here we go already
where you going i don't know if I said it without Someone
How are you good nice to see you i'm good
so aggressive
we have friends good a Is this on good afternoon welcome to the Escambia County Tourist Development Council budget workshop um I'm going to call this meeting to order uh Philip will you please Well
first was the meeting properly advertised mr chairman the meeting was properly advertised in the Pensacola News Journal on uh May the 15th great thank you uh and will you please call the role thank you call the role matish Patel here james Reeves here ashley Hoffberger here shirley Crronley here david Bayer here charles Bayer here jennifer Breer here Brad Mullenex here and Jason Nicholson here great all members present we do have a quorum so this is
officially called to order uh and at this time we will take public we'll have public forum is there anyone here from the general public who wish to speak uh to tourism today um we do have one speaker but it says on the agenda for James Seekins is that So would you like if you're going to be your organization is being discussed would you prefer to speak during that time or now that would be great okay thank you
all right seeing no one for public forum uh at this time I'll call uh Stefan Hall to speak on the or other someone from county OM thank you afternoon council members my name is Jeremy Pagle and I'm a senior budget analyst with the Escami County Budget Office and I'm here today to present the status of the TDT funds through April 2025 as always I believe the clerk's office has already provided you with a detailed breakdown
of the expenditures as of the end of April 2025 FY25 collections including interest total $9,387,350 this compares to 9,615,769 in collections through April 2024 this reflects a decrease of approximately $228,419 yearover-year to give you a clearer picture the total collections
for FY25 through April represent 45.79% of the annual TDT budget which is set at $20.5 million on the expense side total expenditures through April 2025 amount to approximately $10.25 million finally the current TDT cash balance stands at $28.49 million through April 2025 thanks all right any questions comments about that okay any idea why the decrease or where
the decrease was the um 228,000 council member that is a fantastic question and I'm ready to answer that for you so um basically that we have a a decrease in interest earnings so with that overall so that's about uh just under $217,000 our t our tech technical TDT collection is down about 11,500 between this year and last year so we're we're very very close to what we collected the
same time last year thank you you're welcome don't go far what's that don't go far uh do you do you want me to go ahead and do the next thing or you want to uh Let's go ahead yeah so So the next item on the agenda is the proposed TDT budget um I And before we actually get into the details of that um there are some concerns about the timing of receiving all of the documentation uh they've been
flowing there's a ton of them obviously there's a lot of requests and they've been coming in uh over the last few days and really not giving uh council members enough time to go through um do you want to talk about the process and the applications and and everything that's kind of gone on that in addition to the extra workload created by whatever is going on through the clerk's office etc so sure so uh at any given time uh just just for council uh just for your information so there's myself
and I have my director's aid so that is the staff that supports the board of county commissioners constitutional officers uh community partners um Escambia County Board of County Commissioners all of our departments um and all of those interactions uh that we have on a daily basis uh as well as the TDC so um as my my commissioner can attest uh the board has had me extremely busy over the last few months um we've been working on any number of projects um um you know dealing
dealing with the board and board actions and things that we are moving the county forward with so uh our applications we we have sent our applications out uh to everybody so what we did here a couple of weeks ago so we stopped doing a lot of the things that we normally do to support our board departments to support the TDC as far as these applications so I have to review these so I want you to have a clean good application that to to the best of our ability to get the
questions that this council asks for answered by our tourist development tax partners um so we send we read it through each application we make sure that the financial information is there we make sure that the financial information is correct uh we we do our very best to make sure that they answer the tourism related questions related to the event or the activity or or whatever the thing is that each of our partners are doing so that you have the very best information to make the decisions that you make regarding the level of funding for each of our partners
so each year that is a task um it takes any number of hours of staff time to to do that now we uh did get the vast majority of these done about a week ago and then it takes our partners some number of days to to get those back and so those have been trickling in literally every day so some folks do a fantastic job with just a couple of tweaks some folks it it's a lot more so
