left of me is James Bole he's the interim chief of planning and development for links and at the end is Tim JX as you all know our budget director so um thank you Darren as uh as Darren mentioned we received board Direction during the budget Workshop to uh to look at our transit system and come up with other ideas as such Tim and I uh took a a variety of steps we met with Valia County as they have a Transit as well we also had a variety of meetings with the links planning department which you'll hear about in the in James's portion of the presentation and then we also had discussions with the private microtransit providers as well and this morning what we would' like to present to you are three options that we see are potential options for uh for our transit system and then we'll we'll follow with the recommendations so to start this I'm going to turn it over to Mr JX for option one he'll turn it over to Mr Bole for option two and then it'll it'll come back to me go ahead thank you Christian uh seal county is part of a regional transit partnership we joined around 1992 and that partnership is documented in Florida Statutes to include Orange County Oola County seol County and the City of Orlando seminal County uh's contribution percentage based on the approved funding model is 12% and this is based on vehicle hours and trips within the county we uh we currently have 11 fixed route bus links two microtransit neighborlink zones and Paratransit Transportation disadvantage services in the county one challenge with the current option is that the first line which shows the total links expenditure budget it's grown from 148 million in fiscal year 20 up to 208 million in 2025 while system revenues have remained relatively fat flat so you can see our funding partner obligation uh went from 71.4 up to $130 million this slide shows the fy2 total system cost uh the $130 million funding partner obligation is subsidized by $24 million of budget stabilization funds these are partner reserves that were generated when lyx was receiving Federal arpa grant funding as well as receiving the county um contributions in Prior years so the total fy2 net funding partner funding agreements is $106 million if we look just at semal County we have $16 million operating contribution requirement which is subsidized $3 million by our budget stabilization subsidy bringing us to $13.1 million operating contribution plus 400,000 for Capital contribution and half a million dollars for SunRail feeder routes and that brings us to a $14 million fy2 funding agreement which is being presented to the board today for approval and with that I'm going excuse me and then finally we have a slide provided by Lynx um which shows in fy2 the $16 million um partner contribution which is projected to grow to $170 million in fiscal year 2030 and you can see in red the spend down of the budget stabilization reserves that's partly why we're going up by such high percentages and with that I'm going to turn it over to James Bole to talk about Link's proposed changes and if anyone has any questions let's try to hold those to the end of the presentation please all right thank you Tim uh good morning Commissioners Mr chair um commissioner lock carts good to see you in slightly different setting but I'm glad to be here today to to talk to you about links and some of our recommendations that we're proposing uh to deliver a better more efficient uh Transit service to the folks of SEO County so I have quite a few items I'm going to cover I'm going to make it quickly but some points I definitely want to get across the agenda here just kind of lays out our path how what we're going to go through and then how we get to the recommendations that we're going to propose um when we started working with simol County staff you know we immediately started about goals one of the big goals for our project was to expand transit to make it more accessible to more people in Simo County but also to reduce cost so we had several work sessions um it was a good good time for us to get together and talk about this and so we developed several goals for project we want to expand um access to Transit throughout the county part of our effort of course is looking at restructuring the fixed route bus system and focusing those routes on areas of higher demand where we will get more ridership we want to introduce new and expanded uh neighborlink microtransit on demand services and um look at discontinuing fixed route services that frankly are just not getting the ridership that we need to keep those routes uh running and we ultimately want to reduce the cost to Simo County at a very high level um Tim talked about this a bit earlier but we have 11 fixed routes that serve simol County some of those routes are intra count so they only stay within simol and some of those routes Also Serve Orange County we have two neighborlink zones one in Ido and one in the Sanford area our fiscal year 24 uh fix route average weekday ridership was around 6,600 um boardings a day and then um the fiscal year 24 Simo County annual writers ship was around 2.1 million and what I want to make clear is when we talk about ridership in transit we're talking about trips we're talking about boarding so we're not talking about specific people one person could theoretically make 10 trips in a day so I just want to be clear so that we're all on the same page about when you hear Transit folks talking about trips and Riders we're talking about boarding so that's how we report ridership that's how the federal government requires us to report writers ship and our routes don't see County boundaries it's a system and that's how we report our writers ship as a system so current the current system oh now I'm going too fast here's what the current system computer sorry where's there oh there we go sorry I'm not used to the little clicker thing here so so um you can see our this is our current system our current network of fixed route bus in simol County you can see we have quite a bit of service um there's a lot of routes that serve SEL County some of those routes do very well some of those routes frankly don't do very well and we'll look at that a little bit further in the presentation and you can also see uh the two neighborlink zones the one in Sanford and the one in Ovito there we go uh back in 23 we did a o d origin and destination survey and I thought it would be good to show you some of the stats and some of the things that we found by surveying um our Riders and this one focuses specifically on those Riders who started their trips in Simo County and real quickly I think the biggest thing that stands out is the diversity of writers ship of the citizens of SEO County SEO County uh by far has the most diverse ridership we have on link so you can see there's a pretty almost even spread of African-Americans Hispanics and um white folks and other uh folks who use transit in simol County a majority of those folks have to walk to their bus stop so access to sidewalks bike Lanes those are all really important um for our Riders and then you know you can see that 35% of the of the Riders Who board or start their trip in Simo County work in the service industry and so we can see a lot of those folks uh looking at the data more detail they travel out of Simo County into Orange County a a lot of those trips end up in the iDrive Corridor around Disney um downtown Orlando and over towards the airport so there's a significant amount of folks who utilize transit in Simo County that are making those Regional trips and really helping to create that keep that Regional economy going so we'll talk a little bit about ridership and this will get us towards why we're going to propose what we're proposing um so this chart represents seol County ridership only and again this writers ship is made up of routes that wholly serve simol County or routes that partially are in simol and Orange County so you're going to see a mixing of the two here but I think you can see the trends are clear ridership has been decreasing in Simo County I'm really dating back starting in around 20112 we had our highest ridership uh in Simo County and then it has been trending down and obviously what happened in 2020 had a dramatic impact on ridership across the country and we have been recovering from that we're up to about 80% now of our ridership of which we had in 2019 and we're averaging about 61,000 trips a day on a weekday average weekday so the next couple of charts we're going to look at Route specific information and what these charts help us do is to forensically look at the routes what is the ridership on those routes what is the productivity and when I say productivity I mean you know the number of pass passengers per Revenue hour and that is a very good statistic to look at when you're talking about looking at a route and how to make changes to those routes that's a very good indicator how well a route is performing so this graph shows us uh average weekday ridership and as you can see and you're going to see this as a theme through these slides there are some routes that do very well and there are some routes that frankly just don't do well at all um so a lot the the routes that serve Orange County and simol County obviously do a lot better so you can see the 103 the 436 is the 102 they do very well the Orange Line represents the orange horizontal line represents the links average and then the red line you see on your map represents where the seminol county routes are so the seol county routes fall below the links um average weekday ridership routes the next slide is productivity and this is one that planners really go to when we start looking at a system and trying to figure out how are we going to make the system better where are we going to make changes so again this is passengers per Revenue hour and again you can kind of see some of those same them at links we have a standard of 15 passengers per Revenue hour that is our standard so any route that begins to fall below that immediately should we should be asking questions why what's going on you know what do we need to do the red line represents where the Simo County uh productivity is and you can see that is um below the links average and it's hard to see the green line there but it's dotted lyns is basically at our average so we are at 14.9 passengers per Revenue hour our standard is 15 so overall systemwide we're doing very well we have some routes that produce over 30 Riders per hour and that is a very strong indicator that a route is doing very well in some routes U we have ridership that it's over 5,000 trips a day on those rout so again it's about what works best for your community not everything that works well in Orange County on a route is going to work well in simol County so that's why we look at these numbers and that is what helps us get to where we get um the last one I want to show you is cost per passenger and again