welcome to the April 15th uh budget workshop number four commissioner Atinson for the pledge i pledge algiance 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 just just a quick announcement for today we we will not have commissioners Goodson or Alman um with us today so yes
i was wondering if I could request that that we do four hours and end at five o'clock today okay we have a request for 5:00 pm time certain commissioner Delaney second okay
all right we'll all agree okay perfect all right we're going to end at five today okay frank okay we're going to get started with natural resources amanda Elmore all right good afternoon commissioners i'm
Amanda Elmore deputy director of natural resources and I'll be be presenting the other environmental programs in our department virginia Barker ended the last budget workshop with an overview of one of the department's programs the Save Our Indian River Lagoon Program or Sorrel that you see on the right in
green i'll be giving you the overview of the programs in blue and their associated funding and expenditures recognizing that there are 13 other departments eager to present after me i will move very quickly and I'll apologize in advance for the pace of my presentation if we run out of time for
questions I'll be happy to get you more information at the break or at your convenience just my opinion but I think we've I've noticed the number of slides keeps uh going down so yes I'm at 16 minutes all in so don't uh don't rush
yourself unnecessarily i I I feel pretty optimistic about things today okay all righty um so some fast facts we provide varied services over the five programs the budget is about $50 million this year we've had about 10 million million in grant funding and an additional 8
million in ARPA dollars that we encumbered before the end of last year for storm water projects we have 75 positions and we enjoy a pretty low vacancy rate with six vacancies our employees are g geologists engineers and environmental specialists that are absolutely dedicated to our mission all
of the program managers have been with the county more than 20 years they are experts and I'm honored to work with them every day and all our employees we provide thousands of environmental reviews we oversee environmental cleanup we manage Bvard's beaches and waterways and we build storm water projects for
flood mitigation and water quality we also have a support services program that helps keep all of that moving forward very importantly we partner with public works for ESF3 and serve our community before during and after storms virginia presented the overall
budget at the last workshop that includes soil but today I wanted to focus on the $50 million that comprise comprises the programs previously mentioned almost 99% of that funding is restricted stormwater assessment grants permitting fees and contracted charges for services we have
a small amount of general fund that you see in green 687,000 for environmental code enforcement and boating and waterways i'll provide more detail on those sections and services in slides to come we largely spend our dollars on capital improvement projects
compensation and benefits and operating their restricted revenues for or reserves for multi-year projects you'll see this pattern in all of the program expense pie charts the first program I'd like to highlight is environmental resources management this program primarily
provides permitting and policy implementation environmental code enforcement and resilience efforts the budget is $2 million mostly permitting revenue but you'll see the largest portion of our general for fund allocation here
$541,000 that general fund supports the environmental code enforcement section for the last four decades environmental specialists have implemented the board's policies and land development regulations typically we review all permits that affect horizontal or vertical development for impact on the
county's environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands coastal dunes aquifer recharge areas and surface water buffers our regulations are typically more stringent than the municipalities for instance we require tree and canopy preservation depending on lot size and use and additional coastal setbacks from
the D coastal construction control line we also provide incentives that encourage the use of low impact development principles natural resources is one of the reviewing agencies coordinated by planning and development for zoning and land use changes and commercial industrial and residential development
we also capture environmental reviews where there is no vertical construction or planning and development trigger for permit for projects like rock preventments filling and excavation also called land alteration we issue natural resource specific permits we carefully monitor monthly permit numbers and
revenue what we're seeing is that al although permit revenue numbers are down over the last couple years those reviews are taking longer as development pushes into more and more marginal properties because there are more environmental issues that we need to review for compliance like planning and development
code enforcement we are reactive when it comes to environmental violations our three natural resources officers together with our environmental specialists work to educate property owners and formulate restoration plans but these cases tend to be complicated involve multiple departments and state
agencies and therefore can take a little longer to resolve than other code enforcement cases this program is also forward-looking always seeking to propose policy and ordinance improve improvement when necessary and appropriate we have worked collaboratively with planning and
development to formulate and implement the peril of flood policies ear and the barrier island area of critical state concern that Billy detailed for you in his presentation we also partner with other regional and state agencies on funding and initiatives the remediation and
compliance program focuses on safeguarding our drinking water starting with the fuel storage tank and hazardous waste sections they provide our first line of defense compliance inspections to prevent pollution and leaks our geologists and engineers oversee cleanup sites as well under state
contract this is a $3.6 $6 million program entirely funded through state contract or charges for services and business tax receipt fees for hazardous waste there's a $50 sir charge per Florida statute on hazardous waste generators the petroleum remediation or
cleanup section is the largest section in this program and doubled in size last year when D asked us to expand our oversight to a sixth county that board approved expansion means that we now oversee this program for the entirety of the Indian River Lagoon and Okachobee
local staff manages multi-year cleanup plans for more than 500 sites we also provide fuel tank compliance inspections for 350 sites in Indian River and Bvard counties and we inspect hazardous waste generators in Bvard this is an unfunded
state mandate but we collect a hazardous waste assessment fee in conjunction with business tax receipt now turning to the small but mighty program beaches boating and waterways this program provides a variety of management and services but is just three employees
strong you'll see that our other portion of general fund shows up here $146,000 of the $771,000 budget we also see a TDC transfer for the beach program here of 280,000 and grants of 227,000 for reef
creation and derelic vessel removal our boating and waterways co coordinator oversees derelik vessel removal i'm going to spend a little time here as we field a lot of questions about derelch vessels we all see them they seem to take longer than they should to remove
and that's because we're waiting on them to be designated as derelict by law enforcement the owners have to be afforded due process and have to be allowed the opportunity to remove the vessel and real quick we do get some state grant money um toward that too so
there's a Yes and I'm about to cover that um so we have the $150,000 TDC grant where the county is removing some of these derelik vessels but FWC also has a storm related derelic vessel removal effort right now so once
the vessels are designated as derelik by law enforcement the county is given permission to then remove them we can't touch them until then once we get that permission it typically takes about 1 to two days to get a quote um and then if it's a smaller boat one to three 3 weeks
to remove if it's a larger boat 1 to 3 months so we've kind of looked at the pattern of the last vessels that we've been allowed to remove and that's what we're seeing but that's once we have permission to remove them that if I could just add that's that's a large portion of um the issue right that it
takes such a long time to get that permission right yes and that's not something that we can control right right so um but we have removed more than 300 in the last 17 years um and we also um this program also works on waterway markers navigational dredge
priorities and that donated um donation and grant funded reef creation offshore the boating and waterways coordinator also manages the Griffith Landing site on 520 that Larry spoke of in his presentation the site was acquired through the Stan Mayfield
working waterfront grant in 2009 and redevelopment has been grant funded uh this year we have an $890,000 grant to reconstruct Miss Apples that was heavily damaged during the last storms we are fortunate in Brevar to have a federal beach reourishment
project and are halfway into our 50-year uh cooperative agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers the Army Corps manages the project and Bvard is a local sponsor the federal project is comprised of the north mid and south reach and I'll be providing an update on the most recent reourishment efforts we
administer beach restoration projects to protect upland infrastructure and property and maintain healthy vegetative beaches to enjoyed by res to be enjoyed by residents tourists and wildlife this chart shows the dollars spent on beach construction over the last 25 years of which our cost share
has ended up at 8% after reimbursements we need to have about 25% of share available on hand before we get those reimbursements back oh I skipped a slide okay sorry the south beaches are not part of the
federal um project the south beaches represent worldclass turtle nesting habitat because this area isn't part of the federal project we're limited here to usually managing dunes only here after storms with FEMA and state dollars supplementing that our local
share peter fielded some turtle nesting questions during his presentation and we have therefore added a few slides to address the questions although natural resources doesn't oversee any protected species we obtained data from our FWC contacts that show strong nesting over
the last 25 plus years these graphs are specific to leatherbacks on on this particular slide which are at the top end of their range here so you'll see low numbers because of that but there's an increasing trend line when you compare with other Florida core beaches we have far greater numbers of
green and loggerhead turtles for both this slide and the next you'll see that BVAR County nesting trends follow that of Peninsula Florida and represent about half of all nesting data again here with loggerheads about half of the measured nesting is in Bvard
and we follow the state and trends turning turning to tourism and recreational benefit there is no more recognizable example in Bvard than the Cocoa Beach Pier in the top image you can see that there was practically no beach at high tide or opportunity for
recreation pre federal project the middle image is after sand placement and the bottom image is post storm still with a wide beach and plenty of tourism and recreational value here's another set of pre and post project images in Cocoa Beach again
there was no beach at high tide as evidenced by the rack line by the seaw wall in the bottom image the seaw wall has been covered by sand and the beach reveated moving south to the midreach this is a more narrow area of managed beach to avoid the rock outcroppings in this area you can see here that we have
Oceanana condo in the city of Satellite Beach on the left that's been undermined the property owners in this condo were very nervous and placed some sand and vegetation at their own cost so in this slide you see that same edge of that same condo on the left that's that beige wall there and sand
has been placed and we're undergoing reveation efforts so sand placement is only part of the beach management equation here we also replant the dunes to hold the sand in place and encourage residents to do the same with our annual seat sale this is the rock reef habitat that we
endeavor to avoid when placing sand in the mid-reache we're permitted up to three acres of impact or 10% and have mitigated that impact with a 4.7 acre mitigation reef being utilized by green turtles and other marine life the mitigation reef has been deemed successful by
D here's an example of pre a pre and post project on the left and in the middle in the south reach um the picture on the right shows you again a healthy vegetated managed beach and how that performs post storm and in the south beaches we've seen some failure with armored
shorelines and minor structures this pool was removed but the primary primary structure remains we didn't lose any primary structures during the last storms but this just shows you that armored armored beaches are not preferable
so regarding current project status we've completed South Beach's sand and vegetation mid-reache sand placement is complete and we're finishing plantings the North Reach will be complete next month the South Reach was partially renourished this year and will be fully renourished next year detailed project
status reports are available for the public on our website as well as a lot of historical information on the federal project and the South Beaches turning from our smallest program to our largest storm water management is primarily responsible for projects that can control flooding and improve water
quality this is a high dollar program because of the CIP we collect about 6.3 million in storm water assessments per year this year we had 10 million in grants to leverage our funds and you'll see a lot of balance forward here for multi-year projects this graphic represents various
project types per district so you'll see a mix of master planning flood mitigation water quality and hybrid projects the yellow dot near the max brewer represents an innovative wave attenuation device project that I'll highlight in a few slides so here are some completed
projects that I'll move through quickly this slide and the next two um represent completed projects that eliminated flooding for 800 homes treated water qual quality and worked collaborative collaboratively with eels on conservation and incorporated low impact
development principles here to avoid wetlands and specimen trees and enhanced habitat and recreational opportunities here are a few of the current nutrient reduction retrofit projects in various districts d1 is Flounder D2 Pioneer and D4
Arlington and here are current covert and channel upgrades in Miko and a Gabian system installation in Sand Dollar Canal in District 5 this is the Titusville multitro wave attenuation device or WADS project south of the Max Brewer that has gained
statewide attention for its innovation this project's just finishing up the WAD structures will help dissipate wave energy and storm surge the beach will be renovated and replanted to protect protect the causeway and seagrass will be planted and clam seated as well the storm water program is also
completing a countywide grant funded v vulnerability analysis that looks at various rainfall and storm surge scenarios this analysis is statutoily required and keeps the county eligible for resilience funding opportunities we monitor our projects to make sure they're wellplaced designed
and working as they should and we comply with state reporting requirements lastly we're always seeking ways to reduce nutrients while eliminating herbicide usage and have dramat drastically increased our mechanical aquatic vegetation harvesting program adding grant funded equipment
and a second crew uh this year to date in 2025 to date we've harvested 3 million pounds um so we're well on track to exceed last year's total of over 7.4 million pounds thank you for your attention i'm happy
to answer any questions you may have i have a I have a quick question on the on the last uh thing there when uh you harvest the vegetation from our waterways um where where does that go how's how's that Raleigh
landfill goes to the landfill okay okay any other questions um I was wondering we always talk about derelch vessels constantly right so we know that the the time consumption seems to be getting it um called a derelct
vessel how long does that normally take and why is it so timeconuming right so it it's due process um you know the owners have to be afforded that opportunity to claim their boat and remove their boat um and it it's usually months you know it's usually what 3 to
six months what would you say wow yeah three to six months to get that designation three to six commissioner thank you i was wondering about um I didn't realize that we uh help out the other counties with the
um petroleum remediation right and so I just have a couple of questions about that um one do we have the resources for that and two is the payoff worth it because I'm assuming that they pay us for our services they do so they entirely cover the cost there's no
county funds are expended um for those programs um you know when you have a local program like that there tends to be more care the the folks live here and they care about our drinking water and our groundwater so we've um and we you know
you do a good job you get more work so we started in the 80s with one county and they've continued to ask us to take on more and more counties valuchia we gained from Elatchea was was providing those services and they asked us to provide them instead of Elatchua oh
awesome well good job to you guys for doing a great job on that um and then my other question it's not really in the presentation but I was just wondering I've been getting a lot of questions about um Parish Park um and I was wondering was natural resources involved
in the in the engineering or planning of that um that park renovation i I don't I mean typically we review all park plans so but I don't know if we I don't have specific information on that the reason
why I was wondering was because um the you know you had so many things in here about like how hardening the shoreline and things like that i mean it just ends in disaster right and so it's like almost exactly what Parish Park looks
like and it didn't even get to open and now it's just sitting there you know millions of dollars were spent on this thing and it's uh so I was just curious you know how that I can try and get you more information on that review okay
thank you what what's um your biggest budget challenge in the in the next year or two um well for the projects inflation just like you know everyone else all the other departments have
um con construction yeah specific yes okay any other questions for Amanda i did have one more i'm sorry thank you um what about vacancies or anything like that are you guys having issues in that regard as well so over the last couple year we were um and over the last couple
years we do not let the grass grow on the applications that we get we call in applicants immediately um or very quickly to to interview and we've been really successful at um attracting folks and retaining folks so we're lucky in