um so that's kind of it has always been a challenge um you know we we did our very best at the staff level um the only other thing that I could certainly suggest to council and and I know that uh chairman and I have discussed what qualifies for some TDT reimbursement um it's not really a percentage set in statute but um potentially other ad indirect administrative costs for services provided by county staff could potentially be reimbursed but not necessarily to
answer or discuss that part fully today for a dedicated person that would do these sorts of things but um and of course we've have had some challenges on reimbursements related to uh tourist development tax uh expenditures so we continue to work with those through those with our clerk's office on a daily weekly basis as well so that is also timeconuming so um so again from staff perspective uh we've done the best that we could do uh regarding
and with time constraints that we have to do all the numerous activities and things that we do any comments i do please okay um first is these were due initially March 25th around that it's it's around that time it may be April 1st something like that like is there anything we can do here so that I mean we just don't allow it to bunch up this closely like if the deadline to get it that they had to get it back was this week then why isn't our meeting
in a week or two or something to that nature where we actually because I I don't know how many hundreds of pages Danielle I mean seriously like one attachment has 11 openings with so many pages and those came I don't know how many today 10 10 to I mean and they've been coming daily and um I just think that we have due or for our due diligence that and honestly for the public to be aware of what's going on we are not um I don't know that we are really that effective up here
today i'm just being real honest here so I think that we have to really rethink how we do this if your dates have to be set in stone and they don't change then maybe ours does i don't know do we have a September budget responsibility like um the county's budget is adopted at adopted at two public hearings uh in the month of September the same as at the city okay so we Okay all right so what I for timing wise of the the this council what I've tried to do is we have a May budget workshop so that in our June meeting uh we can adopt something to recommend to the county
commission to put into their budget process uh so that hopefully they'll accept our recommendation and when they start having their public uh public workshops and then and then public hearings that it will be what this council has recommended or at least had the opportunity to review what this council's so if we push it as we push that back we butt up to overlapping with their workshops etc and they may not have that information so so there's the deadline for the applicants to submit
and um historically many of these requests have gone through either Visit Pensacola or through ACE or through Pensacola Sports with a few others uh and over the the last few years those have expanded those we we're receiving applications from organizations who don't want to go through those processes uh because either they've gone through those processes and timed out like Visit Pensacola does a grant program that I think is five-year program and they time out of that so
then they come to us directly because they can no longer be eligible for Visit Pensacola's grant and they come to us for funds um and so all of a sudden now we have this and we've accepted them so we have a longer list of uh requests that are coming in that are submitting for the first time second time and uh they may get them in under that deadline but they're not complete or accurate uh etc and so the county tries to Stefan tries to work with those organizations to refine their
applications to get them more presentable for us complete like we need for our policies or you know consideration uh and sometimes that takes a lot of time up until literally this past week uh and you know is that fair to county staff absolutely not um is that fair to this council absolutely not so I think what we need to do is figure out if we have a if there's a deadline for application that means a completed application it's submitted as it's submitted if you've got if you need
work going back and forth with the county then you better sit down with the county in advance of that uh or we continue to do this and maybe today's meeting has to be postponed to another date so that we all have plenty of time to review these documents because it is an extraordinary amount of documents um and I know that the county staff uh every time I talk to Stefan we talk about how much time he is having to spend related to tourism which is a very small fraction of
the overall operation of the county uh is a$22 million $21 million budget of a almost nearly billion dollar budget i mean $850 million and we're only 22% and I'll guarantee he spends I don't know how much of his time but 25 to 50% of his time depends on which year it is sometimes it could be 50% current year we're in it's an extraordinary amount um and it's not because of the council and it's always it's not always because of the applicants um it there's some
issues now that we've discussed over our last few meetings about the expectations for reimbursement by the agencies we've asked the clerk of the court to give us an expectation like what are the rules where is the field go you know the the goal line so that when these agencies submit their documents they know what the expectation is and they submit what's expected but what's happening is they're submitting and then they're getting messages back saying that's not we need more that's what we wanted last month but this month we need more uh and so and we talked about in January trying to