you can kind of still see the same themes here uh you know the routes that perform at a lower level sorry there we go cost per passenger again you can kind of see some of the themes but on this one the lower the the bar the better so you're keeping those costs per passengers uh at a much much lower rate um than say the bars that are much higher oops this thing all right so uh taking into account all that information and data that we've looked at uh we've come up with some proposals and um first I'm going to start with the fixed route and then we'll talk about neighborlink and these are very significant changes I just want to be clear that you know when we go through what we have to go through in our public Outreach these are very big changes but I think it's needed it's been over 10 years since we've done a restructuring in um Simo County and that would have been when sunro came online and before that it was 2008 so here we are 10 years it's time to look at the system so what we're proposing for the fixed route obviously is reducing the amount of fixed route service in seol county and we want to focus our fixed route on those main corridors where we know we can get ridership where we know we have ridership and we know that we where we can connect people to businesses and services and so we're proposing to combine the link 103 and the link 34 into one route and that would be the primary route that would serve Highway 1792 from the SunRail station all the way to Fern Park uh superstop we also will combine link 23 and 434 into one route the link 23 would basically serve between Rosemont superpop and Winter Park frequency adjustments will also be made on link 436 North uh that would impact weekend weekday evenings and Saturday service and we're proposing no changes to link one 106 and 436 South we will be discontinuing several routes that serve the Lake Mary area and also in Sanford um and we are going to be looking at an expansion of our neighborlink service to allow those folks who live in those communities to still have access to Transit and I will say um we do get requests a lot from the city of Sanford about expanding Transit service so just putting these things out there for us to think about and consider as we go through this um process and we will adjust the span a service on several routes to match the writers ship so we look at writers ship we look at writers Ship by time of day weekend versus weekday and that's how we make adjustments um on um spans of service okay so this is what the fixed route Network would look like you can see there's a significant reduction in fixed drought Service uh mostly in Lake Mary in the Sanford area you see a 46 W the 46e the 34 uh the 45 um lots of changes here so um you know it's it's significant we still have a good amount of fixed amount service down in Altamont Springs in the southern Lakewood area so we are preserving uh some of where the most um of our activity occurs this is just a chart that shows headways are the proposed routes and I I I put this up here because you know headways are important and when we say headways we mean how often does the bus come so on those routes where we have service every 30 minutes you're really going to see a bigger usage of that route routes that run every 60 Minutes or even you know 100 20 minutes those basically are just your Lifeline routes folks that have no option no opportunity to use anything else those people folks will use those routes but people who have the ability to either choose transit or choose another mode they're more than likely not going to go the route that comes every hour all right so the second part of this is our uh neighbor link um improvements and I think this is really important this kind of gets it to what we talked about earlier about opening up more accessibility to transit in uh seimo County and neighborlink has actually been around since 2009 and it was a little bit ahead of its time back then um so we do have an on-demand service it's not a pure on demand service there are time points in our zone so the vehicle at a certain time will have to be at a location and part of what we're going to talk about is changing the way that we operate neighborlink and make it more like a true on demand service so we want to expand the neighborlink service in Simo County especially in those areas where we see a significant amount of fix route going away we want to focus neighborlink to be to be a community circulator so people can stay within their Community get to shopping get to the doctor's office get to school if need be and again we want to provide a true on demand service and this requires a change in the way we operate neighborlink but we're looking at doing that you know systemwide and we're looking at using smaller vehicles with a wait time of about 30 minutes and we'll talk a little bit more about that how it's going to work so the map you have in front of you here shows um what we worked on with SEO County staff and this is just a proposal uh I just kind of want to say that it probably will change um based upon you know further um working sessions we have and then the direction we go with uh if we're going to do this in house or we're going to do a private provider but you can see we're opening up a lot of the county to this on demand service especially where the fixed route is um going away now I do just want to put out a little bit of words of caution we have to be very careful we can't just simply say we're going to take away all the fixed route and put in on demand service on demand service is very limited it's it doesn't scale very well so you got to make sure that you're not there's not a high demand for ridership because if there is you're never going to be able to meet that demand and you're going to run into issues of having enough vehicles to provide the trips that you need to provide and and we've met with Votran in Valia County we've talked with them about how their system works and some of the lessons learned from them and I'm also pulling from my past experience in California where we operated nine on demand zones in our service area so there are some lessons to be learned and I just want to be very clear it is a great service it has a place um but we can't just think of it as a onetoone replacement for a fixed route the spans of service we had proposed for neighborlink um really this again is up for disc discussion and we'll work through that with the staff but we wanted to just kind of give you an idea uh so we would look at you know systemwide probably a minimum of 8 to 9 10 vehicles uh estimated a wait time of 30 minutes or less is what we would like to have and then um we are proposing um no service on Sundays there really is not a strong demand for this type of service on Sundays and uh even so really on the weekends but we are we are looking at trying to keep it consistent and keep service Monday through Saturday Saturday these two charts basically show the the the population and who has access to Transit so this chart represents fixed route and the blue line represents the um the current system we have so those are the folks that live within 3/4 miles of a fixed route you can see it's about little 115,000 and then we also break it down by the minority population total households so you can see the this is the folks who resign or work within 3/4 miles of a fixed route now you're going to see a big change here and this comes with the addition of adding the on demand zones you're opening up the county more people in the county more households in the county to have some kind of accessibility to Transit and that's kind of the beauty of microtransit and On Demand you have a defined Zone everyone within that zone can have access uh to the on demand service but again we just caution about size of the Zone the demand of the zone so there those are things that we will still have to work through cost um what I tried to do here was just show you fixed route cost and our current neighborlink cost and this is so you have the fiscal year 25 this is where we are today this is in the funding agreement I believe that you're going to be voting on later on so you have the fixed route uh total number of hours the cost and then going across the chart there you see what proposing for fiscal year 26 and we did this in full year so you could kind of get a feel for what are the savings going to be because we talked about savings early on and so what we're proposing if we go with the model of the fixed route reductions that I presented to you earlier we're really looking at a savings of about 3.85 million annually um just in reducing the fixed route service alone and again it's up to the county and your discretion how much of that you use to put towards an expanded on demand Service uh will be up to you so you're just cutting fixed route reducing service it's about 3.85 million so on demand service there's there's two different ways it could function and I wanted to to show this to you so you can kind of get an idea the first uh the first model would be basically what we have today links operates a service in-house but what we would propose would be to uh put out a bid for soft software so this is known as um software as a service model so there are companies out there who do provide the software uh rideo via does this um and um some other systems do this as well but links with own the buses links with own The Operators links would still maintain the customer service we would just contract with the private vendor for the software to actually dispatch the vehicles and tell them where to go and who to pick up next the other model we could look at is basically just doing a turnkey operation putting it out a bid um for vendors to propose and so this is what you see with via how it operates at uh Votran they have a total TurnKey operation so Vehicles customer service that is all with the vendor city of CMI does the same thing with freebie so they have the freebie that operates in city of CMI and this is the model that linkx basically uses for access links which is our PA Transit service so I don't want to forget about our pair Transit and Ada folks and I think this is important that we don't lose this part of it in our conversation but the biggest impact that will occur um as we work through this process and if we are going to reduce fix drought service is the immediate impact is going to be those folks who currently reside within 3/4 miles of a a buffer of a fixed route um per FTA regulations we have to provide them Paratransit service and so we do that at a red R rate so they're paying about I think $4 a trip now if the fix route goes away we still provide the service it's just that their cost is going to go up so that's something that we need to uh think about and be aware um when we talk about reducing fixed route service so going back to On Demand um one of the things that we can talk about and we' propos is possibly