that regard um but most of the them come for our mission um and and so we're we're lucky that they'll they're willing to come and and stay with us and make a home with us great awesome that's great news thank you okay anyone else
thank you Amanda very much appreciate it wanita hi good afternoon good afternoon commissioners um I'll be presenting this afternoon the um housing and human services uh 2425 budget you might wait one second we have
a whole change of CLA class just let out here i know okay look I'm just like let's get started dismissal she brought a lot of reinforcements with her okay she brought a lot of backup oneita good luck well I
brought a little bit of backup with me too okay all right and so I have with me I see I see Linda over here because you can't know everything right so I have with me this afternoon our assistant department director Linda Graham our finance officer Dave Romero and our um
community action agency program manager Stephanie Bryan so I'm going to give you an overview of housing and human services and um our budget is about $41.8 million and we have about 48 positions and our
department is split up into three distinct programs which I'm going to go over this afternoon this is an overview of our entire department budget $41.8 million and I'll go into detail later in the slides this is an overview of our
expenses for our department and again I'm going to go over in detail in later slides in each program this is a snapshot of our general fund um dollars and where spent within our department and I'll go over that in more
detail later in the presentation housing and human services has the privilege of serving the extremely low low and moderate income individuals and families in Bvard County how we serve them is tied to various revenue sources
the first program we're going to discuss is community resources which is about $2 million of that 2 million $20 million of that is $2.4 million in general fund transfer we have about 7.5 in balance
forward and $9.9 in special revenues which is our grants and community resources is where our community development block grant sits or CDBG our community action agency with those grants we have various mandatory
advisory boards reporting and monitoring cdbg is communitydriven and is communitydriven by our neighborhood strategy areas which we have listed here through CDBG we did um impact about
8,160 Boulevard County residents and we impacted them through our various projects and our community-based um organization public services program we also through CDBG can provide demolition in the slum and bright blight
areas this is not income driven and if we do provide that service a lean is placed on that property next couple of slides is a couple of pictures um of projects that was completed with our CDBG dollars this is
West Coco Community Center Schoolhouse Street uh Merit Island Infrastructure within community resources is our community action agency our community action agency serves directly the low moderate income
individuals and we're able to serve them with their electric water rent mortgage and self-sufficiency assistance the county is also mandated to provide burials and cremations for indigence and hikra which is healthcare reimbursement account assistance our
community action agency they provide the eligibility for all of those services for Bvard County and again we impacted about 4,951 direct residents within community resources we have our aid to private organizations
which is funded by our general fund dollars 211 Bvard is one of those organizations and impacted 14,629 residents meals on Wheels impacted 7 671 residents the firewatch
program is a brand new program that we started this fiscal year and they are estimated to impact about 600 BARD residents and also funding for the um health department is within our department we oversee that contract and over
1,713 services were provided will you describe the fire watch for other folks maybe who are at home and uh just for our own education what what that program is certainly okay um the fire fire watch program again like I said that's a program that we just started this fiscal
year and that program it basically is going to provide training for BVAR County for those veterans veterans have a high suicide rate and so this um agency their their plan is to come in
provide training so you can be aware of the signs of suicide in our veterans and when you see those signs how to act it's like first aid but this is first aid for our veterans and so they're going to provide training through online and in
person we just contact him they'll come out to um various organizations and churches to provide that training you get a certificate and everything to go along with it hhs also develops and manages the following contracts for the county's
unfunded state mandates guardian AD lightum is one of those and we are mandated to provide facility needs and communication services also we oversee and manage the Baker Act um through circles of care they impacted
15,865 residents this past fiscal year the child protection team or CPT 155 Bvard youth was impacted and BVAR County legal aid that contract is managed by housing and impacted 204 Bvard County
residents also contained in our community resources um program are some various discretionary grants the largest of those grants is a behavioral health expansion grant that is funded through SAMA that is a $4 million grant we are
in year one so the first million dollars of the $4 million that's a substance abuse and mental health services administration grant that is going to be contracted out to Family Partnerships of Central Boulevard so we provide the oversight for that contract housing also
has the oversight for the board approved BVAR County opioid program there's a review committee and a recommendation subcommittee that we u manage and staff so far we have contracted for marketing and education
strategies mobile medication assistant treatment programs and we're working with purchasing to issue a RFA to support people in treatment and recovery address the needs of criminal justice involved persons and evidence-based programs in schools and community
education programs our next program is the housing program which is a little over $20 million within there we have 8.2 in balance
forward and 11.9 million in grants the balance forward are those grant dollars that we've received up front the details of the housing program this is where our affordable housing areas sit
with each one of those we have plans we have to report on how we're going to how we plan on spending the dollars and after the dollars are spent how did we actually spend it all of those reports do come to the board for your approval within housing our affordable
housing programs we have the firsttime home buyer program also in there we have our rehab repair and replacement program our rehab repair and replacement program is done inhouse and we do it from the beginning to end eligibility from
eligibility to bidding out the individual projects with outside contractors all oversight is provided by HHS inspectors this program allow Bvoulevard County homeowners to remain in their homes for longer periods which
then um maintains that affordability for them we have our home art program which that is an exciting uh program that we've received and now we're going to be able to build 11 single family rental homes on Houston Lane on May Island with those
rental homes we are going to um provide those wraparound services and uh so we're looking forward to that we have a are we're working with purchasing to put that RFP out we're also working to put out the RFP on the other side we're going to have three affordable um
homeowners to be home ownership and rental on the other side also within housing is our weatherization program this is a federal pass through state program where we're able to come in and weatherwise weatherize homes in Bvoulevard County to
make them more affordable the next couple of slides is a couple of our projects when we go in and rehab the kitchens and the bathrooms we're able to make those ADA compliant which also means that the homeowners are able to
stay in the homes for longer period of times because they have now full access to their kitchens and you know all their resources in inside their house so they're able to stay there instead of having to go other places our last program is veteran
services veteran services is made up of general fund dollars in charges for services approximately $613 in general fund $613,000 in general fund and $87,000 in charges for services the charges for
services is with the city of Palm Bay we contract with them to provide a FSO in Palm Bay our VSOs are um all
accredited to uh all accredited by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs the Florida Department of Veteran Affairs the American Legion and the Disabled American Veterans and Veterans of Foreign Wars our VSOs here
in the county have had over 14,69 contacts with Bavar County we have offices in Vieier Palm Bay and Mayard Island we were able to bring in the third largest in pension benefits and
compensation benefits for Boulevard County veterans at $672 million the paperwork for our veterans to have to go through is very difficult to navigate our VSOs are certified and trained in how to navigate that process they help
the veterans and their families so that they're able to get the benefits that they deserve and they even retro it back and that brings it forward which is how we were able to do the 672 million the trends and issues within our department is that of course we are
seeing in Bvoulevard County an increase in residents seeking assistance grants do drive our department and our staffing as more funding becomes available we are going to advance our efforts to build more affordable housing within Boulevard
County some of the issues that we are experiencing is with construction costs because as those costs go up it is harder for us to build the affordable housing and then with the federal funding we're just not sure um how that'll impact our grants right now
we're not seeing any impact at all that is my presentation commissioners I'm available for any questions you may have commissioner Delaney thank you i had a question about the affordable housing um who get how do we what's the
process of filling those homes how how do we choose who gets to live in those homes okay for the ones that we are building for new home ownership or the rehab repair and replacement of homes so I'm talking about the
[Music] um America Rescue Plan program and it says 11 single family home rentals and then the three homeowners as well how do we pick those people okay so with our um affordable affordable housing dollars we
contract out with um community housing initiatives our first-time home buyer program so we plan on partnering with them they have a weight list of residents that are um have gone through the certifications gone through the budget training and it will help ensure
that they're able to remain in their homes because they already know everything that it takes to be a homeowner and so we're going to work with CHI for that okay and then what about um uh landlording that's a pretty uh
extensive thing so what does that look like for the county we're going to contract that out that's part of the RFA we don't do that within housing we would just provide the monitoring and the oversight so we'll go in every year we'll look at the rent that they're charging to make sure that it's within
those guidelines that we receive and we do the check on each file so we just provide the oversight but we contract it out and so you know God forbid some people move in and I mean things happen you know like holes
get in walls doors get torn up you know floors get destroyed things like that appliances go out um does the person living in the home are they liable for those things or how does that work for for us so if it's a rental that's part
of when we contract it out they have to set aside dollars with the dollars that we provide the rents that they're collecting they have to set aside into reserves and so when those things happen they're able to come in and and make those uh repairs so it's not over and above their rent
no it's not okay and um Okay and then for veteran services I'm curious as to why there are no grants why it's all general funds um are there grants out there that like
we would qualify for i don't know we've ever tried to apply for grants within veterans services yeah Commissioner I'm not unaware of grants um uh Wanita put in the Florida statute 292 and I'm really lightly paraphrasing here that under Florida law that we're required to
maintain a veteran services office and use our local funds oh I'm not opposed to that by any means yeah yeah i mean I'm sure they can look for grants but um that we're at a minimum we're required to provide the service so right so that's how it gets generated is that something we could do because I would love to see this expanded because you
know I mean you guys do a great job of Absolutely dennis our veteran services manager we'll work together and do some research and bring you back some more information be happy to yeah and it's not technically a grant but city of Palm Bay they're funding that position in the office space down the Palm Bay to help
expand the service so they have gone out a little bit to look for other funds but that's great right city of Palm Bay contacted us they wanted to provide a FSO in the city now he does whoever comes in is not limited just to Pal Bay right but instead of trying to get
someone and do all the training and certification we assisted and partnered with that and they totally fund that position awesome thank you you're welcome commissioner Atinson any questions thank
you Wanita i appreciate your department every time I walk over there they're always very helpful to me so thank you everybody thank you and I see Linda out and about very regularly so okay very good all right Terry good afternoon
commissioners as I have the opportunity to present to you almost on a monthly basis I'm going to focus on the budget here since you guys frequently see me at the TPO meetings uh as you see on the screen there are some fast facts about transit i won't get into too many of them but one thing I want to make sure
that I do point out is that we operate our services for 122 operators 30 support staff and 18 contracted staff currently we're providing about 60,000 64,000 passenger trips a month and our fixed route service and in
addition to that we do about 360 paratransit trips on a daily basis that's to individuals that are unable to use the fixed route service so for our budget our 2025 budget is approximately 4 47 million and a large
part of that as you can tell on the graph is split into two areas being the operating the capital of that which 56% is in the attributed operating of our overall budget and remaining 44% goes to capital i'll get into some I'll do like
oneita I'll get into some specifics later so our revenues as you see here are derived from multiple sources however with an overwhelming portion of that being from our federal transit administration budget which says 80 82%
of the funds and then another 13% of those funds are derived from state funding uh and as you see the general fund portion is about 4% of our overall budget this slide shows how revenues are utilized and the sources where they go
to once again you see the capital portion of our uh operations is primarily funded by federal revenue and then also in our operations another significant portion is uh federal revenue uh which typically applies to
our vehicles and uh our facilities operation is uh still comprised of sign a significant portion of federal dollars along with a combination of general funds dollars charges for services and other revenues that you see on the graph
here our operating expenses primarily go to our preventive maintenance which is a 38% of our uh expenses and this is used specifically to keep our vehicles in good operations
and to make sure we're providing that service to our passengers and then the next greatest portion is for comp and benefits for our employees capital expenses as you see here are also once again the primary area is for
our vehicles to make sure we're operating optimal service making sure the vehicles are in uh good uh operation for our passengers then we have our capital improvement project projects such as our park parking lot repairers our fuel tank replacement and other
items like our public restrooms and uh the last part is the capital equipment which a major portion of that is for technology in the vehicles like the bus cameras and IT software and radio equipment this is the probably the most
significant slide in my presentation and it shows that the general fund portion which is the back of the bus where typically our engine is is driving how we operate so this general fund you see that 200,000 is matched to our intermoto
grant which is 100,000 which is half of that then the next portion is our block grant funds which is 50% of our block grant and then the last portion that you see is 226,000 which you don't see that there but you see 2 million so that's 10% of
the uh FDOT funded all of these items then we can leverage an additional 2.3 million in federal funds to uh purchase vehicles and other things of that nature so you see should we have any issues with our general fund all of these items in this area will be
significantly reduced right now the total uh required match is uh 2.4 million we have a shortfall of 183,000 and that shortfall is made up for of things like our sale of surplus vehicles balance forward
advertising funds that we receive and um uh charges for services in addition to that we also are allowed to uh using the funds that you saw on the previous slide we're allowed to leverage additional funds with no local match requirement so as you see here we have 456,000 for our quarter and
uh A1A and 52020 quarter grants in addition we can also leverage $8.7 million in CAP FDA capital grant funds that we use for preventive maintenance and capital equipment once again with no
local match to the county this next slide talks about our capital improvement plan you see various areas that we're looking to make improvements our Cocoa Terminal our learning center our ramp and areas uh for our passenger restrooms uh all once
again approved in the existing budget but in addition to that we don't just focus on our employees staff and equipment we also make sure we focus on our passengers one of the current and continuous requests we get are for
amenities at our transit stops so right now as you see in the slide we have 1.6 million allocated allocated toward amenities to be installed throughout the entire county over the next five years and typically we partner with uh FDOT on projects roadway projects when they're
doing uh any uh resurfacing projects and we have the pads built however in some cases we go through the process ourselves completely from beginning to end we also uh have a need for our transit vehicle replacements right now we have 23 million allocated uh replacements of
vehicles over the next 5 years currently and this number is always subject to change currently a bus of this style cost about $600,000 right now we have about 20 buses that date back as far as 2007 some
with over 600,000 miles we have vehicles are nearing almost a million miles so it goes to the statement of how we keep our vehicles in good repair and continue to utilize them way beyond their useful life when you said just real quick $600,000
uh to replace a bus today how much of an increase is that over just say even five years ago just to give us an idea so I'll I'll give you just last year okay last year we were at probably five and a half okay uh so those numbers I can't