get that from the clerk's office and commissioner you had mentioned talking to the clerk about getting that stuff and I don't know where we are in that process but um that is taking up a whole lot of the the budget office's time also back and forth with Visit Pensacola and Pensacola Sports and the other outside agencies uh on trying to get those documents completed and accurate and reimbursements i mean we still have 2024 fiscal year appropriation agreements that have not been closed uh tourism appropriation agreements uh the visit Pensan is not closed ace has some is
not looking for reimbursement they've got because they were given in advance uh that they worked down towards throughout the year and so they had all of their funds to pay all their expenses but that it's still open uh I don't know if that's because of the clerk's office or because of ACE uh but there's still over a million dollars outstanding from for Visit Pensacola to get reimbured which is causing some cash flow problems for them to be able to continue to operate to continue to pay vendors um I believe some of the vendors that they already they owe money to i mean
they're paying as much as they can through other sources of funding private funding they have they shouldn't have to do that but it's because the goal line keeps getting moved all of that stuff has been operating going on in the background that's causing Stefan and his office to have these issues with working with the outside agencies to refine their applications to get them to us in a timely manner to be able to review today so I'm trying my best not to make excuses of why we don't have them we don't have them if if there's uh this board would like to postpone this meeting
I'm I'm happy to do that too we have what we have uh which is pretty I pretty incomplete to be able to make the decision that we need to make today how many things are on the agenda how many are on the agenda this just this one item on the agenda but it's a budget and it's a list of outside agencies requests that we're just getting today yesterday some of the things exciting and complete
Some of them have been submitted to us are complete are complete I believe not all they're all Well let's take the most exciting one and the most complete one and deal with it first well everybody's got Yeah I don't know if everybody's had enough time to look through everything i have a comment i mean yes Mr b thank you Mr chairman and I'm going to share some of the same thoughts that Council Councilwoman Breer brought up um you know this the amount of information we got I mean
there was a bunch of it sent out at 7:00 last night um and then some more today and I don't feel like I've had enough notice i don't feel like the public has any idea what's going on um I'm looking at one of the applications here it's not signed it's not complete so um you know I've been through this process with a outside organization and I know what has to be done and I know the level of of information has to be submitted and I understand that you all are under a lot of stress with a numerous things that are going on my my big issue and and the
chairman's already mentioned this is I don't feel like we're prepared to take action today not that we're doing action we're not going to vote I don't think but even have a workshop and speak intelligently about what has been submitted to us i don't think we've had time to prepare for that um because I don't get a lot done after seven especially when you throw some things with 11 attachments in there and even one of those was thrown in there with 11 attachments isn't even in the list that's in the the shared folder because it's outside of what we're discussing
today so I'm not even sure why that was sent it's like a scavenger hunt trying to figure out what we're supposed to read what we're supposed to understand and I would much prefer to do this after we have some time to review the records that are in there and I don't I don't like the idea that we had people come here and we may have to to postpone this meeting but I don't feel like I can discuss what's in here because I don't feel like I've had time to review them thank you thank you for all your help i know you've been really overworked and this has played a big part
in it um from a compliance standpoint I'm not a huge fan of giving people hundreds of thousands of dollars that can't fill out a form correctly so I get that some of it's complicated and maybe we shoot it back to them once and if they fail to complete it maybe they just don't get to enter that time i think that would take a lot off of your plate but I don't think we should have to work harder to give someone money so if we could look at adopting that for next year I would really appreciate that um and then we did make a quick reference flyer for how TDT dollars can be used
it was a two-part flyer one part was included as backup to the agenda and then we actually have a second one that didn't make it on there with the restricted uses um common problems that we've seen like can I pay myself back or um can we use it to purchase alcohol the answer to both of those are no but it seems to come up continuously so we'll work to get that second part attached as well um and just for some additional information for the uh council so I know council has made some recommendations uh I know visit Pensacola has made some recommendations we did incorporate those