doing a pilot um with an on demand provider um we have had discussions with freebie I know your staff has met with freebie um they currently have a contract uh with Monroe County Transit down in Key West and that contract is piggyback so we could use it we could do a pilot and this would be um uh countywide this wouldn't just be one zone we would take all the zones in simol county and we would do a pilot with freebie just to kind of get a flavor for it you know to see how it goes and see if there's something that we really want to do and are interested in moving forward so I know it's a lot the timeline slide kind of lays it out there's a lot of things that we would have to um work through and things that have to take place so obviously we're here today um we'd love to receive some direction kind of what are your thoughts um how would you like us to proceed and then I think the biggest part of what we're going to have to do is think about Outreach to our stakeholders and Outreach to our customers um this could be very disruptive for folks who do use links and I recognize there might not be a million people in SEMO County using links but for those folks who do use links it's their Lifeline I mean that's how they get to work that's how they get to school so our Outreach to them is going to be really important and we want to make sure that we're listening to them that we're hearing them and that we try to do um what we can do to make it best for them so we have our our service um change process that we go through so we would do our public involvement we would need to make presentations to the links finance and audit committee to the links oversight committee then we'd have to go and make presentations to the links board so you can see in the timeline here that um you know we're really looking at next next year before any of this could be implemented um and that gives us enough time to really go and do those steps that we need to do we need to think about the title six implications you know for um those folks who are um underserved and especially in our underserved communities so that I'm going to turn it over to Tim thank you Tim's turning over to the clicker because I'm not responsible with that if you thought James had trouble we we'd be here forever just having me change one so um so the I'm presenting the third option and the third option is a bit of a different one so in the conversations we had with links there was a lot of discussions about zones and the number of zones and things like that the importance of zones and um as Tim and I were talking to microtransit providers we discovered a a different approach which was the City of Arlington Texas so with this I just want to present a little bit about how they're doing things so the City of Arlington believe it or not is is fairly similar to us in a lot of ways you'll see a chart here that compares Compares both if you take out our rural boundary we're at 160 square miles Arlington's at 100 we have a very similar population um we also have similar income levels our commute times are the same and we're both Suburban communities and for those not familiar with Arlington we have a Graphic here it is nestled between Fort Worth and Dallas and you can see there on the little uh the little shaded area and there's kind of just a spin around to give you an overall idea um so so Arlington was the largest city in the country without Transit prior to 2017 now prior to 2017 they did have an elderly and disabled uh service um and they because of that were a direct recipient for federal funding just for that um they were not part of the regional transportation systems in either Dallas or Fort Worth they were just kind of an an island out there with only that elderly and lwi income service in 2017 they established a micr Transit uh system but they did it differently than what James had just presented they did it as a single zone for the whole city they also did a corner to corner approach so instead of going door too they lined out a variety of Corners within the city um and my understanding is there's quite a lot of them and that's where you're picked up and dropped off they similar to what James talked about they have a 15 to 30 minute pickup window and a very similar schedule of a Monday through Saturday service their Fair structure is a tiered Fair structure depending on how far you go in their Zone the further you go the more you pay it's a$3 to5 they do offer passes uh like most transit systems um and then what they've done is they've made it free to lowincome and also students because it's one large Zone they had 75 shuttles in the zone and they move about 3 to 4,000 Riders per week within there now the their ridership they know for sure they have apps you have to register as a rider you have a profile and all those things so they they know those numbers are are fairly solid James talked a little bit about you know kind of the blending of the routes this is just in in the City of Arlington um as mentioned it is a single zone um and as mentioned as well they are not part of the Dallas or the for worth transit systems but they want connectivity to those so they have point locations where the microtransit can take you to a point to get on either of those transit systems and they similarly have a point into their commuter rail system now now what made it interesting was the cost to provide this um their overall cost for the on demand service the single zone excluding the elderly um and lwi income portions 11 to 12 million the low income in elderly which is is similar to a a Paratransit TD typee thing but there are some differences it's 2 to 3 million they do receive 6 to 7 million um as as I mentioned to you before because they are a recipient of federal funds already and then they also sub subsidize the low income with cdbg funds as you'll see on the chart so the net um the net cost of their General funds about 6 million um because they are a direct recipient they did talk about the amount of um reporting and things like they have to do to FTA so they have dedicated staff members that are involved with their transit system they actually have four although all four of them none of them are full-time dedicated to this so all of them have other duties with the city so we guess that there's probably two um full TI equivalent employees that are dedicated to this if when you take out their other duties so here's a slide that just shows seal County we're all familiar with it semal county is 345 square miles when you take out the rural boundary it um it goes to the 60 square miles but ultimately to get it to Arlington is the yellow area and and that is effectively um that's 100 square miles it's the area between I4 and the 417 as you can see it goes from the the southern boundary of the county up to Lake Monro um the other thing that we learned from not only looking at at Arlington and discussions with James at links and everything there's kind of un unlimited Zone configurations there's really a lot of ways to do this um all of them them have a transition period as James mentioned you've got to provide notification to writers you've got to market the new system you've got to do things like that if if you were attempt to get grants on your own you would need to become one of the direct recipients and there is also a time period to do that as well um because of this we we recommend that a solicitation is is really in order to to kind of look at the whole host of things going to be provided by the vendors and really not just look at one era one idea but but look at a bunch of them with cost compar cost comparisons there's also um as James indicated as well we found the vehicle ownership model changes depending on who it is some folks have the provider own the vehicle some of them that some of them the entities own the vehicles but we are recommending that that there should be connections into a fixed route system um like link so that way you're part of a regional player these are our recommended next steps uh we are recommending to um continue conversations with regional transit entities continue conversations with Valia County and see if there's some other Regional connectivity possibilities to identify sources for Grants to to help fund help fund this and then we're ultimately recommending to issue a solicitation for proposals and encourage links to to bid that with what James has shown as well as any other options they have so that way we have a full look at everything that's available um we believe the timeline will take a approximately a year um so here here is our recommendation um that's shown on the screen basically is what I said to to uh issue a proposal to uh look at a number of zones with connectivity to Sun Rail as well as fixed routes also have people who Pine on the uh obtainment of gr grants and then providing a invite to links to Bid And as due to the timeline we're also recommending to approve item 21 which was pulled from the consent calendar to um to do the funding agreement with lyx so with that um I'll be happy to take any questions thank you any questions for staff at this time sure want to start down there we'll start at this end commissioner her had her hand up first and work our way down the eyes that was an exceptionally thorough presentation so let's start with questions for links um why have the system revenues remained flat for so long let's take Co out of it I realize there's a dip but we're back up to where we started all those years ago right so I do have a team here with me do you I'm I'm going to have Lenny answer the questions uh that pertain to finance and budget thank you Mr chairman uh commission members the name for the record if you would Lenny Lenny anman CFO links um the system Revenue say flat part of it is the revenues from Fear Revenue as ridership has gone down that that Revenue has gone down a little bit um it is starting to come back up and not at the level it was preco but the rest of it is Grants from the federal government where we get a certain amount of dollars each year from FTA most of that is used for Capital because we don't have dedicated funding uh any monies that we take out of there come off of what's available for Capital Equipment so we take out approximately 6.8 million towards operating the fix ride each year which was a level that was recommended by the board of directors of links also about $2 and5 million towards the operation of the Paratransit operation any more than that would reduce us to the level of not having sufficient dollars for Capital uh revitalization beyond that we get a lot Grant from the state it stays fairly flat it's been in the 12 to4 million range for several years and it doesn't change uh drastically uh we have a little bit of advertising Revenue but it's been around $2 to3 million a year uh we only have so many buses we can't advertise more than we have bus buses to have out there when's the last time you