say fluctuate uh um incrementally there are just I I probably could get Jim to tell you when he bought a bus last how much it costs i'm sorry i know a couple things about buses um uh I haven't been there in eight years uh last time I was spending about 330 a copy and then and
I'm jumping on Terry i'm sorry uh the drivetrain the engine transmission they're over $100,000 now and and almost uh one manufacturer or is there are there are there two um do you do you buy from there's several manufacturers
however we excuse me commissioner excuse me that's okay uh however we primarily purchase our vehicles from Gillig uh one of the benefits of doing that is our mechanics are trained and they're knowledgeable about this specific bus uh so there are a couple others uh new
flyer is another one there are a couple neoplans or others but There's many differences in of course the equipment the components the parts so then we'll be trying to uh get parts from different people different vendors so we have primarily went with Gillid Gillick who is also uh one of the vendors that's on
the state contract we're required to purchase off of Florida state contract and if the vendor is not on that contract we can't purchase the well there's a lot of steps we have to go through but we would not be purchasing buses from someone outside the state contract so yeah well I I appreciate
same uh when it comes to these things i've had that conversation with uh over fire rescue vehicles and and and how they they try to purchase there's an advantage and and and one of the major advantage of the state contract is because they do all the leg work to make sure we're getting the best price so
we're not just buying the bus because we like it we're getting one of the best prices for the equipment that we do purchase okay thank you sir you're welcome sir so that actually does conclude my uh presentation knowing that there are about eight others behind me I want to make it as quickly as possible so I
wanted to continue to give my thanks to the ACM the county manager and the board uh for the dedication and the support that you provide to transit services all the time what What does it cost a typical rider for for if they use
transit services almost exclusively um do do they get a pass for a month um how h and and what does that cost does it work that way yes it does a passenger currently for one ride fair is $1.50 each way they can buy a 30-day pass is
just about46 um and they can use that f that pass from the time it's initiated to 30 days later as many times as they want to uh no restrictions and there's also a 10 ride pass which gets punched at each
time you uh use that pass but primarily our passengers pay for the single ride or they buy a monthly pass and I think I saw a QR code the other day so you have a you have a way to pay with a mobile device um these days right yes sir so
one of the things we've implemented recently has been a myriad of technology and one of those is the opportunity for passengers to purchase a pass on their phone and once they get on the bus they're going to show that pass to the operator we're looking at ways to even uh increase the technology and then
where it will be a scanned pass on a device on the bus and minimize the amount of cash we take in which will also allow us to recoup cost because of the cost in counting the money the armored truck services and those things so we're looking to implement even more
technology to allow us to save more now when they get on the bus how does so the somehow their mobile device interacts with the with the bus when they get on they say "Okay you've you've that's your ninth ride or whatever." Is that how
that works so currently uh what it is is it's called a flash pass so the passenger purchases a pass in advance and when they get on the bus they activate it and there's three mechanisms that show that it's actually an active and real um real pass it pulses it shows
the time and date of the current time and also has a color that the operator himself or herself knows to differentiate once they see the pulse they look for the current time so a person couldn't use a video unless they're using a video and taking the exact time that they're riding the bus tomorrow they wouldn't be able to uh
duplicate it and use it um without it being an actual pass that is um being applied typically those are going to be monthly passes anyway so just as long as it's within the 30-day range they can use it as much as possible there are a couple of individuals that we do see use
a single ride uh but that's good for just one trip and they can get a transfer to continue a trip if they're going to another route there there is an ability for me to give a gift card to somebody uh for them to ride the bus for a day we don't have something like that
currently i'd be better off just to hand them three bucks for a round trip so uh not a gift card but you can purchase the pass for anyone you want to just as long as you have their telephone number you can purchase the pass and then send it to that individual and it will show up
on their phone just as long as they have the app activated okay so they have to have the app to do that they have to have the app on their phone and they have to activate it yes sir all right other questions for Terry i Those were all the same questions you had okay all
right very good thank you commissioner Atinson did you have any question okay thank you Terry very much thank you i have an app for that assume you have many good afternoon uh I'm Jeff Mcnite i have
been honored to be part of the best team in Bvard County for about 13 years and I could go on and on about uh the IT department because I'm very proud of them and I'm a geek but uh I'm going to breeze through this at about 150 kilobits bits a second to be respectful
of your time okay here's our last year's budget um we're sitting at about 11 millions this is a little bit higher than our normal budget uh it increased this year significantly because of the SAP upgrade most of you are probably aware of that
uh we just finished that last week uh so we're very excited about that and that was about a six-year project uh with it ramping up in the last three years so we're very proud to get that done uh our funding we're about 27% general fund that has been pretty flat
over the last few years uh we have had some changes in the charges for services uh we had a true up and uh that uh helped out our department quite a bit but uh the the general fund has stayed pretty flat these are our five groups that we have
our biggest two groups are systems and software uh and uh I'll move on to administration administration this is basically what we do in administration including me uh the uh one thing that we did change uh in administration this
past year was uh first of all in uh you can see this bump here is uh in our compent benefits uh we added an accountant to our payroll for secession planning and also we assumed a male clerk to take over for a vendor an outside vendor that was handling the
courier on campus and uh we presented a cost savings for that in order to just hire a person have them do that on campus and it's worked out very very well uh the person we hired is that Gabe huh that's Gabe yeah okay okay our systems group is uh at is based
out of I mean uh conform comprised of network systems and cyber security cyber security is also a relatively new position for us uh we have nine staff in that as listed there uh you can see the top line is operating and for the
operating that dip that we had there was the result of an RFP we did for our communications our circuits and internet uh we had a significant cost savings there by moving to the current vendor and uh the bump that we have there in the competent benefits is just like I
said we added the cyber security officer and also for secession planning we promoted an internal to assistant uh department director software is basically software we have uh 12 staff there you can see pretty
significant jumps in both operating and capital expenditures that is all SAP uh that was a huge undertaking for us and uh like I said we just we're very proud to have that done and it uh we have payroll tomorrow we're crossing our fingers but uh our day after tomorrow
but uh that's another uh uh milestone that we're reaching service desk is our face to the customers which our customers are county staff uh they're very very important to us and uh we have seven
staff uh the top line which is the most predominant and most expensive line is almost all Microsoft licensing that is for all the computers all and servers in the county uh and also one of our concerns which I'll get into in a little
bit um the bottom line where there's a jump in our capital uh last year we started taking over seven departments in their computer management uh they were buying their own computers and not necessarily uh consistent about the models and the types so we took that
over at their request and they just moved money from their department to ours and we take care of that for them our GIS department is the smallest department it's three uh staff and the line there is very inconsistent on the top on comp and
benefits because we've had a very hard time keeping a couple of those positions filled that is by far the the most difficult we've had it's the smallest one but it's also the smallest group but it's also the most difficult to keep someone you know in those positions
who do you who do you compete with when it comes to GIS folks just curious i mean almost everyone uses GIS to some form of I mean marketing agencies use a GIS uh uh IT companies use GIS everybody uses
GIS so it's not just other municipal governments no no no not at all no I mean uh from marketing standpoint GIS is very important i mean I don't know it's not really my wheelhouse you know as far as that uh what other companies use GIS
for i know that it's uh uh you know like uh geo uh what do you call caching or whatever they call it yeah there's a lot of stuff like that you know tourism uses a lot of marketing yeah there's just a lot of different up it's not just maps
you know it's uh not just planning development i'm sure utilities are using a lot of that absolutely several other departments have their own GIS super users that they use in their own departments but uh and I think E911 also has uh some
dedicated people that are GIS yeah okay i was just curious and I'm not going to go through all the the recent accomplishments uh we've been quite busy and we stay busy uh I think I went through most of these financial impacts
uh yeah I missed all those okay threats uh all these are valid threats we we have highly trained and highly skilled staff and they are constantly getting head-hunted you know we try to create an environment here that uh they want to
stay and we've been pretty successful uh especially in the last year or so so we're crossing our fingers and just hope they stay but uh you know we make sure that our staff is trained up and when you train staff you know to keep up with
technology you also make them more marketable to other corporations and other uh opportunities out there so it's a it's a catch 22 in that situation uh security concerns is a major threat I mean a major threat to us because we can
never stay ahead of the game it's impossible you know we're always playing catch-up with that we get annual audits now for PCI compliance we have several departments that take credit cards and we have to make sure that the framework behind that uh meets all the
requirements and we get audited every year and uh we we have a difficult time implementing all the findings before we get the next audit that's and that that's a moving target every year the requirements get more stringent
uh I already mentioned kind of the advancing technologies we have to stay trained or we just uh if you don't stay ahead of that you know you're going to get left behind uh software subscription trend I already showed you the Microsoft trend how that's going up uh everybody is going to the subscription trend and
it's really out of our control once we get on that sub subscription train because they are in charge of the pricing um very few of them will give you you know multipleyear contracts it's like a year-by-year basis another thing that goes for all those companies
listed there and more even our hardware are now going to subscription type services they'll get to a certain point where they'll say "Well uh we'll give you these uh keep giving you these updates until the device is no longer compatible with the updates then you have to replace them." Uh another thing
that's a a difficult and complex thing is the way that they do some of the licensing on these things uh sometimes it's about users and users sometimes it's about the amount of data you use the amount of cores in your in your processors and computers so it's it gets really
complicated and it's hard to keep track of all that you know on a global basis with thousands of computers so and that's it any questions questions for Jeff commissioner Ainson
thank you i it is like the bane of my existence and I'm glad that there are people like you who are doing it for us thank you be before you go for anybody who's watching at home uh give a give a quick description of SAP just just for layman it uh it's our financial system
and uh basically without it you don't get a paycheck it handles you know all of our invoicing uh purchase requests receivables uh asset management uh HR components uh recruiting onboarding uh there's a lot of layer to it there's uh
there's different modules for uh public works uh different modules for the procurement office uh it there's a lot of layers to it but uh basically to sum it up it's a financial system it is a it is our core financial system it is uh
it's a huge system that uh we have looked at replacing in the past and it's just it's too big to replace it just does too much uh and it involves also the the clerk's
office and uh and finance so it's uh it's not just us but uh and it's fair to say that every county employee has interaction with SAP I would say yeah well yeah some if they get a paycheck yes they they have some type of interaction yes okay all right anything
else for Jeff thank you sir thank you um how about we uh you guys amendable to a fivem minute break yes okay all right let's do that [Music]
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jimmy sir you're up all right um uh Beth Shepard sends two apologies her first apology she's not here because she's at the Association for International Agricultural and Extension Education's annual meeting and
her second apology is you got me so okay so there's the there's the humor for today um so I'm just going to do a quick review of the uh University of Florida IUS which stands for Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension Services in Bvard uh their main mission
is education you can see the number of the different things they do they do provide basically two events a year they have multi,000 uh people coming in and out of the building every year they go out and do field visits um that that be agricultural um and then their class participation they have over 16,000
people participating in their classes throughout the year uh the extension services it's a little bit well it is a unique structure for Bvard County um as they have two funders and two managers of the services as you look at the chart um if you look at the I'm going to call it dark pink
magenta and the dark blue colors uh that's the federal and state funding they receive neither one of those you'll see in the county budget that is the US budget um they fund it they provide their own services and different requirements and for example best representing UF today um then on the
left hand side the green and the pink that is the budgets that you see for our county where we have our general funds um UF uh we have a number of extension agents UF pays anywhere from 33 to 60% of our agent salaries and the interesting thing is since it's UF and are with their agents they have to
follow a tenure track so if you're familiar with tenure for professors and doctoral ships they have to uh provide their standards every year they have to move their way up um and you know if you don't get the proper tenure then you have to basically go find another position um so they're also county
employees and they're also uh UF employees at the same time the there are three different areas that the uh extension provides this is the first one the agricultural horiculture and crants um we have four agents that uh provide the
services you can see everything in there stuff you'd be familiar with and you know with the livestock uh their sod management pasture management um but they're also and with flooding adaption mitigation they've done a lot of studies over the last couple years on how to help reduce watering in the different farms uh they use drones and try to you
know try to make us a little bit more efficient they're also spent a lot of time with the coastal marine marina environmental education and then the the one we probably all know is their master gardeners or citizen sciences um that go out and volunteer help in the community family and consumer sciences
that's actually where uh Beth specializes in um it's and it's pretty self-descript in there you see about a little over half of it comes from general fund and user funds um that's uh financial management nutrition canning a bunch of our classes uh Beth actually herself teaches classes along with two
other agents um you have your food and nutrition and then underneath the county uh because I know a bunch of you have been through it that's where we run our citizensmies through um so you see extension is the one in charge of that told you I'm going to go fast here uh last but not least is the 4 youth
development uh the life skills stem healthy living all your 4H volunteers this entire program is one through run through one agent i can tell you last weekend was the big uh how do we want to call it 4 fair and market or as my family calls it the chicken auction um
so we go um and it I I got to tell you it's amazing stuff you see the you know the kids are anywhere from uh you know four to 5 years old up to 15 16 and watching those little 5-year-old kids bringing their chickens inside to be auctioned i mean the chickens are half the size of the kid but they got them well maintained um but above and beyond
that you know they're teaching the kids on how to manage how how to budget uh how to you know what they need to do properly grow their uh their animals and maintain them but they also maintain goats there's uh turkeys um you'll see if you go down to the Wickham Park at the uh the old um horse stalls you'll
see the different farm animals there the ducks that's the 4 program out there so it's your traditional 4 program that you'll find throughout the country and then finally um there's um there's tons of volunteers if you go into the extension building you're going to find probably more volunteers in the
building almost at any time than you'll find total employees they have that many volunteers the one that I'm sure we're all familiar with is the master gardeners um and I would tell you again personal experience with the master gardeners they had their plant sale the last couple weekends um and I had a nice
lady led me around Sandy i had three three requirements give me something green something that's not something that's difficult to kill and it's not a weed so she set me up so my back porch is looking pretty green we were able to redo our flower garden in the backyard but you see there's a number of different things they got the interns