into the 2026 application uh one of the other questions that I sent back to each applicant uh what was the s who who or what is the source of your metrics data so I know there were some questions this year you know um so when folks turn in their report card as to how good was this event so one of those questions that that I've asked was how did you get the data that supports your event so so that can be shared with you all right so so that question
uh can be answered uh you know one of the things Visit Pensacola asked for was a marketing plan so we've asked each uh applicant for a marketing plan so uh uh and there was an additional question that we added u uh at VP's request which was a legit a legitimate question so so to to maybe help a little bit as far as our partners are concerned so the questions do get a little harder each year based on the questions that come from council and from my board and
um you know just just in the reporting and certainly based on input that we receive from our clerk's office these are the things that we're looking for these are the things that are necessary for you to get your reimbursement so we're trying to incorporate a lot of that information or as much as we can to check every box to answer every question to the best of our ability so so yes it's it's uh it's a challenge for everybody um but but let me assure you we are doing everything that we can do to to get it as good and as
right as we can make it so so when you do get it it is the information that you need to see brad I agree with Mrs hoffberger you know when a form's not filled out right you can't do that you know in a lot of settings they'll say um uh this is not just not up to standard and they have terms for that and they'll just hand it back to you and I you know and sometimes I've I've been in that situation where you're trying to play the nice guy and and that just doesn't work out
and I've also seen in other settings if you get denied uh you have to wait a full year before you can reapply and I think that's to help with the workflow so I think there's some things in the procedures that might be able to maybe not completely make this an easy process but just help with that flow and give our team some relief and I know that's challenging for them uh but you know they they break their necks to do what's happened here just to find out this and that's not easy
for them either could I say something i I would like to I know we've brought it up before with this board but I and I sorry if I'm throwing Visit Pensacola um volunteering them for something but there is a grant committee with Visit Pensacola there's a grant committee with Pensacola Sports and they have a a whole process put together that kind of addresses all the concerns that we have here um and I I really think that because it's proven there folks should not be coming here
for events to get grants for events they should be going to one of those agencies and speak to those committees and if you don't if you miss the deadline there then I'm sorry but the deadline's given and there's workshops and you have to attend the workshop and if you don't you don't get any money it's just a part of the process so if you miss it this year you can come back next year but I don't think they should miss it there and then get to come here or well they don't give me enough money there so I'll come here um I think that's been happening way too much over the last couple years and that's why these numbers at this board is have been getting bigger and I think
some of it's because we don't have the planning and the organization here so folks are like well I can really get a big chunk here and I don't have to do half as much as they require me to do at Visit Pensacola or Pensacola Sports and at both of those you have to show that you bring the room nights so if you don't show you got the room nights you also don't get the full amount of your money so if you've been awarded 5,000 and you say you're going to have 500 room nights but you only have a hundred room nights well you don't get $5,000 you get $1,000 so here it doesn't work
like that with us so I think that's the reason why more and more folks keep coming here so I really think we should be pushing anybody that's asking this board back to visit Pensacola or Pensacola Sports if it's a sports sports related uh event um or then this board needs to get more organized and get the help of Visit Pensacola to have the process that they have so that if folks are coming here we have something to say to them or give to them instead of putting it all on Stefan and and pretty much him and his aid it's not it's not fair to him and the aid if they're
going to keep coming here and we're going to keep awarding it to folks and I don't agree i don't think we should make a decision i'm not going to make a decision my decision today was going to be no for every single ask because if I don't have time to read it it's I think it's tax dollars and I'm not going to say okay to it so I hope we can meet again after we've had enough time to look things over yep and I would agree if it's not infrastructure based so if we're not building a facility if it's event related I I like the idea of it having to go through Visit Pensacola i think
we probably need to look at how much money we're giving them for grants and maybe expanding their grant program so they have the capacity to do it but you're right they already have the system and the expertise it doesn't really make sense that it's coming back to us so maybe we just need to work with them to enable them to do more grants through that same process is that an option i think the sky's is the limit on options okay i mean if I mean we we years ago we did that when we formed the uh unified budget group uh that was the wishes of the the commission at that time was