changed fairs uh and while there's actually a was brought before the board we're actually going out to to do the analysis now to see if it warrants a uh fear change I believe the last time was what 2009 it was 2009 uh there have been analysis done twice since then both times it came back and the board recommended not increasing it but we are in the middle of that process again right now okay thank you the next question I think is going to be just a little bit harder because it's philosophical that was my easy question by the way I'm going to tell you that I sit here rather embarrassed having sat on your board for a year thinking that this work was actively being done by links on our behalf and finding out that it really wasn't and so if we choose to stay with links what is the assurance that this due diligence and I realize we're only 12% son of the pie and by the way Oola County if you're watching this maybe you want to have this due diligence done as well to make sure that we're we don't have routes when I look at the bar graphs around the underperforming routes that should have been identified years ago and adjusted years ago we vote on route changes how often a year on that board a minimum of three times a minimum of three times four in the years as I was in the year I was there but this isn't being being brought to the attention of the board and so I just can't fathom how this has gone on for all these years and I'd be remiss if I didn't say in the beginning I thought you were crazy commissioner lockheart but it has turned out once again that you were Visionary in terms of this isn't feeling right we got to dig we got to dig and thank goodness we're here so what would change in the links management process to assure that we never end up or any of your partners don't end up in this situation and how is it that we get let's not let's call it like it is we'll never get an equal footing to Orange County at this table but we ought to have an equal process in terms of protecting taxpayer money and if it's not happening down there it should happen there as well by the way yes I I hear what you're saying commissioner her and you know in my time at links this has been the first time that we have had a level of involvement from link uh Simo County staff so I will say having the involvement from the staff has been really [Music] important that's I'm I'm sorry to interrupt you but our staff sits on every one of your committees they attend regularly and this is the first time that you've had aggressive involvement at commissioner's lockart at commissioner lock Kart's demand and Direction those those are two different things we don't want to have to walk into a room kicking and screaming and you shouldn't have to commissioner and I agree with you and so my promise to you is that beyond what we do we provide monthly writers ship reports and quarterly writers ship reports in every board packet so we do make information available but my commitment is that we will go over and beyond that we will have constant communication with your staff and I will say in every service change we do communicate with staff so there are times where we may propose things and this may have happened in the past that frankly there wasn't a lot of you know interest from the staff level to make any kind of major changes to the system and I can understand because it's a big deal you know when you talk about discontinuing and fixed rout service it's a big deal so I can understand that but my commitment to you and to this commission is that as the interim planning director I will do I need to do to make sure that your staff Christian and Tim everyone understands where we are with writers ship if there are routes that are not performing I will bring it to the attention of staff and we will have that discussion uh and we will come back to the commission for any kind of recommendations or approvals and follow our uh approval process through our board and again I'm sorry that those things that happened in the past but my commitment is moving forward as long as I'm part of the links team I will make sure that we're we're doing what we need to do to make you comfortable when it comes to decision making time so as a process Improvement opportunity and this is really for the for you as the executive director Tiffany I think that there should be routine reporting of underperforming routes for the entire system to the board in a manner that says should we be rethinking these because we are 12% of the bigger piece of this so if you manage the overall cost of the system the 12% goes down as well even though the 12 stays 12 so the bigger picture of underperforming routes need to be addressed as a system whole is a big deal to that end I think you have a chart in here that plots the um ridership I would ask you to also plot on that same chart the cost over the year so it was ridership over the years I'd like to see the cost over the years plotted with that shared with your board and your partners okay we can do that because I think until you dashboard these items and put them together you don't realize the severity of the problem and and I I think that's part of the issue I would point out that the reason why you're getting this angst from me is that three quarters of our routes are below link standards I don't know why we even have a standard if you're talking about process Improvement there I don't it just doesn't make sense in your suggestions why is there no change suggested for link one which is clearly underperforming I think the majority of that route resides in Orange County and part of our process we have to look at the routes that impact Orange County as well so we were really trying to focus more on the routes that are wholly within Simo County but if you would like us to look at Route One um and come up with the recommendation we can do that commissioner we would just have to make sure that we're communicating and working very closely with Orange County staff as well on that route I certainly don't want to be hampered because there's a county line to making sure we have the most efficient and effective use so yes I would ask for that okay you said that the Paratransit cost would go up because the distance changes uh or whatever the reason was can you tell give me an idea of what it would go up from to and from so the cost of operating pair trans wouldn't change it's the cost to the customer that's my question yes so um FTA requires that we provide complimentary PA Transit service within 3/4 miles of a fixed route and so as a part of that program it is at a reduced rate and So currently those folks pay $4 a trip one-way trip now if the fixed route goes away then it goes to the $7 Fair the oneway fair that they would pay because that buffer is no longer there and that that is the federal requirement so they would have to pay the $7 fair so from $4 to $7 yes ma'am I just wanted to get that on the record because it sounded like it would go from $4 to $50 it's from $4 to $7 yes ma'am okay and then the last question I think I think just is warrants being discussed publicly why would we run an RFP As I understood it for free through links well I think that kind of goes back to part of what Christian was talking about the different options that we have now as Lynx being the regional transportation provider I mean we we would love to keep it whole keep it all intact and if there's a desire from the commission uh to look at a different model uh to operate our neighborlink service we're very open to that and to be honest with you we're looking at neighbor as a whole anyway so we are going to be probably looking at doing an RFP for all the neighborlink service to to make it a true on demand service to make it operate more like what you see in vucha county and down in CMI with freebie so the county the the county can choose to stay with links and and we would handle that part of it and we would do the RFP and that part of it or as Christian said you could go a different a different route but I think in the spirit of regionalism we would very much much want to be involved you know and be a part of that and really just to keep the transportation seamless for our customers and and for your residents as well so my commentary with regard to that is that I think at the point that we start to figure this out there may be parallel paths that have to be run at the same time I would certainly like to understand what options are available to seol county that may never make it through your system to this board because they go through the grind of all of your committees to the links board which is Orange County dominated and then we get what the result of that is and we would never know that we could have tweaked this played with that the other if we don't do this ourselves in addition to you doing it as well I agree that we want to stay Regional we also want to say wildly effective and wildly efficient at the same time so my the next I appreciate your answers and I appreciate your cander with all of that Christian I have questions for you you certainly in order to make the Arlington model work in Seal County it looks like you just chopped out a bunch of geography we kind of solving for the um I I think we we normalized it um I we normalized it though based upon where Transit is currently I mean there's not transit in the in the rural boundary other than other than Paratransit and things like that there is transit in on the other side of the county where we took out the warpa and there is bus that run up there now there there there are some there are some limited buses that that run out there if we go back to it's probably an underperforming route I appreciate but we struck it out of the out of the discussion well it's yeah it's a 46 routes as what we're talking about if we can go to that here we go so so there are some things that go over there you are correct um they are very underperforming you know as mentioned in our um as mentioned in our recommendation there there is a thousand ways to to kind of hack this up what we were attempting to do is say okay this is what the cost is for 100 square miles in in Arlington what does that look like in seminol County we're certainly not trying to say hey anyone to the west of I4 should you know should be you know a nogo for for Transit we're truly just trying to say Apples to Apples this is where it goes and to your comment this is really why we're recommending to put rfps out to get all these out there because there's a lot of discussion on how this going to go even when we said down with links you know we're moving things and we're looking at things but these are policy decisions truthfully they're not staff decisions of where the board would like that the whole attent was for the 100 square miles was to attempt to normalize it and show its close but it certainly could change all right that's it thank you chairman you sir okay commission delari