they work with uh the food nutrition um and then uh you know we have the parents out there for the 4 program so so you can see basically that um oh we I'm sorry the last part capital and building I've almost forgot that it's just like every other department we've been doing a lot of investing paying attention a
lot of our facilities um so you see the number of repairs that they put through all their different um facilities out there in West Coco last but not least you see there's a roof replacement scheduled that building uh when when I is fairly new it was a new building it was built in 1988 so it's getting to the
end of some of its life cycle so we're going to be paying attention we have a big roof we made the front doors accessible uh we worked on the parking lot we worked on the irrigation so we've been investing a lot in that we will as long as the board allows us we'll continue to invest in the uh facilities
for um extension so last but not least it's you know they focus on education they're out there in the community i I do wanted to let you know that they do have you know their UF employees and their county employees which leads to some interesting um situations uh Beth she'll probably kill me but Beth gave
her presentation this morning probably about seven hours ago because she's in Scotland right now so she worked all weekend on the 4 fair and had to fly out Sunday morning sleep yesterday and gave her presentation about 4 in the morning our time so um but they do a lot of different things and they're out there
helping agriculture they're helping the locals they're also helping our 4 and helping with our kids hope I was shorter than Terry any questions i could try to answer for Jim onus thank you sir thanks
all right good afternoon all right so let's talk about mosquito control um so uh we operate countywide uh we have three offices our our headquarters in Titusville um and
another office down in Valkcaria both near uh adjacent to airports uh we have aircraft operations uh laboratories uh ground operations shop and vehicle maintenance in the center of the county we have a small office near the a center
um where we have watercraft and and also do some maintenance there um so we were established as a mosquito control district in 1937 uh state approved so we uh we work to maintain that uh certification under
Florida law and uh in order to protect public health uh we have uh we're completely funded by special revenue funding um via um advalorum taxes so this is just a quick look at our uh
revenue um obviously advalorum taxes 8.8 million out of our nearly $14 million budget um and then next that the balance forward 4.7 million approximately um this is very much our our laboratory
that we're we're looking to construct in this next fiscal year uh we have money saved for that that we've shifted forward over $3 million um as well as some operating funds that we carry over to help us with the transition um so everything else beyond that
miscellaneous uh interest um services for uh a few services that we provide um to other agencies uh grants and uh just regular transfers uh as far as expenses go
obviously comp and benefits uh 4.3 almost $4.4 million about the same for operating uh expenses now this operating category is uh everything from um um repair and maintenance to
pesticides fuel uh just everything to really keep us going uh insurance that captures a lot of different things uh capital improvement projects uh that $3 million that that again is the laboratory that we've been saving up we've actually just in the recent
balance forward added some more to that um capital outlay um that's our uh $765,000 that's our equipment so if obviously there's a lot of equipment involved in mosquito control um some of that a couple of hundred thousand of
that is grants um um excavators uh vehicles u things like that the computers um so uh reserves this is uh this is in case of course we have a real outbreak a real public health emergency since that's what we're there for we
have that ready to go um and then uh just transfers um to for um the tax collector to property appraiser and um annual payments so this is what our team looks
like 51 positions nine of which are uh administrative customer service support staff um four biology environmental technician types um and um heavy six heavy equipment operator impalment technicians and I'll talk about
impalments here in a minute um now this our largest kind of section is our ground operations section this is where we are on the ground doing the inspections the treatments the spraying 22 people that are involved in that it's a big county so we're kind of widespread
there um and then uh four people involved in our manned and unmanned uh aircraft operations uh includes drones um shop maintenance calibration safety staff uh six people there so the reason why we have such diverse
staff I know usually people think of mosquito control pretty much just think about spraying we have lots of uh habitats lots of challenges nooks and crannies everything from the uh salt marsh um associated with the Indian
River Lagoon to the um fresh waters of the St john's River um and all the lakes ponds and wetlands in between so that gives us over 40 species of mosquitoes to deal with in Bard County um so not only do we have to deal with all the
different species decide what what we're seeing if they're uh how much they they may impact humans we have to figure out what habitat they prefer what diseases they may transfer but we also have to deal with them in their different life cycle stages um they could be in the
aquatic stages as eggs larve pupia and they can be adults where they're biting flying mosquitoes which again is what what you would think of some of them are small size of a a gnat and some of them are pretty big maybe not this big quite
but um but pretty big some like a like a wasp for instance um on the left side here you see this is the list of diseases that are there 11 there and these are the ones that we have to pay attention to we see these um regularly
and um you know this is why we historically were part of mosquito county I would say between the mosquitoes and the diseases but the ones in these boxes are the ones that I would say we expect to see every year um outside the box it just depends we're seeing more and more of the tropical
viruses uh like deni we're also seeing malaria cases what happens there is well people will travel out of the area often out of the country they'll come back feel ill go to the medical center and then they pick up on key words the health department contacts us and we
address that and we basically keep that from spreading to others because we have the mosquitoes to transmit the diseases we just try to keep them away from the diseases so um so we we follow an integrated approach to mosquito environmental
management um and I I thought it would be a good way to kind of go through what we do as a service because it's really uh very much um an ecological approach um so the first thing we do is you know we'll get phone calls come out you know
they people would like us to come spray um we don't necessarily just spray without justification uh we'll go out and look for a source we might go out to a house and see uh bird bath buckets um you know swimming abandoned swimming pools tires obviously we've talked about
tires recently um full of mosquitoes um we get rid of the source the job's done we may not have to even spray uh beyond that um we we move about 60 tons of tires every year just picking up waste piles and now with this you know new
program we're hoping to get some more so that's a habitat tires are a mosquito habitat and other containers well think about habitat on a larger scale um salt marshes are known to produce up to two billion mosquitoes per acre so I mean
and that's not just once per year that's every time the tide comes in the wind blows uh the tide in um um so we we address that in a in in a unique way then these mosquitoes these salt marsh mosquitoes can fly 25 miles pretty much
go across the county so so um other species uh like I said 40 plus species they may not go beyond a mile or a few hundred feet so it really varies but this is what we call our mosquito impoundments which uh a lot of people have heard of um so back in the 1950s
and60s these were built with the understanding that these salt marsh mosquitoes unlike a lot of the other mosquitoes uh will only lay their eggs in the sediment not in the exposed sediment not in the water so every time the water goes out the tide the wind blows it out they'll lay these billions
of eggs the water comes back in within a week they're producing all these flying biting mosquitoes and then it keeps happening keeps happening so what they realized was if they build these earthn dikes around this these acre this and and it turns out that we're managing 28,000 acres we're able to capture that
water the first time in the beginning of the mosquito season and hold that and we we we go through a lot of trouble to keep that water uh up to a level and it and it reduces um the mosquito's opportunity uh to lay eggs um we it's
enhanced by 110 uh culverts 15 pumps countywide plus several more culverts in the Merit Island uh wildlife refuge we partner with them on management there um so this allows us to when when you know when the mosquito season isn't as active
we can open everything up let the water and the fish exchange between the outside lagoon uh and inside the empments so that gives us all kinds of opportunities to not only manage for mosquitoes and public health but do some
environmental projects um get involved in the Indian River Lagoon uh restoration we have seaggrass projects going where we're trying to help use the empoundments as a nursery um when we do shoreline work um instead of like a hardened shoreline we're we're putting
native plants um oysters and we're getting grants for that so it all works out win-win um every everything work and we we also get lots of opportunities to partner with people with different agencies not only in the county uh other county departments like natural
resources but outside the county um we have a water quality program as well so we're looking at water quality inside and outside the empoundments we're trying to make sure we don't uh impact the environment any more than we need um so our native mosquito fish hatchery so
one adult one mosquito fish is known to consume up to about 100 mosquito larve per day so we built we've we've uh we built and expanded our hatcheries in 2020 we have one uh north and one in the
south office um and we're able to use those fish not only for ditches and small ponds but we're able to do some largecale stocking because don't forget we have this empoundment program which is very unique well we have the ability to we're pumping that water in um well
why not go ahead and stock some fish because even though they're native mosquito fish or gamboo that you would find in the area they're not necessarily there yet so mosquitoes are producing a new brood new generation uh within a week sometimes less than a week 5 days it the fish take a while to get in there
we're already going to have to you know start spraying if we don't figure out a different way so we've really been perfecting that system of utilizing the fish stocking program um especially like in this time frame uh in the beginning of the season um and we also have been
doing mosquito fish giveaways uh for residents at outreach events um so if you ever have any residents inquiring send us send them our way and we can either go and stock the fish or they can pick some up so um so the vast majority
of our operational staff are out there checking all the nooks and crannies we were talking about they're inspecting seeing if there are opportunities to stock fish sometimes you have uh an inch of water uh you're not going to be able to throw those fish in there right now so but still it's enough for mosquitoes
to breed so we have to consider um what pesticides we might use so our goal is to uh save the actual nighttime spraying is the very last resort um so we have options we have EPA tested and improved
materials um most of which are divi derived from uh natural materials such as uh soil bacteria you might have heard of BTI basillus bacteria that kind of stuff and not only are they more environmentally friendly products but we
also can target just where we find those mosquitoes so instead of treating just mass treating broad scale we can actually just treat where the mosquitoes are before they start hatching out and going through and flying away once they're flying it's really hard to it
takes a lot more pesticide to catch up with them uh and all of our applicators are um are licensed in public health by the state of Florida Florida Department of Agriculture so uh in getting this material out there and including the
fish we've developed many retrofits uh innovations we've taken our eight we have amphibious eight wheelers uh four-wheelers we have airboats and other boats side by sides anyway we take all these vehicles and and make sure that we
can take out their dry granules to for these kind of products liquids and also fish and take them right out where we need them um so that's where drones come in so we were really working on all of these uh different ground vehicles but we have different habitats out there
some are so thick with mangroves you can't really get these ground vehicles out there so we started off uh thinking you know drones are going to be this small niche we're we're just going to hit these small areas where we don't need larger aircraft just buzzing these homes like you see in this clip here um
and some of these areas we just couldn't keep up with the treatment um even having people out on foot would be rough on on the environment so we we have two licensed drone pilots who are uh who are licensed by the FAA and Department of
Agriculture um and we're we're at a point where now the drones are uh capable of treating doing all the daytime treating uh basically um so we have uh a fleet of drones lots of it has to do with our grant funding that we've
we've gotten um and accessories to to you know lifts and things to get us to where we can get a line of sight um and um we're um we have our largest drone is uh 13 feet across and diameter can handle over 200 lb just as an
example uh and this is what a typical drone mobilization looks like uh when we're set up battery charging station and we have to you know kind of mobilize and then we can do hundreds of acres uh if needed um so here we're at a point
where we've talked about the habitat the source reduction the laral control biological control um um laral um treatments and we're at a point where okay now some mosquitoes are going to get away they're going to be flying around now we have to do something with them because these are the ones that can
transmit diseases um so we have a trapping a surveillance program of 50 traps per week we're check around the county most of them are uh CDC um traps uh we have others that are standard equipment in the industry um so we check
these our biologists go through and look at everything in those for the species the number of spe the number of um individuals in there uh because we may get a a couple hundred of this uh mosquito that is known to bite earthworms and frogs they're not even
interested in humans or we may get some that are not known to transmit diseases so we know that hundreds of mosquitoes yeah we technically met the threshold but we're not going to spray we're going to leave them alone because it's just part of nature at this point um but of course if we find uh disease threats
that's another story just like in the case of our um sentinel chicken program so this is a program where and I should first say that chickens are immune to these arbor viruses so it's a it's kind of a good situation they they get spoiled they get taken care of we have
12 coups around the county um we we get we withdraw their blood send it to the uh to the health department every week um and we get those results um and we look at our results as well as the neighboring counties and all together we can make decisions if we see a cluster
of uh certain like our say West Nile virus kind of heading our way um from out of the county even we'll start looking in those areas more closely um and prioritizing it maybe even we're prioritizing over the phone calls we're getting for you know some species that
are maybe not transmitting viruses so that's the kind of decisions we have to make between the mosquito trapping and then the disease monitoring so again this is where we're finally doing the thing I think that most people think of we're spraying so we then would choose our equipment
accordingly we have we have we can spray by ground or air um again EPA approved pesticides is is all we would use um we actually wait until after sunset normally the vast majority of time 30 minutes after sunset we want those
pollinators to get in their shelter and go in sleep for the night uh also people walking their dogs and pe kids coming from home from school we want to delay a little bit but that is actually the most critical time frame as well for mosquitoes so it's really tricky because
we kind of have to balance that they're most active at dawn and dusk and um so we're trying to get out there and not interfere with people and pollinators but at the same time we want it to be effective but luckily with the all the the the latest technology that we have
uh we have atomizers the we have mist droplets that are the size of mist that we measure under the microscope and we make sure they're in specification with the uh product labels um the droplets are actually uh in the range of one to
two tablespoons for an acre of treatment so it's very little goes a long way it's not like the old days where you picture this big cloud of smoke and so we get a lot of calls saying it's not working and we're saying no it's working we can see it in the traps but it just doesn't look like it's working
so um so think about you know emergencies like hurricanes all of these things come together at this point we're when in a hurricane's approaching we're look we're we're coordinating closely with the EOC watching those updates and when we say "Okay this is the real
thing." We save ourselves a couple of days to go out there protect our resources make sure the chickens are safe and tied down make sure our traps are pulled in because we don't want them to become flying objects or get to uh they're attached to down trees that we
can't get to um um and uh just heavy equipment we want to make sure everything is safe and then as soon as that storm passes we're out there as soon as we can get out there making sure our facility is ready for us to work out of um making sure uh and checking around
the the different habitats so now we do our thing basically everything we've been talking about we're checking the new for the new water for mosquitoes um normally you don't see it kicking in for a couple of weeks so it's some it's not instant unless we happen to have an
influx just before the storm um but um so we're doing our thing where then we're conducting laral treatments fish stocking nighttime spraying as needed um and then uh if we're in a declared emergency we may get the opportunity um to utilize FEMA funding so again we work
with the EOC on that procedure there um we that's is where all our our data collection comes in really handy we have we have to submit three to four years of trap data show that it's a significant increase um we have to get support letters county management and um the
health department and then design some spray maps and then once we release it we have to do our internal spraying in different areas and we try to prioritize it to stay out of those areas while they process it and they're dealing with all the different counties and so as an example Hurricane Milton we had quite an