we we want to quit having people come to the TDC and come directly to the county commission to make these requests for tourism dollars uh we want to we have these agencies you know ACE with arts and culture and Pensacola sports with sports and then visit Pensacola with you know all other adventure and beach and you know all other tourism that generally covers the majority of tourism that we have here uh drive those requests through them through their grant programs etc uh it's just over
time that's expanded um through requests coming directly to us could could we just get a kind of a read on whether we're going to adjourn or whether we're going to go forward just so you know everybody spends their time to be here so well I'm stay here for two hours and not decide anything no I I agree uh well I I get the feeling that the majority of the folks aren't prepared
today to make any today we're not making taking a vote today it's just a workshop so what what the plan and what we've done at the workshop is to try to agree to what we're going to recommend uh and move forward to our board meeting our June board meeting to make have a vote for the recommendation to the county so today was just a workshop to work through those items uh but it doesn't sound like the majority of folks unless I'm reading the room wrong uh aren't prepared today uh so if that's the
case um I'll entertain a motion to reschedu and um adjourn the meeting yes um just one thing before I I will u float a motion in just a moment but maybe the the best analogy that I can correlate to what we're doing here and um as Stephan said the questions do get harder every year but if I go to a a banker and I ask for a half a million dollars they're going to have some very specific
questions and I I'm not afforded the option of answering those questions or not they're they'll certainly allow me to not answer the questions but I'm not going to get a check at closing so as hard as it might be um we are dealing with a lot of money the sum totals of the grant are the ask is 2.1 um the proposed is $1.7 million of the taxpayers money so uh with that I move that we postpone today's meeting to allow for more time to fully vet each of the proposals and uh come
back together for a special meeting uh to review before our June board meeting council meeting second so we have a motion and we have a second is there any further debate or discussion mr we can What's it I'm sorry will you turn your microphone on please sir i can't even I can't hear you okay Miss Conley this ends i mean we've gotten all the reports we're going to get
we aren't accepting any additional applications right um everything I believe uh whether it was a fully completed application there were a couple that had have not been resubmitted if you will with with the requested updates there were a few of those but we wanted you to have those as well um as quick as we could get them to you so again there there are next year I would say uh chairman maybe two weeks from now um shouldn't shouldn't be an issue next year um that should be more than enough time to do our evaluation um ultimately however council wants to
handle the these these requests on annual basis certainly that could be the conversation for the next meeting um I know Darren's here um I just want to mention this so I know Darren Darren would probably share or say you know uh the the dollars that that this council gives out um through their evaluation process those amounts are a lot smaller at Visit Pensacola which is why those folks do do come here um so uh I'll let you have your vote and then I do need to make one statement for council um or I can do it now chairman however you would like to except since
there's a motion let's have the the vote and then we'll take that any debate or discussion i had Yeah I had a question are we going to continue to accept incomplete forms or do we want No I think that was the question i think we're So if they're incomplete do we want to take them off of the ask or are we going to still review them and I have no idea whose they are i don't know because I haven't reviewed all them but if they're incomplete at this point I wouldn't accept okay i mean that's I would second that well we have a motion on the floor is that part of your motion
do you want to make that part of your motion i'll amend my motion okay to include that to to include uh the commissioner's suggestion okay and your second so we have an amended motion and second uh any other discussion hearing none i'll call for the vote uh if you would please call the role tish Patel yes james Reeves yes ashley Hoffber yes shirley Cronley yes david
Bear yes charles Bayer yes jennifer Breer yes is that correct brad Mullenex yes and Jason Nicholson yes all right motion carries although that motion was to adjourn this meeting early uh we do have another item uh before we actually adjourn yes stephan it's justformational good afternoon council so um I did want to um provide some addition additional information on the uh bank loan so uh the council approved $25 million for
the bank loan there is an additional $100,000 um for the the cost of the debt issuance so I did want to provide that revised number it's 25.1 that we are seeking the bank loan on so uh prior policy I'm making council aware of that that minor change great thank you and should you need the breakdown of that I have provided that to the chairman i can't share it with them okay all right i can I will provide that to our staff over here and we'll send that out to everybody from our Florida legislature question