thank you Mr chairman on one of your slides I think it's slide 17 that I have uh talks about the existing services and you have 6,644 weekday rers ships is that just SEO County those would be all the routes commissioner delari that's the what all of the routes that serve SEL and including the ones that partially serve Orange County so that's all is there any way there must be through technology just to peel out what's seal County wrers ship so what we what we do know is the routes that are just wholly contained within simol County and so if we just look at the routes that are wholly within simol County those average weekday boardings fall to around 1,600 so that's just the routes that serve only simol County so do we know how many riders are going into orange then do we know how many riders are going into orange yeah off the top of my head commissioner delari I don't know but I can certainly look at getting you those numbers because you talked about you know Regional where people from other parts of from our County are going into other parts of the region right I tried that a couple times it's really hard and hard is not the word it's difficult it's extremely difficult yeah I tried to go from Sanford down to the link station it took me two hours I understand and that's because I made all my stops and I made the transfer as well so I'd like to get some information on that because really how many people are really going into orange I mean there may be a bunch I don't know that number yet yeah but I'd like to know what that number is to see the importance of it and to put the weight behind it uh and I'm going to Echo what commissioner her talked about as well as what we're hearing from commissioner Lockard you know you're all the experts you should be telling us the time we get involved is once a year when we talk about the budget and we've always been told the budget's the budget and you know I don't really hear on a regular basis of where the savings are coming from or if there is savings or what you're doing to increase ridership you know education is the big thing we all know that and you know how are you getting New Riders are you just waiting for people to say I need to take links to go someplace that's not how you get New Riders but I'd like to know how many people going in from seol to Orange okay and what that number actually is and commissioner har was talking about links one uh uh Route One it goes to prove the point unless we ask a specific question it's very difficult to get information from you all I mean until she asked that question you didn't tell us that it's an underperforming uh route it's a route that we should be looking at it's like pulling teeth sometimes getting information it's very difficult and then as I go through your presentation on side 20 it talks about the ridership metrics that's just the fix route that doesn't even talked about the par Transit which is just as important as well as the need for uh working with the individuals for title 6 I'd like to how all that plays into uh a role uh you know through technology if people are buying digital bus passes they should be able to figure out where they're getting on and where they're getting off I would think so commissioner we do have technology you know people can and we're actually switching to a whole new Fair system so we're about to upgrade Our Fair system uh so people can use their phone to tap on you know to pay the fair when they get on and also tap with credit card so just stop right there so if you're doing a new uh digital ridership ticket is it paired with SunRail at this it's either yes or no yes or no no no okay I know the answer and what I will say commissioner so we have to pay for it again twice well we have transfers so I mean people but I mean if we want to pair the TU again we have to pay for it again commissioner that is something that we would have to work on SunRail with yes so why do we have to pay for it if you're just doing it again we it's government money can only spent once I understand commissioner I understand and what I will say is um you know people they can tap on tap off and that gives us a unique riter right I understand now almost 50% of our folks pay with cash so it's very hard for us to track individual writers and I know that's a question we get a lot um you know and and one way to do that is you know people tapping on you have unique identifiers and SunRail is a good example of that I mean most people pay with you know the tap to pay thing now there too so all right you talk about your wrers ship metrics and about the link standard what's the National Standard that we should be looking at as well is the link standard below the national or above it so the National Standard is 20 20 passengers per Revenue hour is a t is a national standard for fixed drop bus and the granted it's a guideline there's not like the Ft but we should be looking at things not just nationally but in the Southeast what's that wrers ship number and not just what we think we need to be looking at so so we look at our our peers our regional peers and we have several in Florida that we look at and uh including the southeast and so really for for the southeastern region for Florida 15 passengers per Revenue hour on a fixed rout bus is pretty good I mean that's you know but if we do education and try to get people to promote it it should be higher then oh almost definitely you know if we had more people riding the bus getting people on those buses then absolutely 20 passengers per Revenue hour that should be the minimum that's and that's all based on education incentives and getting people used to riding Transit I mean that's the bottom line uh I go to slide 24 it talks about uh uh removing some of the uh the routes which is 45 46e 46 West what's that going to do to those areas uh from the uh economic aspect of it has anybody looked at that well commissioner I there's no doubt that people will be impacted and I think the is really going to be more on those folks who use those routes for their daily travel needs um the economic impact of removing the bus route I can't sit here and tell you I know what that's going to be I we haven't looked at it yet we have not looked at an economic impact um to be honest with you that's not something we always look at when we're talking about discontinuing a route it's it's really more about the customer and the passengers and how that's going to impact their daily lives okay so we also have a transportation model and a traffic Transit model the county does as well as the region how does all that play into that aspect have we looked into that going to ask Christian I'm not asking you I'm asking our staff we we have not compared it to any Regional Transportation models there's there's so many options out there and that could certainly be that could certainly be part of an RFP process to align it with that but there's just so many options as to as to what could be picked here okay so we haven't looked at our transportation master plan at all how this actually plays into it then no sir okay okay again you talk about expanding the uh the new service if we were supposed to if we did do this with the neighbor links uh I'd like to start talking to the cities about this to get their buyin not just their buyin but their what their needs are and how they want to be a partner with us because I think that's just as important uh cuz I think we need to bring the Seven Cities in because I'm sure we're going to hear from them there's no reason why I don't bring them in earlier commissioner we do have that built in our timeline so we will be meeting with the municipalities with staff I like the aspect of uh what our staff was looking at about the Arlington uh model because of the uh the grant aspect of it that's where they really get their savings from so I like to get some more information on that and if we were looking at uh you through your recommendation i' like to include the Seven Cities as well as the hospital and the college and uh I think it's important that the hospital all the hospitals and the colleges are involved the big biggest aspect of it is that we've gotten reports from our staff that uh individuals are missing their uh medical appointments it's extremely high I think the last time I remember is like 30 35% of the people are missing their medical appointments I want to make sure that we're not going to be causing more trouble with that and we haven't really addressed that yet we haven't really addressed the par Transit issue as well so there's a lot of things that we still got to keep on pulling to get information from you uh I'd like to see another work session to address all these issues I think we're just starting to uh scratch the issue uh and I think for the surface we keep on talking about Transit which is important uh we need to have some dialogue with our community the entire County in the Seven Cities but uh it's very difficult to get information from the staff of links and we do this once a year we've done it not to this depth but we've done it before I remember the year that they were going to cut the uh service to the Goldsboro area that's how the labor neighborhood links happened because there was three or four rows in the back of people sitting here talking about how we're cutting the bus service and uh if it wasn't for them we wouldn't be having the neighborhood link area uh served and the same thing with a veto now so uh I don't know what the formula is but I don't do buses to the way you do but I also think that we should be going out on the street ourselves and doing a par uh a duel uh uh track of either doing ourselves uh as it's recommended here by including the Seven Cities in the hospitals and the school college not the elementary schools I'm talking about the college when I say schools but I think that's just as important and uh there are dollars out there we need to have a holistic approach and I don't see that links is bringing the best foot forward to us to to explain what needs to happen yet and I'm still waiting for that dialogue and that's where I stand thank you Mr chairman anything else nope I'm good commissioner lockart all right um thank you James I know you have kind of been sent as tribute and so you you are very new to Links um and so I appreciate you being willing to to bring that knowledge with you from your prior roles and and help us figure out what's going to work best for semal County um one of the things that I have found in my short tenure on the lynx board is that um to missioner to commissioner her's point you know regionalism is a is a has benefits and drawbacks because you you do only get the benefit of what the collective hive mind is bringing forward um and there could be a lot of things that are left on the table that may work very well for some in Old County that we would not be able to implement for a lack of being able to um persuade others on the