influx we thought that last season was never going to end um and then they came out and did uh was 140,000 acres um on in the critical areas where we were seeing um you know um lots of mosquitoes and and the viral rates rising um and
sure enough it yielded a 98% reduction in the mosquitoes and we were good um and same thing happened with Ian before that so when we're not dealing with emergencies we're al we're always trying
to do some testing and development of our our processes improving everything along the way we came across some methodology that we wanted to try enhancing our pumping in these empoundments and stocking fish together
um and normally we expect over the years over the decades everybody who's been there a long time expects that first bre brood of mosquitoes to come and just really hit us hard we have a spike and we're just going to have to do some treatment then after that we hold but what we found was watching what happens
sometimes when these storms come in you get this influx the fish spread around naturally and then you don't have to treat in certain areas especially around the salt marsh um so we tried that we started we started with a small impoundment about 50 acres uh cuz you
know and then we um we we let it go as long as we could and sure enough we saw the fish we saw the larve and they weren't connecting and we were just hoping they would just go to them and we're about to the point where we need to maybe treat uh and then they started a feeding frenzy so we said this might
work if we can do this um on a larger scale so the next year 2024 we did this on thousand acre empelments and we're we had some success there um sometimes we had to treat certain areas but it was just little spot treatments um so
ultimately we've reduced the need for as much much uh pesticide applications we had no significant emergence of mosquitoes we had traps all around here so this is a full-blown test we had people working seven days a week and making sure it didn't get away from us and now in 2025 we've imple implemented
it um even further so this is what our trap counts look like over the last 10 years you can see it's a downward trend overall and so we've had a lot of historical sites that are in approximately the same place all those years um we're running about half the
amount of uh mosquitoes in our traps so we're we're definitely these new improved methods are working um and um and then this here is a similar looking trend but it's it's actually the acreage of larvaicide I mean of of um pesticides
so you're uh again we're we're getting those results fewer mosquitoes in using the new and improved technology the drones the the empoundment methods and everything else and we're actually um still getting lower trap counts so um
and as far as testing goes uh that's that's why we're really pushing we're we're we're we're planning on building a lab this next fiscal year we've been really expanding our in-house resistant efficacy disease testing um uh we were awarded $300,000 in ARPA funds for lab
equipment um and now we're ready we've been we're trying to wrap up the design and build the lab so we can we can spread out instead of just shoving equipment here and there in these buildings um and then we can really do some u more testing and improve our
processes further so just a quick review of some of the grant funding um uh D we typically are able to get wetland restoration grants um each year uh with culverts uh with living shorelines uh we have two of them awarded a couple of
them that are pending um and then uh US Fish and Wildlife and with Ducks Unlimited we're actually looking at a partnership with natural resources and we're waiting on to buy to for some acquisition a lot of the empoundments are privately owned or at least portions
are so it limits how much we can improve those areas so when somebody is wanting to uh consider selling that that we have incentives like this and then last thing there on that page is um the uh the the tire amnesty events which we recently
approved we already ran uh one uh big event uh at the health department we we took in six tons of tires um to the landfill and we have more planned um coming up here um a a really important
source of funding was CDC funding that was administered through the state department of agriculture $861 uh,500 um all of this is a surveillance equipment treatment equipment uh this really got our drone program up and
going um and we're we're just wrapping up we just made the the remaining purchases on this grant um and getting close to closeout this all was uh originated from uh Hurricane Ian incentives uh basically um trying to
make sure we address any um shortfalls or anything we saw that you know could have helped us get through the hurricane um and then I won't go through all of this but essentially this is our partnerships a lot of this are a lot of these are tied to grants um we're talking um and a lot of these are
environmental agencies again outside of um our you know other departments that we work with um FEMA U National Fish Hatchery um we we coordinate with Merit Island uh the refuge uh Bvard Zoo just various projects um to help make our
processes better and improve things like we had just talked about um and finally our really most important resource are um our employees so um we are always looking for opportunities uh for employees um to uh develop and we um we
work closely with human resources just in the last few years we developed um three new career ladders and multiple updates on on job positions we've had some people retire so it's an opportunity to say let's let's look at this and look at the latest technology and what we really need right now so um
incorporated in those ladders we have incentives for people to um to participate in the uh employee development program the executive uh leadership institute ELI and these these same employees it's really important because these same employees represent
the county so um they're out doing local outreach events talking to the community we're out um and even at state events we're definitely at a point we're one of the larger mosquito districts in the state so we have a lot of resources a lot of things to share and if we can
help another district you know do the same kind of thing with some of the say environmentally uh um friendly measures that we take to control mosquitoes they're taking notes they're contacting us so um this is just a quick snapshot
um last few slides here uh career days we're at parks and wreck events libraries um we have open houses from time to time with different groups coming in um and then here like I was just saying uh professional um participation we're going to these
events like these are mostly from Gainesville and not only just attending for CUS but we're teaching classes you know and that's the best way for employees to learn um is if we're getting ready to teach and um so um I think that's all I have so if you have
any questions commissioner thank you I just wanted to say thank you so much for everything that you and your team does when I um after I got elected I came and did a tour with you guys and it was a really cool day um I got to see all
these things that you're talking about and it's just it blew my mind on how expansive um your department is and all the different things that you guys are doing not only for health and safety but um how conscious you all are about the
environment and that it it really just blew me away so I just wanted to say thank you so much for what you guys do yeah well thank you yeah we we have a that's one of the things that uh had me really interested in coming over the Bvard County came in at natural resources actually and then went over
the mosquito control after a year um but but just the environmental focus is very unique and and so we keep up with that tradition as much as we can so Commissioner Atinson I was just wondering how many empoundment areas do we have in the county
technically we have over a hundred all right but there are lots of empoundments that were built in the 50s and 60s that aren't safe functioning most of those are in the um are up in the refuge um but we also have uh I would say uh about
25 that we um actively manage out of that and that's from um where we share the management in u the refuge um also in central Merit Island there's a there's a cluster there that we manage and then South Melbourne Beach area
there's another cluster there and then there are a couple in the up in the Scotsmore area um so about 25 that we really actively manage and then some of them we we monitor but it's just such a vast Indian River Lagoon so
um you did a great presentation thank you he was very thorough um I had a I had a few questions the I'm very interested in the amnesty event that you did i think you know I joked with you once before about we need couch amnesty
in this county um so uh you you've shown that that's successful six tons of tires that's 12,000 lbs did people bring you 12,000 lbs of tires or did you have to go pick them up or were there dumpsters out there that they dropped them in how
did how did that happen it was a combination so we were right here at the health department parking lot it was kind of a trickle it was a Saturday people were kind of trickling in we had we didn't know really how to judge uh and plan for it so it seemed like we had enough people to say "Hey we know of a a
close by tire pile." So we sent half the people out to go pick up those tires at the same time and then you know we never had so much of an influx that we couldn't handle it so we pretty much doubled the count by going out and I had checked with D ahead of time to see if
we can do that and they were fine with that so um so yeah it was about half and half and they found there was a I think it was a 528 on the ramp going on um lots of uh truck tires tractor tires um and those were really heavy so um so we
we got a lot of weight just from those tires yeah i I I mean I think that's I mean tell me if I'm wrong it was 12,000 pounds of tires no that's right and then um just this past weekend there was another event that um uh basically uh
Natural Resources Virginia put us in touch with this uh Pineita um waterway warrior group and they were cleaning up wonderful group by the way they were cleaning up Ty Island so we did the trucking um and uh we we just turned it's about it was probably around the
same amount of tonnage we have to look at the at the numbers we just did that so yeah um that's very impressive um are are rain barrels uh a a hatchery for mosquitoes i mean they're becoming more popular and I
think that's great um trying to keep you know water out the lagoon etc but I'm I'm wondering does it have a long-term consequence when it comes to mosquitoes they could but uh basically just people need to keep a screen a screen screen keeps them from getting You could take
uh the the BTI dunks it's same materials we use but and break off little pieces if for some reason it's not secure it's not kind of sealed up but at least keep up with the screen um that's the main thing keep up with the maintenance of it then it's not a problem
do uh you know when I think of um the many retention ponds in Bvard County um there's you know typically u those are in HOAs do HOAs contact you for mosquito fish you talked about um that people
could contact you is that sometimes is that something a lot of times the open ponds are really not generating mosquitoes so if unless they're just clogged wall to wall with vegetation that's then people often think that's the part the problem we'll go out and figure out where they're where it's
coming from but that's where you have more of an issue with like non-biting midgetes um and they're attracted to lights attracted to the homes they're called blind mosquitoes so people get mixed up and uh they they think maybe that might be what's biting them um so we do go out and do uh education and we
work with them on that but often don't require the the fish stocking but we do sometimes we'll find some areas that are pretty heavily vegetated and we'll stock fish are are bat boxes something that you promote is that uh that used to be a thing uh a while ago i haven't heard I
haven't heard that and not back boxes yeah so uh at some point there was some research in a laboratory where um uh given only uh mosquitoes uh bats will eat mosquitoes like crazy in that lab um
but out in the wild um there have been um studies since then including a really recent one from University of Florida where they were finding that you know they would prefer moths or larger insects in mosquitoes they're pretty hard to catch you know where the moth
will just fly right in your face so um and they can get more out of it now there are different species of bats you know so um they found that the smaller bats I think uh seminal bat was one of the key species there they don't prefer structures like bat boxes they actually
prefer Spanish moss and hanging palm frrons so all the the conservation that u like the eel program and you know natural resources and the you know all the empoundments that we um manage that's the best really way to uh have
bats do their thing um because the bats that are consuming the most mosquitoes are those bats and not so much the ones that are uh attracted to the batous for so that's and there's a yeah recent study university of Florida um that um
really got into that comparison and everything so every once in a while we get a lizard in our house and I can hear it making the noise in the middle of the night and I think uh I hope he gets that mosquito that I saw earlier is that realistic probably not but uh they can get hold of
it but hard to catch hard to catch mosquitoes okay so uh any other questions commissioner what would be the best situation for um those those fish where where are they most useful
um they're most useful in new ponds that don't already have established native population um in uh the like flood water areas that at the beginning of the flooding season and that's why we're able to when we're artificially flooding an area then we can add fish because we
know we're pumping but if not that then when the rainy season picks up and you have ditches that are uh full of water only from that point on that's a good time to stock fish so it just depends but anything that's normally pretty established uh they we'll go out and
actually see that they already have the mosquito fish um and everything under control the exception is if they're just clogged with vegetation and um maybe that needs a little more help so anything else for Joe all right sir well
done thank you thank you hello one quick second i know you already know ouch ouch ouch so um I'm Wendy Bost i'm proud to be your director of the Bvard County Library System um what you see on
this very first screen is the nature and variety of our libraries they are all very different um and I guess the one thing I want to say is libraries are great buildings but they need to have the right staff in order to be most successful so I want to start with some
key performance indicators of libraries um I don't know if you realize but 1.6 million people visit the libraries each year um our circulation is over 4.3 million items um we see our certain things going up our volunteer hours we
love our volunteers also lots of people coming to us for programs i always say the library is like a hidden jewel you come because you have a specific need and someone said "Hey have you tried the library?" They get to the library and then they're amazed by all the things that we offer i also wanted to point out
we are required by law when someone registers for a library card to update their voter registration or register them to vote so um we have a total of 19 locations well I'm stretching one because it's a mobile
library but we stem from um Mim Scotsmore all the way down to South Mainland um we manage the four of the buildings that we don't own that's Merit Island Mim Scotsmore Ogalli and Cape Canaveral well and Mim Scotsmore it's on
the school property is what it is we have a mobile library and our newest addition is the Riverhouse the Riverhouse was built in 1924 and this year it's been renovated on the first floor so that it's ADA compliant and we're holding all kinds of interesting programs there so it's about
$338,000 square ft of library um no two are the same all of them are aging and in addition we give about $300,000 to the law library here for the them to maintain their collections our revenue is pretty simple
and pretty straightforward we are a dependent taxing district in 1972 um the taxpayers approved a referendum and we became an independent taxing district so we receive that revenue we do get um state aid to libraries we have
fines and fees um those are the main things and balance forward for our expenses library media we have various transfers we give um we also have capital projects a lot of capital projects and I have to give a
shout out to facilities skip Bell and his team are incredible we work with them regularly they help manage our projects and get them done um operating expenses about 7 million 14 million in salaries um we have endowment money
where people have donated money to the library which is very lovely um I'd like to have a process where we can let the community know that it's a great resource and for them to think about um and we do have the two million in reserves and that's kind of to get us through the beginning of the next fiscal
year as um as the tax collector is collecting the funds so library revenue and I have to again shout out to Mark Bernath and Skip Bell you can see there was a steady kind of increase there and then if you look at our next projection we're going to be
a little bit down and that's because we've gotten some of our projects done so some of that balance forward has gone down so like I said staffing staffing we couldn't do what we do without our staff um in 2001 we had 307 library staff but
as you can see the majority of them is are part are were part-time and then we had some full-time now we're moving up towards adding full-time staff um slowly but surely we call creating snowmen so when someone leaves here and someone leaves here we piece things together um
so that we can have some additional positions that are full-time and dedicated to service um and then also we've had a hundred staff get promotions since 2021 and sometimes that promotion is full-time to part-time sometimes it's
from an entry- level position to a more senior position so it's all within the system we try to promote from within and we've had staff that go out and get their master's degree in library science we will help them with that and again they get promoted and move up so I'm
really excited about that when I talk about CIP projects just some ideas of what we're actually spending um we had budgeted this year I think close to $5 million and we're working our way
through it there are some challenges pipes break and I'll show you that in a minute and I'm going to show you some examples of some of our projects um and then this is kind of some history if you have 18 locations someone's going to need a roof every year someone's going to need we haven't
had new flooring in the Kathy Schwinsburg Rude Library for quite some time so we're looking at ways to um get these things done and make them fresh make them look good but being mindful again we focus our funds on the envelope
of the building plumbing air conditioning those are all the things that our dollars are focused on here we go right into this budget priorities staffing security which I'll talk about um maintaining the buildings
and then I mean even windows we have to replace all the windows on the north side of the Melbourne Library and we were looking at doing it in sections but we learned the windows won't be the same so we're going to start saving now so over time we replace them all at once so