yes sir does that relate to the artificial turf so that's for correct okay thank you all right um so I will work with county staff to identify a couple of days uh I'll ask to send it out uh 2 PM right does that work for everyone 2 PM uh for the next meeting and uh we'll set it from there so any other Yes sir thing uh where did the proposed budget for the next year come from that's in here from me okay so so there was the request you see that
the three columns last the current fiscal year the requested and then I tried to fit everything into uh the actual dollar amount that we have to appropriate uh and it was only my suggestion as a starting point for our discussion it is yeah there's nothing fixed it's proposed by me after a thorough review of all of the backup information well many of them are are returning grants i think there was only maybe one that was not so knowing their programs based on
my thorough back check of those other organizations mr chairman I just want to say that as far as letting these outside agencies meaning ACE meaning visit Pensacola uh they tend to think whatever their percentage is is their money and I think you know you ought to we ought to provide some way that they have additional money but that put it out on
new items i mean so like a grant pot what what they do is they go to ACE and ACE says "We're all tied up why don't you go to the big board?" And I just think we need to provide some money to those three agencies so they have new money and they have new money efforts in that regard just an idea so in years past uh before I was on this TDC when I was chairman of AC's board
uh we were having those discussions i was having those discussions with some of the other com previous uh former commissioners uh and one of the the concerns was those are all independent agencies they're not agencies of the county they're not appointed board members uh by this by the county in any form and by trying to dictate how they do their programs we're taking away that independence from them because we're forcing them to do something that their mission
may not meet and they lose their independence other agencies would like to be independent like them like which ones i mean why those three why are those three what why those threes are independent all of all of these I have two or three more independ I think you do i think you have uh Marty Gro Pensacola is an independent organization and we're not telling them how to make up their board and how to allocate their funds or Navy Days or the um Island Authority or
the Pensacola Chamber right they're all coming here requesting funds as independent entities agencies ace has a process visit Pensacola has a process pensacola Sports has a process so keep on doing it the same old way fine with me i'm just telling you what the conversations we've had in the past uh and what the possible taking my gummy you're going to go all right well grab your
marbles anyway is there any other comments any other discussion do we think we'll have enough time to have all those applications in the in the portal instead of a bunch of separate emails it got real confusing to to figure out what which email or I've checked or which download which it was very hard to keep track of uh and then even maybe like a like a checklist that hey there's 15 applications you're supposed to look at 15 different and because I really didn't know who I was looking at how many I was supposed
to make sure I you know like there's no checklist of hey these are the 15 you should look at what's that all the different items okay all the groups should be listed on the agenda okay so right now sir you guys should see each folder on the SharePoint individually lame with labeled with each applica applicant's name on it as well what the problem was from what I understand is not every not all council members were able to access all of the folders that's a different subject that I'll work with Danielle and we'll try to figure that piece out but on the SharePoint they are all
there's 15 applications on there right now and they're all labeled by applicant name right okay are are we pulling some of those if they were incomplete so So that's three of the 15 yes ma'am so we based on the motion we're going to pull those and there will be 12 remaining named labeled folders okay wonderful thank you excuse me yes ma'am just to that same point though I think the reason we're asking for them on the agenda is so that the public has access as well absolutely
so if we have everything there I mean everything should be that's why sure it was unfortunate i mean it was unable obviously this time but yes ma'am we'll make sure those are on the the agenda as well yep yeah so on the county's website on the calendar under the TDC there will be uh for today's meeting there's the link and it opens up the agenda and on there there is agenda packet uh and you can click and okay so might be a technical problems i had opened it the other day and saw what we had already received in the portal was on there but we hadn't received everything yet
anyway but um but that is where hopefully it would all be yes and I just wanted to say that one of the issues with the SharePoint was with getting that access to that shared folder was that city of Pensacola was throwing in spam every time that code would come through so I had to call and get them to release that so there we learned that today as well so Okay thanks appreciate it any other comments does it if not uh call this meeting ajourned and rescheduled thank you