board for whom it it may not be a benefit for them right we are very distinctly different um communities one not better or worse just different we we utilize Transportation differently in seol County than in downtown Orlando certainly so I do think it is incumbent upon us to do our own uh research and RFP RFI process um parallel to use the same word that commissioner her used um with whatever it is that links is is pursuing um talking about cost Effectiveness and and getting information and how do we make the entire um system more cost effective more uh efficient I'm not sure that every partner has the same passionate goals that we do about the cost Effectiveness um not only do we have different goals but I think we have different pain thresholds our pain threshold in seminal county is very low um other other partners you know are are a little bit higher when I've talked and asked before about how can you know how do we get the cost down the the response that I have received in the past is we'll tell us what you want to pay and we'll build a we'll build a program for that and it feels very much like um as a woman trying to buy a car at a car dealership well darling you just tell me what you want your monthly payment to be and I'll find that car for you and I and when your husband comes in we'll help you and and I'll don't play that so that is not the way that we are going to get to from my perspective efficiency and and cost benefit analysis and and working on this um solution one of the things that I have loved learning about freebie and I did um sit at a Florida Association of counties conference where they were a sponsor and had a a um a session that you could come and sit and learn about microtransit um they are not just a Transit Agency they are actually partnering with the private sector and they view themselves as being a partner in Economic Development because of the way that they um utilize their app and partner with with businesses and downtown areas and um I I can see there being something very unique and beneficial about that model um but I would but I don't know as much about the Vias and the Arlington and what have you so I I would still like to have um an RFP where people can come in and and educate us and Pitch the the particular positives of of their model um the college I agree with you wholeheartedly the college currently funds a uh portion of the links budget it's a from seminal count it's a very very small portion um I was able to get numbers from Dr Loren that she had been provided by Links of ridership numbers um we had the same conversation about how do we drill down and find out exactly how many of our students are utilizing the service it was it's nearly impossible we think there's a maybe a a good guesstimate out there but one of the things that we are not able to do right now with the current model is help our SCH enrollment students who are attending one of our seal County traditional high schools get to class on a college campus and in talking with Dr Loren and our executive team we would love to see how that could be done any any way that we can increase access to education at seol State College we want we want to do that I don't think with the numbers that we have right now we can say that that that the money that we contribute I'm weing the my college hat for a moment U the money that we contribute at seal State College we really don't know how much that's benefiting in contributing toward getting students access to education there's no way for us to know um but we're we're excited about the opportunities potentially with um our traditional students and dual enrollment students the slide and commissioner delari kudos to you for seeing numbers on these slides because I don't see them on mine but I had to print it out to get it okay the proposed service improvements fixed route on the link slide and I'm I'm so sorry I don't know what number it is I probably have it on the computer which one are you looking for commissioner uh proposed service improvements fixed route maintain service on key corridors is the first bullet and we talk about combining the two the four different Curr proposed is that what you're looking for the current a slide that says proposed service improvements at the top that one so the fourth the third sub bullet frequency adjustments to Links 436 North on weekday evenings and Saturday are those frequency adjustments being adjusted up or down I believe we're adjusting those down okay um and the when I compared the links average weekday ridership by Route bar graph with the existing service map I was looking at you know where where are instead of continuing to fixate on the underperformers because that's my nature is to focus on the glass glass being half empty I'm like I'm going to flip this I'm going to look at the ones that are actually performing well where are those and 102 is on the bar graph but I don't see it on the map or in the bullet it's the it's the one commissioner on 1792 South going into Orange County it's South it's south of uh elamont Springs at the superstop if you see it if you pull the map at the bottom down firm Park South isn't it yeah it's a little purple uh that's the existing service yeah who else go to the next slide Tim I think it shows the 102 bullet on mine uh that up go back so we go 46 West 103 106 cut it off 102 is on mine I'm on the computer service if you go to the proposed service slide it shows right there's proposed it's on proposed but it's current it's it's also there it's just not on the map okay yes ma'am all right so that's um so that route and then even even though that seems to be a higher performing route the the route that's coming up from 43 4 the let going up to the Altimont Mall one even though it's an underperforming route somehow we wound up with some type of demographic information on the folks who ride that route can someone remind me where what we learned about that go ahead yeah I recall it there's there's a lot of folks coming from the Eatonville area and they come up toward the mall so we suspect that they may be employees at the mall or the hospital but there was quite a bit of getting on the bus in um in Orange County there was some heat zones there at certain times and then and then there was heat zones in the in the evening in the opposite direction so we're opining that there are workers going there from Eatonville area got it so that's the kind of information that is probably going to help commissioner delari with his question right sure yes and there's got I'm sorry there's got to be a way of doing that there has to be technology exist you know and I I failed to mention this in part of my presentation is we you know we we we record ons and offs so we know when people get on we know when people get off and and the figure just within simol County we get about 2.2 million boardings in simol County alone so those are owns and offs so significant amount of people and we can look at the routes rout specific at ons and offs like where people majority get on where majority get off so we can we can dig down a little bit deeper commissioner into that okay I I think that will be very very helpful I understand that anytime we ask someone to change what they've been doing whether it's for six months or six years we're rocking the boat we're moving the cheese pick the analogy but I think what we are saying as a board is we are not wanting to change it to make it worse or less frequent we are wanting to change it to make it exceedingly better we want to change it so that is much more user friendly and gets people where they want to go with a lot less um aggravation and at the same time save sein old County taxpayers millions of dollars amen so when we when we have an opportunity to improve service reduce cost I just I think the I think our citizens and our Riders who utilize the service will be thrilled I I I recognize initially depending on how we deliver the message and how we do these Community meetings there may be a lot of concern but I think the message at least the message from this commissioner is we are here to make this better for you not worse it it's going to take make some adjustment because we're going to f it's any changes change but um we are not trying to make this difficult for our citizens or or less uh beneficial to them good commissioner Constantine whenever you're at the end of the the Spectrum here a lot of things have already been said that uh we can all agree with so I'm going to try to keep mine as short and brief as possible and just hit the highlights of what I think is important Christian Tim great job thank you for you really digging into this Tim I know you and I have had numerous conversations over the course of time uh ever since you know I I was back in lyx and and you were appointed and and Christian I know that this was something that um you really got into and and you know really got to the meat and potatoes James thank you very much I know this is a difficult and I want to thank all the all the link staff that's here today you know I I don't want to dwell on the past although the fact the matter is that that you know we do know that covid has had a great deal of of of uh effect on the service the costs uh we also know that a lot of that because of the dollars that came in from the federal government that was able to soothe the problem so a lot of people didn't look at the long-term issue issues that were going to come up uh we also know that if you want to go even before that cuz we've been part of this for 32 years that we've had time and again um you know leadership problems there that um we've had to adjust on the on the Fly um when I came in it was you know we had to we found Mr Harrison to come in from uh Orange County and um so I know that that you know that that was something that uh caused a lot of um um disruption in in in all of the uh services and and you know this is tough I mean there's no guaranteed income I mean if we want to really go boil it down there is no you know fixed income for links other than what they get from the federal government and the and and the revenue Partners which you know that comes almost exclusively especially with us out of the General Revenue so when you look at all that it's as my fellow colleagues have indicated and again I'm trying to boil this down times have changed and technology has changed and we have stayed on a on a on a on a course that is not taking those into consideration so I'm just going to tell you as we go forward some of the things that I believe I do believe that we are part of regionalism and we need to to respect that and not everybody's going to get an equal deal in regionalism but we all represent you know um you know a a community that by the least of us um you know we cannot rise without all of us Rising so saying that um I'm going to boil this down to we protect we need in any system we get to protect the least of us