they all have that same look and then finally just some of these pictures here um the pictures on either side are in the mobile library it's not just a bookmobile we do technology in there we do all kinds of different things kids are coding ozobots they're
playing with Makey Makeys they're making instruments there's all kinds of things that we do that would surprise you so this is one of my favorites so we do a lot of renovations we have a lot of facilities that we want to make sure are welcoming to the public and so we're
working on a more central theme going forward where we'll have a similar feel and experience when you enter each library right now when you enter them they're all different and so we're trying to make them look and feel the same same colors painted not identical but give them that same
feeling so you got to love this that was um this year with I'm very proud of this project we got a new roof we painted and we refreshed the Cocoa Beach Library so it's looking much cleaner much nicer much better um bathrooms bathrooms are a
big deal in public libraries um anyone is welcome in a public library and they will talk to a person um but we have to maintain those facilities as well so this is an older bathroom that we renovated this is my favorite project at the Kathy
Schwinsburg Rid Library we have a very old drain system on the roof and we had pipes crack we know we have other pipes we need to replace well when the pipes crack water flows down we had water on the third floor second floor and first
floor in our IT room on the third floor was kind of I've got a video of puddles of water um so we spent this money to the $87,000 to fix the cracked pipe that you see on the far left um we have more pipes that need to be fixed but then
when you're done all you see are ceiling tiles so it's pretty uneventful but we know it's fixed some more examples these are Cape Canaveral bathrooms that were just updated and renovated we did the adult and the youth bathrooms again we're
going with the same bathroom and same look and feel as we renovate other bathrooms so everything has a similar feel this is the Riverhouse um I don't know if you saw but it was re recently featured in Florida today via a voice in
some other locations we are doing all kinds of creative activities in this house for community um someone very wise said to me that during their campaign they were knocking on doors and people were lonely and so one of the things we focused on here is a place where people
can come together and serve community we have things like knitting with a purpose so that you'll knit and maybe baby caps for kids in hospitals or scarves for veterans um what you're seeing in the two bottom right pictures I will admit I did not take them um Tim Short did but
we have a book club Thursday morning it's just quiet reading on the river you come in with your book of choice at the end some people choose to talk about it some don't it's a nice place to be and we also bring in um Bvard service dogs service animals the last Thursday of
every month so if people are lonely or they're looking for companionship maybe they can't have a dog where they live they get the opportunity if they want to meet with one of the Space Coast dogs so I did want to mention safety we
do have a code of conduct we have all kinds of training for our staff from deescalation seminars to actually on-site seminars we do crowd control webinars we have monitors we have alert uh all different types of things but we had over
360 events at the library that required some more significant intervention um and that's important because as we move forward we want to make sure our buildings are safe if you look at the little chart on your page you'll notice
that we do have offduty officers at a few locations one of them is the Melbourne Library on Fe Avenue where you would be um aware we have the Daily Bread and some other things so hopefully things might we might see a turnaround
in that community but more importantly we have security guards at other locations titusville and we have a few locations that need some security guards ogallia and West Melbourne are coming up so just technology you know we talk
about visits to the library we had 511,000 people visit our website um the last year the first quarter was not available because Google made some changes but using our online resources are critical to the community so we
always say that the library is available 247 and so you can check out books you can stream video there's a lot that you can do in the library and you don't have to come in and see us every time technology over 450 public access
computers so just some fun here again some kids on the mobile library but the bottom right hand corner I want to po uh point out that's our cyber patriot team so when I hear people speaking when I heard Jeff speaking when I heard Joe speaking um this is hacking for good and
it's part of a national program four of our students this semester they will end in April are in the top 10% of the 10,000 students participating across country and this is a grant and we're doing this with Northrip Grumman and Codecraft Works they've been a
tremendous partner for us our app you can carry your library in your pocket if you didn't know you have a a bookmark for that and what I was going to mention is that you can download this app you can check items out you can even go to a bookstore and
see a book you like and scan the ISBN to see if the library has it so a lot of exciting things we have a lot of exciting resources that way and for example it will take you to things like Libby and Hoopla if you've never done those before um those are online ebook
resources and of course we have LinkedIn Learning i don't know if you're familiar with that a lot of the veterans that I've talked to when you're in the military you get LinkedIn learning you can get um certificates and all kinds of things to help yourself but also learning in small increments so LinkedIn
learning is a product of LinkedIn and you can access at the library for free here are more of our online resources do you have a child that needs test prep it's a good thing do you need to go see an attorney Morris um I always recommend going to the legal forms just
because what it will do is you can look at what a lease should look like or look at what it will look like so when you go in to see an attorney you can have some preconceived notion of what you might be looking for so it's a great resource wall Street Journals are usually a big hit for people too that's available to
you for free along with other newspapers that's just not all we have um we are in trend to beat the numbers next year if you look at this um 846 electronic um ebooks checked out online with just
Libby and and Overdrive they're the same the app is called Libby the website is Overdrive but that's books that you want you can you can renew them if they're available you can reserve them and you can even go online and say what's available now we do a lot of small grants in the
community i just was um awarded this week a grant from the Ogalli Rotary for summer reading our theme this summer is space a summer on the space coast and we will be um I'm using the word um we will
be um having a lot of fun with that and the kids that win the award at the end of the summer will be getting space um telescopes telescopes so it's kind of going to be fun and informational telescopes and finally um young
storytellers that's a a grant that we had with the Florida Humanities Council it's a wonderful thing these kids wrote all summer long with authors that we brought in we did it all online in a contained environment and they published this book at the end of the summer they
just recently spoke at Library Con and they asked if their fans would be there would they be signing things because they wanted to know that their fans would all be there but we're doing this again next year and we have some other tricks up our sleeve so there's a celebrity on this
page that someone may know but I just wanted to mention that this is summer reading if you look at this we had a 30% increase in attendance in summer reading it's our busiest time of year where everyone else is busy during retail or busy during the summer um and we had
over 1 million minutes of reading in two months last summer and that's tracked on an app we call Beanstack our friends of the library are very important we have many locations that have friends groups they are separate 501c3 organizations all
volunteer and they all support us and raise funds to help us do more we are always evolving to serve and I don't know if you uh recall but we have added on January 1st we added at least one hour to every library almost every
day because we're open now till 6:00 p.m instead of 5:00 p.m so unless it's a day a library is open until um 8 cuz some of our we rotate evenings um they will be we are open later and we did answer over
1 million reference questions so this is my closing I think I have this slide and one more but I think it's really important to recognize that 1.6 million people visited our our locations last year we provide a lot of
things like tech help programs classes community spaces ebooks but there was a survey done recently and it was about 2,000 people were evaluated about the library and I think they feel more peaceful after being at the library it
positively affects their ability to cope with the world they've used it for personal growth and I think that they are feeling more of the community if they use their library and so we do have something for everyone and so this just gives you an idea of some of the things
that we have i could go on and on and on questions for Wendy commissioner Doing I just wanted to say thank you for all you do for the community thank you
okay good job thank you thank you all right let's take another quick five minute break and then we'll have uh Adam right thanks
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and I know Adam is very eager and very eager well good afternoon commissioners i'm Adam Hyde i'm thrilled to be your airport manager at Valkyrie Airport um it is my favorite subject so uh let's
get into it um Valkeria Airport it was built back during the war effort World War II as a naval air station it was used as a train training base and then over the years it was deed to Bvard County to be used as a general aviation airport in the last 20 years or so it's
really been polished into the gym that it is today to today it covers 670 to total acres about 190 acres of that is is golf course and the rest is used as airfield or other operational uses this past year we've done just a
smidge over 110,000 aircraft operations which is huge it's it's up from what our estimates used to be now now we actually have a system in place to accurately count that and that's on two 4,000 ft runways and then we recently just had a GPS approach that increases safety for
instrument traffic we have 95 hangers 94 of them are available for lease the the other one we actually keep for ourselves to use and we have a fixed wing and ultralight flight school um an airport's a lot like an on-ramp any anytime you have something
like that other things get built up ne nearby so services things like that so we have airframe and power plant of of course fuel and um builder's assist all of this is actually managed by three people three full-time people and one part-time person so I think that's
pretty impressive and a great feather in the cap for the staff our operating revenues $ 1.5 million um it is all the color of pink and most of that revenue it comes from charges
for services so fuel sales land leases hanger rent thing things like that and then some of the rest is just intergovernmental rent revenue and that's from our grants that we get from FDOT or the FAA our two largest leases the first one
is the Habitat Golf Course our current annual rate right there that's at 150,000 this lease was re-evaluated back in 2022 and brought to 7.9% of fair market value from when it was originally um concepted in 1992 mosquito control is
our is our other large lease that we have out at the airport um Joe Joe talked briefly about that but they use that as an unmanned aerial system base and a variety of other uses and we just had an increase there by CPI to the $53,000
the final largest um revenue producer at the airport is actually our hangers the majority of the hangers that we have are T T hangers and this column has a lot of information on it but I'll draw your attention to to
the CPI column um we've generally just gone up with C CPI o over the years so right now we've gone from 251 in fiscal year 18 to 33509 for this year the nearby airports that are comparable to to us do charge a
little bit more to a lot more the ones that charge a little bit more are also run by governmental entities so Arthur Dunn and Merit Island are run by airport authorities sebastian Airport is run by a city but their hangers are run by a private entity so I think that's the largest difference right
there our operating expenses the vast majority of that is maintenance and fuel purchasing and followed up by comp comp and benefits CIP again that's our to total for one of the projects we have
going this year and then debt service that's going to be retired in 2030 our largest major CIP project right now is the development of a large hanger facility it it'll house approximately 75 hangers total right now we're in the
environmental assessment phase and FDOT is is funding that and of course the rest of it as well um at 160,000 and then we're just responsible for the match there at 20% looking a little bit more towards the future this is the part that I'm
most excit excited about um of course I said the new hanger construction but we did purchase some property back I believe it was 2018 2019 and that's a piece of property that we're hoping to use for private hanger development so if people want to build their own personal hanger or business
wants to build a hanger for um their own business uses they can this uh photo that we have on here is actually a conceptual drawing that was provided to me by our flight school they're hoping to actually be able to build that in the next couple of years at at our airport
so that's kind of a big deal for us that's a big shift from what we've normally done and of course we'll need taxi ways to do that and our airport master plan is coming up to its midlife point the airport master plan is a 20-year
document so um usually around the midpoint of that we see how much things have changed o over the years and and go out and um start doing a new one and then finally we'll need some additional staff to meet that growing aviation demand that we've seen over the last few
years an airport budget presentation really isn't complete without talking a little bit about the federal regulations that govern airport revenues there are quite a few few of them but the the real essence of it comes down to
grant grant insurance 24 and 25 grant insurance 24 basically says the airport needs to have a fee and rental structure that helps the airport be as sustainable as possible and then finally grant insurance
25 basically just says any revenue generated at the airport has to be spent at the airport i know this was quick and I just wanted to be conscious of everyone's time so did anybody have any questions that's great questions for Adam
Commissioner one you answered it right at the end you're welcome how how's um how's the relationship with with Grant Valkcaria today you know in the in years past um you know there was some some friction but I haven't heard that for
many years um probably to your credit so I'm I'm just curious so it's change it's changed quite a bit especially over the last couple couple years i'd say I meet fairly frequently and just randomly will stop in and and talk to the town and some of the members of town council and in fact one of the tenants is actually
on town council now so it's changed a lot we rarely get noise complaints and when we do the majority of them are so far from the airport there's nothing that the airport could even consider doing they're 10 miles away often so it's been really good okay very good
anything else for No okay good job sir kathy all right good afternoon how's everybody doing today um I brought uh some staff with me today uh Merryill Vincent she's our asset manager
how are we doing and uh Mary Bowers is our purchasing manager and Carl Cotner is our fleet manager thank you for having me today central service department is responsible for the procurement of goods and services providing for the accountability of
county assets the maintenance and repair of county vehicles and equipment maintenance of county fuel sites in the county and also provides the clerk to the special magistrate for code enforcement and others the central services strives to provide
excellent support to the county departments charter officers and at times local agencies through its core functions as purchasing fleet services and asset management the additional services that we provide are clerk to the special magistrate and we also
manage the advisory board database man maintenance the county's funding sources uh the majority of the funding sources are $4.9 million and those are for fleet services for fleet parts fuel sales and
vehicle repairs general fund support is $1.4 million we have miscellaneous revenue of $90,000 which is the sale of surplus assets and then we have a small balance forward of $79,000 for asset and fleet
um we have a total of 28 positions nine in purchasing nine in fleet services and eight in asset management we have two administration positions my position as well as administrative assistant who
also is the clerk to the special magistrate purchasing services we accomplished 116 million.9 in solicitation of the American Rescue Plan Act which were
required to be and we did encumber of those by December 31st 2024 they are required to be spent by December 31st 2026 significant changes that we made we made significant changes to board policy
BCC 25 BCC 26 BCC 27 BCC28 and ordinance 9837 we also consolidated the bid uh the bidding platform we used to have two bidding platforms one was Demandstar and one was vendor link we found Demandstar
the contractors or vendors had to pay for that vendor link the county paid for so to encourage more people to go on vendor link we stopped van uh demand star and we only use vendor link now asset management is um responsible
for annual physical inventory supporting charter officers and judicial functions with regard to assets they also collect and redistribute um assets that are turned in as well as a auctioning the assets they were uh found in full
compliance with the 2023 um annual comprehensive f financial report part of the work that asset management does actually is recorded on the county's financial reports as assets and they're working right now with the
external auditors on the 2024 acter they conduct inventories of board agencies charter agencies state attorney's office public defender court administration law library and guardian at lightam they had a total inventory of over 29,000 items
and they collected over a million dollars in surplus sales of which 894,000 went back to departments so we reuse our equipment or sell it fleet services is responsible for vehicles
heavy equipment generators acquisition replacement and disposition monitoring fuel usage billing operating efficiencies maintenance and we're also working we're helping to work on a new heavy equipment building that will be at
the Wickham site uh they managed nine fuel sites they distributed over 377,000 gallons of diesel and 484,000 of unled fuel they've serviced 577 vehicles