that's what government's about protecting the least of us and that that that to me that we're talking about what has been a growth issue at lynx and that's PA Transit that is the one thing that whatever we do Christian whatever whatever path we decided to go we need to make sure and and commissioner delore is correct I mean it was like 30 35% were were missing their doctor's appointments or they were having to what 24 hours in advance you know to try to get a ride we need to we need to change that we also need to make it more coordinated especially since we have 1 2 3 four four stops in seol County with the last miles SunRail I think one of the reasons even though a SunRail is underutilized at this point also everything you know you can't sit there and have it full all the time but I think that's another reason that Lynx is you know has reduced nobody has said it but reduced in the in the amount of Travelers however if that was more coordinated I think with the Le with the last smile I think that that would especially in seol county that would be to a great more benefit for all of us I agree with commissioner um lockart because I've also talked to freebie and there's others it's not just freebie there's many different companies but I would you know I would love to see their success in Monroe County but I will tell you that um we need to look at that we need to look at that as part of the a whole integrated system um I can't disagree with anybody that the communications has not been there I mean you all be the first one to admit MIT that uh that it needs to improve I also believe that we do because we are paying for the entire state county that we need to coordinate with the cities and try to make sure that we get them on board I can remember many times um when I was in the legislature and even when I was on this board how Altimont Springs and um Lynx has had disagreements um and uh other cities have had disagreements so we need to coordinate that if we're going to put something on uh ourselves we need to make sure that we do that and the last thing I'm going to put a face on this every one of us has seen whether it's at Mo boards at links boards at other Transit boards a seol County resident by the name of Joanne oh yeah that's their every single meeting and God love her I mean she finds a way to get there usually on time usually on time and wanting a route to the Ovito bowling alley but oh in the swimming pool CL Road Country Club Road and and she finds a way to get the links to Mo to everything through through SunRail through lyns through every time can I interrupt you for a second real quick about Joan I actually spent the day with her riding sunro I was amazed and impressed not just with her knowledge but the way she rides SunRail in lynx and she knows the the routes better than I do the way she integrates everything is amazing I can remember when we usually had one Mo meeting at Habitat for Humanity and she found a way to get there oh yeah and then I remember her looking around trying to get her a ride back which is all the way on Mercy a ride back back to the to the to the sunre okay I digress what I'm saying is say is this the short version that you were yes it is because I was interrupted I mean not not I I appreciate it no it's okay but what I'm trying to say is anything we do anything we do it's got to be a better service for people like that cuz that's who we're really trying to serve the least of us the people that need this 100% to get anywhere get to the paramedic Olympics uh uh whatever it is you know the bowling out that you know that the Special Olympics the special did I say pyramed I'm sorry Special Olympics whatever it is I mean I she goes there 247 s days you know that's that's what she wants but what I'm saying is we need to find a way to make sure that she has the opportunity and I use she collectively has the opportunity to get from one location to another commission that's it commission I recommend spending a day with her I learned a lot I spent a lot of time with if y'all could go to one of the slides on the the status quo portion for me please showing the bus routes links current services and semal County no it's got a picture of a bus and a pair of Transit bus oh this one keep going back I think we go back it's your blue Pages it's in the beginning oh oh it's yours there you go a lot's been said I'm not going to say it all again first my first year in office Tim Jax and I had a conversation about how broken Lynx is you all are all good people don't I don't want you to take this wrong as a businessman when I looked at all the modeling and what's happening this is not efficient for seminal County the model is Antiquated it's outdated this type of transit system belongs in a core City Center not throughout the entire or MSA of of Orlando 11 fixed route bus links two neighborhood Ling zones and the par of Transit and we're paying $14 million a year just just let that sink in for just a second that's a lot of money I thank commissioner lockart for accepting the appointment I knew she would be able to dig in and get some answers and get our staff uh involved so thank staff for for doing that there was a couple things that were said I think we have to put in perspective is each county has its own perspective of what they find important um and and I think it's been said not necessarily what seol county finds important underperforming in seol county is going to be a far different narrative than underperforming in Orange county or city of Orlando etc etc so so as far as I'm concerned I've been ready to rip the bandid off the links discussion for now six years um and really put a modern model in place that is serving the the citizens in a true efficient fashion with the least amount of dollars I don't know that we do away with all lengths I think we need to maintain a corridor through the spine of our County going north and south I think you need a hybrid program maybe stay with lyns on some routes and then we need to adopt our own our own modeling for the others uh whether it be freebie or one of their competitors I've met with freebie uh moo uh I'm familiar with some of the others but it's got to get fixed and I don't believe going with this premise that rfps would be run by Links quite frankly they can't turn enough they're not Nimble enough they're too big of an organization they're too weighed down again they're good people but their model is just not designed to turn as quick as we needed to turn and quite frankly I think it's been said it needed to turn five six 10 years ago um you've heard some of the things that have been said fairs haven't changed since 2008 2009 um there are people in our our community that that have to have transportation but arguably at $14 million a year I'm pretty sure we could get a frequent card with Uber and have all the people we need to run anywhere we want throughout this region so I'm a fan of not going with links doing rfps we do our own RFP and we have discussion with what we stay minimally with links as far as a North South Route so that's my two cents worth commissioner lock let's try to wrap it up well I know that staff is looking for direction and so I want to make sure that we're giving the county manager some consensus to move forward one of the things that I'm because I'm I agree that we need to move as fast as possible and belaboring this is not going to benefit anyone really is there a possibility of moving forward with the RFP while starting a type of pilot with freebie can can the two be done at the same time go ahead and start working with them on a pilot and put a uh an RFP out on the street because I think once we start to see how it's utilized in maybe some one of our more frequently utilized areas we we may learn a lot one of the things James says you know we're we've learned a lot and we continue to learn what works and doesn't work and we may wind up putting something in an RFP with an assumption that we want it to be built a certain way but through the work of of a a pilot program we may learn some different things and to save time and and get things moving more quickly I just didn't know if that was a possibility if staff recommended it recommended against it what that would look like and that would be for us right we would we would run the pilot right so uh the consensus I heard was is we would like to do our own RFP process and moving forward and let links do what they want to do and then we can see what comes out of that my narrative falls into what the recommendation pretty much is while they explore that and just let the staff handle it at the staff level report back to us what their further recommendations are okay you lost me then because I thought I last slide so my discussion was discussion with links as well as RFP for the other no this says to invite links to submit it doesn't say coordinate with them okay that's a play on words my expectation well well no it's not very if we're doing our if if we're going with the recommendation which as I see it is we're going to go out on our own and create an RFP and Lynx is welcome to respond to that RFP I was thinking that my question was going with the recommend and then while we are doing that RFP would there be a some rationale to starting a pilot program so that we're learning and not wasting time in that learning process Mr chairman I think what you're trying to say is the last line invite Lynx to submit a proposal among amongst others well first of all Lynx does not have a dedicated free V type service so if you're going to if you're asking them to solicit they have nothing to solicit in that room neighbor link they neighbor neighbor link understood and we have that service and so they can have the ability to submit alongside and all I'm saying is I personally am not interested in keeping all of our eggs with links it's not cost effective I think we're saying I think we agree yeah that's what I'm saying with the recommendation that staff's given us go ahead the staff let me have further questions on that no if you'd like it just for my clarification is that or well we got into a pilot program I'm not I'm not there at the pilot program section yet but so couple things on the pilot program and then if if would maybe just clarifying where I think uh I think we're on the same page but perhap perhaps a little little different vernacular but um the issue with a pilot program is obviously can it be done yes there's a a bunch of things that can be done when there's a adjustments to the service there's a time that it takes place to do it they have to go through that whole process of posting and things like that so there's potentially a um you know there's a start and stop and how that lines up in the timeline could be problematic not to say not to do it that's it one reason as staff we're recommending an RFP is we weren't comfortable just kind of establishing a Zone and saying Yep this is it this