220 um heavy equipment 255 generators and 53 replacement purchases the clerk to the special magistrate we are required to provide services to the county special magistrate for code
enforcement dangerous animals and contractor licensing we coordinate and schedule the meetings we take the minutes we order and file at the clerk's office and we provide informationational support and the advisory boards we
maintain the database we have 44 advisory boards and appointments maintained online through the county's website we're a mighty support agency are there any questions
questions for Kathy any questions we appreciate your support thank you so much appreciate it all right don all right sir good afternoon commissioners i'm Don Walker i'm director of communications and Space
Coast Government Television uh if this comes as any relief I have the smallest budget in the county uh departmentwise so uh with that said I just wanted to talk a little bit briefly about staffing and funding uh I have Rachel Horst who's my public information officer and 50% of
her salary is funded through a grant from emergency management and 25% is funded through fire rescue so she handles a lot of public information for those two departments uh I also have Logan Himway my uh production manager and Andre Scambre who does programming
and 5% of their salaries is funded through planning and development i have Vonte Osborne he is my legal ads uh specialist and 50% of his salary is funded through information technology because when he's not doing legal ads
he's helping uh keep our web pages up to date and uh make sure everything's where it needs to be and then we have Michaelardy uh who is funded 100% through utility services because he is funded through a grant through their
office for outreach so he will be he does like wetlands information uh public information um schools things like that so as far as our budget uh we're just around $500,000 majority of that is for
salary and benefits uh 47,000 of that we brought in last year through uh legal ads and I'll talk a little bit more about that um $25,000 we spend for a contract through column Software which is a Miami based company that helped us
formulate our legal ads page um one of the our main things that we do in my office is public outreach and it's all about transparency and so I wanted to give you an idea of the types of things that my office produces we do a quarterly newsletter that we post on
our web page uh that pretty much highlights uh that u achievements that county departments have made over the course of the quarter we do a monthly employee newsletter and that's also available not only to employees but to the public as well uh we did 217 press
releases in 2024 so far this year we've done 70 uh we're also big on social media uh especially during hurricanes so last year during the hurricane season we posted 144 social media messages uh just letting people uh know information of
where they can get sandbags things they need to do to protect themselves things like that uh we did 33 prescribed burn notifications last year on social media we've done 19 of those so far this year uh we also post road closures 44 last
year 32 so far this year uh anytime there's an extreme weather event uh potential tornadoes uh severe thunderstorms uh we work with the emergency management to also send information out on those um we activate for every rocket launch there were 112
launches last year 34 so so far this year and when we activate for a launch that includes launches that have been scrubbed so there may be 114 launches but we may have activated 150 times uh and the reason we activate for those is that if there's any type of an anomaly
with a rocket the public's going to want to know what do they need to do uh for safety reasons whether it's just to stay indoors whether the rocket was off the beach and therefore there's no threat at all but we're there just in case we're needed to send information out to the public uh and then also last year we did
28 cold weather shelters we did 24 this year as you know it was uh a very cool season this year i mentioned legal ads so Bvard County gets to tout itself as being the first county in the state that started
posting legal ads um on its web page uh last year or two years ago actually Florida House Bill 704 7049 went into effect and that allows counties to post legal ads on their web page instead of in a newspaper publication uh and not
only are we able to post our legal ads on our web page but we're also uh allowed to post municipal legal ads on our web page if they desire to do so and also the charter offices now we can't force them to post their ads on our page but we have put out the welcome mat
we've met with all the clerks of these cities uh we've sent out letters to them letting them know we're open for business uh Commissioner Felner joined us on many of those uh meetings that we had with the clerks of the cities uh right now out of the 16 municipalities we've got five that are doing legal ads
with us and we also have one charter office which is the sheriff's office that has posted some ads so last year we did 442 ads uh on the Bvard County web page legal ads and again six of those were from uh municipalities and from a
charter office i wanted to mention that our goal uh with SEGTV is that we try to reach people where they're at so one of many ways that we do that uh when we have a meeting like today this is being
broadcast right now on SEGTV it's being livereamed on Florida Today's uh website it's livereamed on Space Coast Daily it's also on YouTube uh and it's also closed caption on our web page and also
on YouTube and um we started uh during COVID putting our meetings on YouTube and we've been able to uh backlog previous meetings before 2020 on YouTube as well so right now on YouTube uh you
can look back to meetings dating back to 2017 uh you can share those with people if you want to or you have access to them if you just want to use them for research but there are th 309 meetings currently listed on YouTube from Bvard County those are zoning meetings uh
budget workshops commission meetings things like that uh and then finally just to give you an idea of uh SEGTV's programming we are 24hour a day 7 day a week uh TV station
so we do live broadcasts like this one and then we'll roll this into our programming so over the course of a week you'll be able to watch this uh budget workshop today uh you know as many as five 10 times during the week uh we do board of county commission meetings
zoning meetings workshops we do transportation planning uh organization meetings and the sorrel uh when they meet we do their meetings uh that's that amounts to uh 49% of our content on
SEGTV we also do recorded broadcast so municipalities like Barefoot Bay the city of Cocoa Cocoa Beach Melbourne Palm Bay and Titusville uh and Bvard public schools they record their own meetings but then they provide them to us and we factor them into our programming and
then we also when we're not showing our meetings and other municipal meetings we show the Florida Channel especially during the legislative session and we do public service announcements things that we produce in house uh that people that we think that are interesting things that we're doing with the lagoon and things like that we put those on our
website as well um if people want to know where to find us uh we're on Spectrum channel 499 uh if you live in North Bard you can find us on Comcast channel 51 if you're in South Bard we're on Comcast channel
13 we're also on AT&T channel 99 uh you can watch our meetings live on our website uh bvardfl.gov uh we're also on YouTube and that address is sectv499 and we're also on Facebook uh
at the address of at bvard govt government so and that's my presentation qu questions for Don Commissioner Delaney thank you thank you so much for this um one of the things that I really
appreciate that you guys do is um how how much content is available online and that is extremely helpful i know so many people who watch these meetings online from the comfort of their own home and later on I'll get you know messages from
people you know what you know what happened here and ask me questions and so I know that the community really really appreciates that um one of the things that I know we've talked about a lot is um I was at a uh chamber meeting
um it was the government affairs one and some of the feedback that I got back and this is really for the commissioners uh the other commissioners um some of the feedback that I got back was that there's when looking at our Facebook page um the Bvard County government page
there's not really a whole lot of like storytelling so when they're on um like when businesses or um executives or whoever are looking at our our Facebook page they were hoping to see like what's
going on in Bvard County what's our community like all that kind of stuff and since you know we've talked there's been some more sharing between departments and that kind of stuff so I really appreciate that and I I um I'm excited to see how that's going to grow in the future sure well we have a good
story to tell in Bvard County and so anytime you know we we try to get with make it very clear to our directors that if there's information that's positive like that they want to put out there that that we're a good avenue to get that out there for them uh I wanted to mention too about our meetings the the great thing about our meetings being on
YouTube and on our website so if you if you call up this meeting tomorrow and you want to see well I don't want to you know no offense I don't want to hear the Valkyrie airport budget presentation i want to hear the SCG presentation you can go directly to that on the web page
and listen to me all over again so anyway there you go yeah Adam he didn't mean that in a bad way i I I I promise you uh well um Commissioner Atinson do you have any
questions um I I just uh a comment for you i really appreciate you know the SGTV office is next door to mine so uh we we talk to the staff uh a lot and uh you know from time to time I'll remind you to you know speak in the microphone
and all that that's because they're over there trying to adjust as people are too far away or uh they don't turn it on and all those kinds of things so uh so think of that when you're when you're sitting in a in a meeting like this uh the
people who are trying to sort of uh keep up with us in real time so well I would I would have loved to have my staff here to introduce but they are here yes they they are so uh thank you sir very much all right Morris
all right commissioners most of you know a lot about some of the work we do so we act as the legal advisor to the board of county commissioners um we're also Bvard County's records management liazison officer officer um we handle public
records requests through my office and much like uh Jeff and and Don and uh Kathy presented before we support all of the good work that the departments who have gone previously do here so we
provide legal support for all of our departments yesterday afternoon I spend in court on a hearing to help an important drainage project uh that public works is doing go forward and we're back in court on that Thursday just an example of of some of the things we do to support departments in addition
to contract work um and things of that nature so again ordinances statutes board policies we assist in reviewing those applying them helping the board um draft and create and move ordinances
through the process as well as staff um we assist in updates to board policies last this year or in last the c last calendar year we uh assisted in drafting drafted entirely andor reviewed 610 agreements or contracts we responded
to 1,988 public records requests in calendar year 2024 again we support all meetings of the board of county commissioners we staff meetings of the planning and zoning board um Myra North Boulevard economic development zone uh
and various other boards we provide staffing for each of those meetings uh also do the review and legal work for for all of those boards um records management at the uh at the Cocoa at the central library uh the
entire third floor where you saw the pictures of the leak before we have tons of records there that my office maintains uh Jackie in my office goes and pulls records from there when needed uh she manages record retention and
destruction policies uh and again we do that public records function we help coordinate among all of the departments various records coordinators when there are requests that cover multiple departments i referenced litigation we oversee um all of the litigation handled
by outside council on behalf of the county so things like tort litigation slip and fall we don't do that in-house that's covered by our insurance and outside counsel but we oversee the work of those attorneys and more and more I am keeping litigation inhouse and we're
doing a larger share of that than we had done previously when I see that it will be uh both a better outcome for the county that's always important but also to be costsensitive and where it makes fiscal sense and to try to save money and use our in-house services so
whenever we have those opportunities we're doing more of that litigation here than was done previously um we have 15 positions in my office uh two vacancies currently uh my office is in you know basically
all of our funds go into the direct service of the attorneys and our support team with a very small amount of the budget for things like necessary continuing legal education uh and lenture and things of that nature and
that's pretty much it um what what are the vacancies that you have sorry I didn't mean to interrupt attorney one and legal secretary one so we need a we need an admin and um looking at bringing on an attorney okay legal legal
secretary is not necessarily parallegal not necessarily okay could be you would like that potentially yeah if it's a good fit or someone certainly someone who can learn and train in that capacity right if they don't bring that already okay
um questions for Morris yes please okay commissioner Delaney i was just wondering do you know um roundabout how much money you guys take in for um public record requests each year i do not um that I don't see that as
part of our budget okay um so u I I don't have a number for that okay but we can get it certainly right and those revenues go to those individual departments that are fulfilling those public records requests so that would be something that um we could work with the
county attorney's office to track down what that revenue is and I think we did compile not that long ago a request that sought all of the um the charges for records uh for some past period so we should have that readily able to provide
but we don't that's not incorporated in our budget thank you other questions from Morris all right sir thank you very much thank you all right Frank frank let's see this should be the
shortest one i think I'm going to make it shorter than Morris's you know county manager's office our role is to provide leadership to implement uh board policies and directives to the whole organization and to strategically plan
for the future to ensure a high quality of life for residents visitors and the businesses in our community um so in the county manager's office I can tell you that our focus I was just talking to commissioners about
it today different commissioners uh it's to uh deliver responsive services and be responsive that's to the board of county commissioners to individual commissioners i can tell you that we focus on that every meeting uh with
staff that goes beyond that it's about staff and how they interact with other staff and being responsive to members of the community being responsive to the members of the community means to respond in a timely
manner doesn't mean they're going to hear necessarily what they want to hear but it's showing respect by being responsive and so we try to focus on that as much as we can um I can tell you that the outside of that um county
infrastructure improvements has been a key focus and it continues to be in a variety of areas we've tried to incrementally improve in the areas of public works specifically roads and you've heard that in the presentations
um in county buildings uh you've heard a lot of criticism over time but I can tell you that we've been incrementally uh increasing maintenance and efforts to upgrade uh different facilities for a uh
for the last eight years um and the same goes for public uh for parks and recreation we're doing that at a variety of parks and a variety of you know you've seen libraries talk about what they're doing at at at their bathrooms
the restrooms upgrading and I can tell you that uh there hasn't been a lot of attention focused in parks uh and but we've been doing that the last couple of years and we're now starting to try to do it in county buildings as well uh and that's
based on some board input that we've gotten as well to try to focus in on those kind of things we'll continue to do that there's other areas though that that's happening too utilities you know it's a very aging infrastructure you heard that um there's different revenue
streams that are doing it for there and then the big issue is this you know solid waste and a variety of different facilities up in North Bard the transfer station the new one 192 these are all very big significant uh projects that we've pushed very hard for uh doing that
so uh those are among the things that we are focused as a leadership team trying to support staff with uh another key area for us is um um dealing with agendas for the for the board preparing
them making sure that agendas um give the board and the public the information that the board uh needs to move things forward um and give us the direction that help us you know develop the
upcoming budget and that's really what it's really about for us uh um following the board's policies and the directors that you've given to us and then and then developing the budget based on the parameters that you establish um the
last two areas that you see in that first page is the enhancement of public safety services and I can tell you that um you know uh we've done that over the last several years trying to do you know we did a seven-year plan as it dealt with public safety we're in the process
of looking to get that upgraded we're obviously looking for some board direction i think we'll hopefully we're going to be getting that next Tuesday when we talk about updating a seven-year plan as to where the board wants to see the future that's a roadmap for what
could potentially happen in terms of how we address you know public safety issues that are out there and and the last one that you see there is the investing in employee employees and that basically you know and I hope that's what you've gotten out of what you've heard these
last four uh sessions the board has a lot of uh employees in a lot of different areas that uh provide a lot of critical services and you've heard when HR that's why we focused on it
organizationwide challenges both in re recruiting and retaining and that's why we shared the vacancy rates it's organizationwide you've had those issues the leadership team tries to provide the best support that it can
within the parameters that the board establishes because you establish for us what our resources are going to be and where you want those resources allocated uh we don't do that so uh we provide executive leadership but it's to fund
board directed priorities and that's what we will do and so in the county manager's office that's done with a budget of $1.5 million and eight full-time employees the county manager two assistants three uh support staff