is Utopia there's many things that come before this board that staff has a very definitive opinion or or what they believe is a solution on it this one has so many variables that I think it's difficult and they come into policy things so that was one reason we didn't recommend one of the one of those options even though we spent a ton of time with links trying to come up with things It ultimately just came you know we're not policy makers but where what I what I think I'm hearing is the communication with with links and their AB ability to bid and not bid um and I and I think there's two slides and I apologize I think I may have um I may have caused this confusion if you go to the next steps there's a thing in there that says uh continue conversations with regional transit entities about efficient service of the future and then on the recommended action there's about the provide so I think there's some confusion on on what my intent was in there so this is the part I was hoping to clarify um what I mean by that is the the first bullet on the next steps say staff has not recommend that we remove ourselves from a Regal regionalism approach that there there are ways to reduce a footprint in the traditional manner that we've had but still keep in a regional model and that's really what the first bullet is meaning is we should look at scale that back so we could go with an Arlington approach of having two or three stops and and okay you just get to a stop and you go through that or we could go to an approach like commissioner zauer mentioned and say okay we'll keep a 1792 route or a 436 route and these are things that quite frankly we'd like the proposers to look at one of the things as staff that we would like to suggest for proposers including links would be all right here's our writers ship here's what we have suggest some things back and then kind of set a framework of okay we would want a minimum of three points and one that's on a north south one on an East and one on a West maybe that's one thing or we want no more than whatever the basic number of fixed routes we were keeping on that and we're amable to any option in between so I I that was what the intent was bullet one is to continue that dialogue make it more efficient but at the same time that's not that's not excluding links from bidding that's working in conjunction with them as well as private providers ho hopefully that clarified some things and I apologize I'm that's what my thought process was Mr chairman if we're looking to try to build consensus I think the next steps makes a lot please go back right I think the next steps makes a lot of sense I I think that that those four bullets are what we're all kind of saying in one form or another and I think what Christian just articulated um so I think that that's where we should go Mr CH great the only thing I would add is that we need to be including the hospitals in the Seven Cities I know it's not on that but I want to make sure that it's on because I don't want people to say well it's not on there we didn't agree to it yes and the school and and Community College and I mean when I said school I all the schools yeah don't mean Community College commission her I I still want to go back to the concept of a pilot at the same time we're going out to bid I think if we're going to do that I think the there should be a not a purchasing solicitation but a request from all potential vendors to say do you have any interest in piloting something it's going to have to be for a date certain and they're going to have to be willing to make that investment knowing that an RFP is going out I think that will be self-limiting in and of itself so I wouldn't do it with one vendor over the other but I would do it as a general request to say is there any interest in this and then bring that back so that we know where that goes the RFP process I would tell you that my perspective on the setting up the parameters of what we want is not to do that the worst responses to rfps that we that that ever happen in my industry is when somebody puts parameters in there that we have to work around we can't make it efficient when parameters are put in there by non-experts which we've all admitted we're not experts so I think the parameters need to be General that we want the population that needs to be serve to be served they should be able to identify that that that we want speed that we want 30 minutes or less that we want connectivity to links that we want all of that's the type of parameters we need to put in there not we need four stops and here's where we want them to be correct and and to commissioner H point I mean they have their own model in it's all taken from existing stuff that already I mean there you freees doing Miami they're doing uh Coral Gables they're doing a Ventura they're doing other places and so are these other entities who have those metrics to be able to rely upon um it's going to be working in conjunction with those entities to tell us what the best service routes are and where the best area to be served is so I I think I have no desire to take what links numbers are and give it to a vendor and say this is what you're going to bid on these routes I mean that's I think that's a waste of time I don't think that was the suggestion I think it was giving some parameters to it I do think it would be beneficial for us to establish what our budget is and so this is hard work for this board probably for Darren but it would probably be a really good idea for us to put out a number that says if our current number with links is going to make one up is $15 million and we want to spend 10 then we ought to put the thing out that says for $10 million what is the best transportation we can get for our citizens with these minimum standards in this community that would we would get some really cool responses if we do that otherwise we're going to have an upend number that we're not going we're going to be two years out because we get stuff back that we can't afford yeah I'm not a fan of putting a number on the street and ask them to Comm in at that number uh I'm a bigger fan of letting them tell us what works best and what has worked best in other locations and what the costs are associated with that and if we want to expand that service reduce that service there should be a number that comes along with it we can all have that discussion so is your thought that we're willing to spend more than we are with lyx I I am not willing to spend more than lyx and that's not the question well you don't have your answer yet I mean you're going to ask somebody to come in and say look at this links today what we spend today understood well that's the top end 14 million there you go that's the top end and that's with 2 million offset being subsidized so we got the numbers earlier and you want to go back to those slides the numbers earlier with the FTA funding and the other grant money that could come in so there's just make sure on the this is the this is the Arlington one is that the one you were looking at you looking okay something that's already exist happening taking place understanding it's not a plug and plug here but this is something that is real time has happened and what they're what's occurring correct that that's correct these are numbers we got from Arlington the one thing to the one thing I just want in the sake of full disclosure is the FDA 537 funds you know we would have to reach that designation a recipient other going to the region Mr chairman yes I thought could be and there's a lot of great input here uh you know waiting another meeting you know or sometime in December and having staff bring us back an actual timeline with what they can put some thought behind it instead of us just flee wheeling up here and say you know what is the best approach to do this that may be the best Avenue and actually give us an outline of what they think we should be asking in an RFQ or an RFP uh what we should be doing the timeline how we should be handling all this and let's put some thought behind it so that we can all digest it over the and that's why the next steps made so much sense correct I understand that that's what I would do I agree I think staff's already started those dialog and I understand it Mr chair let's just put it more together on a piece of paper for us that's all so do everybody agreed when we move forward with the next steps yes great there you go fantastic we the sorry I'm sorry I I was just going to say do we now go back to 21 yes okay so I'll move approval of 21 second I have a question on second further discussion for the county manager I'm sorry delari uh we're agreeing to renew the contract for links uh for the uh next year or this year which is just a little bit above $14 million and I would imagine that if we do a pilot program or a program that comes in before this contract is up that we would be adjusting our Revenue our cost of link that is correct just want to make sure that that's clear yes and I just want to make sure I'm clear on what we were're doing so we're going to go with the next step slide that uh staff showed you we're not doing anything with an RFP at this point we're actually putting it together with a timeline and we're bringing that back possibly at the next meeting to show you you know what the what that would entail right is that But to answer my I just want to answer my question first because it's yes no you're correct it's the question that the motion that's on the table am I correct by assuming that yes okay yes now we can go to your question well I don't want to get finish that is there any further discussion on the motion well in the county manager attempt to clarify I have a question are why are we holding up putting together the RFP no we could actually put that together I thought this board wanted us to bring it back for you to look at yes that's what I heard that's why I just want to clarify you're not waiting to put it together you're going to breing you're work you're working diligently on it and you're bringing it to us by our December board meeting correct okay got it a draft any further discussion see none all those in favor I opposed like sign seeing none carries unanimous okay next item up is utilities master plan what's the flavor of the board you want to go Ahad and work through lunch or do you want to take lunch and have them come do this after take lunch that's okay with the rest of it we got a little longer on that one than I anticipated so you want to do this now or do you want to do it this we've got time this afternoon I'd rather do it this afternoon so I actually get into it is that going to do anything for your No in fact they they were all notified that this could go at 1:30 get pushed to 1:30 if you all are are willing to do it at start it with at 1:30 the utilities master plan they so be it we'll return at 1:30 we'll be in recess till 1:30 thank you all very much [Music]