for those assistants um one person who is an assistant to the county manager that position's been vacant since January uh one reason is knowing that I was going to be transitioning we know whoever the new county manager is that's an important position that's a
right-hand person for that person so I left it a open for that person to be able to make the the the selection to move things forward and then an agenda coordinator who's you know responsible for uh making sure that uh all the agendas all the attachments everything
are done everything that the board wants to see that we get that out on a timely basis on uh on Thursdays and uh then we have the support staff and obviously in planning and development that does the same thing for the planning and zoning
meetings so very simply that's the county manager's office that's funded through the general fund and uh and we look forward to you know the continued direction that the board wants to give relative to how to fund the priorities
that you determine are the most important that we should focus the resources that are available for and uh with that I think uh we're going to turn it over to Jill right and I know Frank mentioned he was going to do his very
quickly i bet I can go quicker than Frank on the uh this is the an overview of the budget for the commission district offices so these are uh your offices that that you manage and operate within your individual districts and so
in 2021 the board adopted board policy BCC43 and that established a cap for each district office so um each there's a separate cost center for each office and that initial capped amount was
380,000 per office and that includes the compensation and benefits for the employees within your offices as well as any travel expenses memberships uh operating supplies and things of that nature so that's your copy machines uh
you know if you you have um certain office supplies that you want to buy um and we adjust that cap every year for organizationalwide increases so if there's a cost of living adjustment or if the FRS rates change which they do
every year if there's changes in the other employee benefits like the health insurance rates that cap gets adjusted every year and so you can see for the current fiscal year that capped amount is $443,525 per district office and as
commissioners you each have discretion over that budget within your office um so as long as you stay within that amount you have the flexibility to use those dollars as you see fit and uh just want to point out that these office
budgets don't include facilities cost such as any rental expenses or your electricity water things of that nature those are all paid out of the facilities management program and um this just shows what that
total is just over $2.2 million for all five offices and primarily uh that goes to compensation and benefits for commissioners and your um staff within those offices that's about 93% and then about 7% is for those other operating
expenses and so that's the commission office budgets if you have any questions i think there's only one office currently that even has a rental right um rental fee for their building uh I believe so yes that's correct
better than uh it had been in the past okay questions for Chill Questions no okay okay uh very good all right so I'm going to I'll pull the audience do we want to take one more short break before Chief Voltater gets
in there or don't power through it all right Chief all right i voted for a break but it's whatever you guys want well you didn't you know I didn't see a hand or anything so that's Tom's job okay all right very good all
right so thank you guys so much for uh hearing us today uh thank you for the meetings that we've had in the past few weeks and thank you for what you are about to hear in the coming week uh as uh the county manager referenced the uh
the fire assessment as long as nothing changes you will see that next week at the board meeting so this being the last budget presentation I feel it's kind of going to we'll have part one and part two this is going to roll into what you
will see next week um so this is a very small snapshot of fire rescue because part one and part two so let's get started uh few things we'll talk over just a general real broad brush financial
overview of the fire assessment the MSTU revenues our personnel the infrastructure the equipment that we purchase on an annual basis uh our lifeguard services the resource divide that's the 5545 split that uh we learned
that I know you guys that we've talked about plenty you learned about last week and uh we'll continue to talk about that into the upcoming weeks uh fire assessment impacts i don't want to spoil too much of the surprise on that but we will definitely look at that chart as an
overview so fire assessment and MSTU the revenues of our fire department uh around 54 million between the two streams um you'll see the green line is our reserves if that chart went back to
around 2007 2008 you would actually see those reserves up close to the revenues they were around 20 million so that's the history of fire rescue going back about that far um we basically lived off reserves for quite some time and that
allowed us to uh work through you know the the increases in equipment and not go for those fire assessment increases but you'll see in 2020 our reserves got down to 1.16 million so uh staff knew
something had to be done our savings account had run dry and that's when that was actually the second fire assessment increase but that was the first really big one of 29% plus the ARPA and CARES infusion so that was the inception of
our seven-year plan that we currently sit in that you'll see some more details about that as we move forward um in the last couple years we have brought those reserves back up certainly not to the level that we hoped of course that's why
when we went into that seven-year plan nobody predicted COVID and nobody predicted the increase of goods and services and just the absolute increase of price of fire trucks and all equipment that we saw nobody could have predicted that and that's what those
2021 numbers from that seven-year plan are built off and around our personnel uh lot of charts on this page and I'll I'll summarize it real real big picture for everyone here
uh recruiting efforts and our sponsorships we have done excellent on and there's no more uh exciting and fun part of my job is when we get to give the opportunity to the young folks in our community it's very fulfilling and
it'll turn a bad day into a good day when you get to see that smile on their face uh but in with this chart you'll see some of those negative numbers so not to talk about what we've lost but I will tell you our total uh open PCN
count in the field is 91 so that's just the the the the raw truth of the data that's where we sit today um with one more retirement this week of a fire prevention personnel which the inspectors has also become another trade that we're we're losing those senior
people and has also become uh hard to replace and I think that's a common theme being the last one I think the trades and the experience leaving the fields is a common theme amongst all uh
the one difference and I know you all know this uh our fire prevention folks if if they're not in the seat we get behind on inspections which is definitely detrimental to public safety but when the firefighters the paramedics
the lieutenants aren't at work when we have those empty seats we still have to fill them so that creates the overtime that we all hear so much about that we're trying to combat when we come see you
next Tuesday the infrastructure so prior to that seven-year plan uh that's the first year I referenced before that plan got put into place our total budget for this was around
$600,000 so into that new plan the board directed us go build those fire stations make them better again who planned for COVID who planned for the price increases as you'll see at the bottom of the the uh chart there at that time when
we were building out the financial plan the price per square foot was anywhere from $200 to $400 a square foot currently our most recent station that we built station 49 was $600 a square foot to build um so we're still doing
the best we can and pushing that and meeting you know meeting all the uh requirements and the things that we have to do to keep that infrastructure going but it's getting tough and that's another reason why you're going to hear from us next Tuesday uh just for your
reference so you know the uh stations on this chart the green ones are in the 5545 split so they're funded by both uh the fire side and the general fund side the red ones are fire only and the blue
ones are EMS or general fund only capital i'll uh go ahead and skip right down to the bottom again keep harping on the increases but that's really what's made it tough uh overall of all the projects about a 39% increase
in the prices of the uh equipment uh 39% may not sound like a lot but it's a lot when you're talking $600,000 so our fire trucks have gone from about 500 to $900,000 along with the lead times of
two to four years to build a firetr uh as as you guys may remember a few meetings ago um those lead times made me buy a firetruck from somebody else we found a great price on them and it allowed us to buy four so that's one of
the ways that we've survived through all this inflation is truly looking for the best value for not only getting the equipment for the guys and girls but the value for Bard County as a whole so buying that extra fire truck and getting
it in county right now uh it'll be going in service within the next couple weeks is huge because one of those trucks is replacing a fire truck that's actually older than a lot of the new hires that we have coming on to the field so it's a
very good thing to be replacing those fire trucks and getting them in something new the lifeguard program uh two key points on this slide that I'd like to bring your attention to um the Cocoa Beach thatund almost $170,000 that's a double payment from
them because we allowed them to forego their payment and pay uh two years as a one-time payment so that's why you see that number there that's so off base of everyone else's as well as the tourism
fund the tourism uh funds the 1.5 million there at the bottom um that's what allows us to run the staff you see there of the seven full-time and 11 seasonal towers uh so if the to you know if the tourism isn't available coming
the next year we'll have to look to general fund or uh changing around how we operate in the last i don't think it'll be there Chief okay that's why two things I wanted to mention and that was that was one of them just going to own that one so
so the divide of BCFR uh how we collect how we fund things it's the 5545 split is what we refer to it as and what that is is 55% of the personnel are riding on firet trucks 45%
of the personnel are riding on ambulances that's how as a general term to try to glaze over it that's how we've derived from that number in funding the fire department to keep it um fund well um so the fire side is
obviously the uh the fire trucks our hazmat uh anything uh wildland intervention and those trucks and equipment that would go along with that the blue side or the EMS side would be just those the ambulances the rescues uh
all the EMS equipment that would go along with that to help them do their job and that and that is important because when we go to this slide and when we go into next Tuesday uh for every fire assessment impact you have
there's a general fund impact that goes along with it um I know the board we've we've gone over this pretty well and I think uh between our meetings the last couple week and executive sessions I think we all understand that pretty well but I won't go into this chart in too
much detail because there's more to come as well as um for for options here's just a chart for you all to look at uh as you go up and down the per 1% those are the
increases from the fire uh the fire assessment MSTU side as well as the general fund and how those are proportionate any questions that was a lot faster than I thought you were going to be commissioner Delaney questions
sure um so I was wondering about station 49 the 600 um dollars per square foot um what is the hurricane rating on that building like can it can it survive a cat five yes okay so is that with it being an
inland um uh fire station is that is that totally necessary we don't want so those we don't want those fire stations to have an issue when when crews are having to to live in
there during the hurricanes right um you know we want to build them as strong as possible um same thing our plan for you'll see station 64 in there has a big price tag on it uh because that is one that's truly sits on A1A and our plan
and hope for that one is to build everything above grade uh lessons we learned from our West Coast folks um the fire stations you lift the bays you don't build any electrical on the first floor your computers your server rooms
uh everything is on the second floor and the ocean goes over to the river and we in theory hopefully squeegee it out and start running calls again and I know that I've brought this up before but Station 23 it just I mean
that being a mobile home just totally kills me on spending $1.3 million um on that i I just really um yeah I don't I I'm going to get a lot
of questions about that i know that um and so I just uh I don't know how to defend that i don't I don't like it either so I'm wondering like how that how that came
about how did how did we and so the the one this is what I can say the 1.3 is not all the station itself uh there's site work site prep and honestly the price of that stuff will surprise you it
surprised me um so the the price of the trailer itself isn't certainly that's not a $1.3 million uh modular home modular pre-built prefab um but the site prep site work and setup is honestly the
majority of that cost yeah that's still going to be really hard to sell to my constituents um and then so you said that we have 91 vacancies yes and so what does that look
like right now for the day-to-day for for your people um for filling um mandatory overtime filling those slots um to keep stations open are we at risk of having to close
stations is like what's the point um what is the tipping point of that i don't I don't have an exact number to say my tipping point is here um do I do I certainly look at it that uh um if things don't turn around could you know
could we be close to a tipping point i'll say yes um you know the the the mandatories are definitely dependent on the day of the week and and things like that um but we do have 18 spots a day
that are floaters that are built in but those are far and gone eaten up in that 90 um there are certainly a lot of overtime filling those spots i mean I think the math is pretty simple and then um I just wanted to put this
out there because it it's just for the dire situation that we're in with our fire department um and I'm not going to say which fire department this is but there's fire departments out there in the state of Florida that are doing some
major things with with their contracts um there are multiple places now that are on a 2472 schedule um this one in particular pays $30 an hour with you know medical benefits paid for um for not only themselves but their family
members and I just to be able to fill this need of the 91 slots we're going to have to we're going to have to be able to recruit and doing a um just from the presentation that we were briefed on
um when uh you and some of the other staff came to our offices I assume we all got the same presentation um but I don't uh I don't foresee us being able to fill that gap with what I was
presented and um because if we don't deal with not only the wage gap that we have but the work life balance issues we're not going to be able to recruit the people to come to Bvard County and so I just say all
that you know um I don't want to ruin too much of the surprise on the uh on the agenda because it doesn't come out till later in the week but I'll I'll ruin this much of surprise that there's going to be an option three and that's board direction
so Okay thank you thank you well I didn't mean to It's all right commissioner Atinson did you have questions uh I don't I don't have uh questions i'll make a comment to you i spent yesterday as you know uh up there with
fleet gentlemen and lady and um I really appreciate that um good folks that you have up there um it's interesting you were talking about an older vehicle and I have one car that's 20 years old i have one that's 48 years old and I have
an old Honda Cub that is 63 years old and so when you try to work on um older vehicles you gota you got to be resourceful and I I you got some resourceful folks up there who are are making it happen so um I I want to just
give kudos to them so So our fire trucks that are still in service the American Le Frances they went out of business in 2006 so you talk about those guys being resourceful um they they find junkyards
and and they do a lot of special things to keep us in service there's there's no doubt thank you for saying that but uh you know almost 20 years uh America France has been out of business not making any more parts and uh and they keep us going i had I had really good uh
conversation with Don who runs your um facility up there and um I think I might bring a couple items to to try to make it easier for him to uh we we just talked about some of the bureaucratic uh things that uh that he deals with so I'm
I'm going to I'm going to try my best to try to make it a bit better for him so it was it was productive for me and I I appreciate very much thank you okay uh sir thank you very much okay i don't think we ended up with cards is that is
that right Kathy no okay so done with that is there any other discussion from commissioners no okay um do board reports so Mr county Manager anything
else sir no report okay uh Mr county Attorney no report anything else sir okay commissioner Delaney no report okay uh we don't have Commissioner Goodson we don't have
Commissioner Alman commissioner Atkinson no very good now just real quick for uh the public's sake and everybody else this concludes our budget workshops so this was the fourth and final one we don't have any other
department nobody we missed right go go ahead Commissioner um I was wondering at our first budget hearing or budget uh workshop we talked about you know that we would as a group kind of go over um some of the different
revenue options that were presented to us and and whatnot when do you foresee us being able to have that conversation um I'm I'm open i think that's the at the pleasure of the board um open to
suggestions um Jill what do you what do you think would be the the practical way forward for us um to do that have all the right information etc before before June so in May is that uh yeah so we're working with departments right now to
develop their budgets and then when the uh board takes a break in June we'll be meeting with them and preparing all that so we can bring a proposed budget to you in July set the tenative millage rates and and move forward from there so as
much direction as we can get the sooner the better um okay as we move into budget development we could certainly discuss that at the next U meeting and um what uh whatever the pleasure of the board is I I think May makes sense right
before before the June break right right okay we all agree on that okay is there anything else that we missed thank you everybody very much everyone did a did did a great job frank uh your staff uh I think did a wonderful job in their
budget presentations all four workshops so much so that uh two commissioners thought they had it all uh and didn't even need to come to this one i'm kidding all right thank you i'm kidding i'm teasing all right thank you everyone
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