couple days period of time thanksgiving
yeah they change there you go i'm so interested
good afternoon uh welcome to the escambia county tourist development council budget workshop i'm david bear i am the chairman uh and at this time i'll ask philip was this meeting properly advertised mr chairman this meeting was properly advertised on the 12th of june great will you please call the role sure matish patel here james reeves ashley hoffberger here
shirley cronley here david bear here brad mullenex here charles bayer here jennifer breer here jason nicholson here all right we do have a quorum and please let the record reflect mr reeves is now here also thank you um all right uh first item on the agenda is public forum i have uh a couple of forums of uh folks signed up to speak first i will call on uh ray palmer pensacola sports
if anybody would like to speak at for the budget workshop u please fill out a form and get it to fill thank you mr chairman good afternoon everybody so um i've been um made aware of an opportunity i'll give you a little bit of back background story and what i'm looking for today is possibly a little guidance on what y'all would like to see us do if anything of an opportunity that's come up um in the middle of the sunb belt conference basketball championships this year the first night we learned um from van wagner who is the organization that sells sponsorships for
the sunb belt conference across their footprint that hercules tires which had been their longtime sponsor and title sponsor of their championships was exiting that sponsorship that sponsorship is now available to us um it's available to anybody that wants to write a check for it um so it's an opportunity for us to be either title there are a couple opportunities actually there's there's a title sponsorships that's available there's also a presenting sponsorship
um uh that's that's available this is not an event this is something quite different it's a media buy um i don't have the expertise by any stretch to determine and vet this to determine the value or to negotiate it with this organization but we do have showcase who has all of that skill set and so what i'm asking for you for this organization is to give me some guidance of whether y'all would like to see us it's it i'm going to tell you and and to not disclose too
much it's in the couple hundred,000 range change very much in line with many of the activ annually and they are looking for a multi-year deal for title sponsorships of basketball and of their football championships again this doesn't bring us the football championships although we did just give $2 million to uwf to improve a stadium and their commissioner loves neutral sight venues not making any promises but it sure would get us in good light with this organization
if they ever wanted a neutral sight and the commissioner loves neutral sight events so i'm just looking for y'all's thoughts because i don't want to waste my time your time showcases time or the organization anybody anybody's time if you go ray we're not interested in a major media buy we've proven that the the positive points are we know the sunb belt conference is our footprint of tourism no doubt about that um and and the schools you know we know
they love coming here they've showed that with sunb belt conference basketball this would just enhance our our opportunity to be um in their markets virtually year round thank you ray any comments questions i know i'm throwing you something you didn't expect but i also know they're actively try i know they're actively trying to sell it i don't know how you know okay but i was in i was in destin with with the conference at their spring meetings a couple
of weeks ago and it came up i was like "oh let me ask." ray have you had any um communication or talk with anybody from showcase about what they think about this or is this so new um i did have a conversation obviously a little bit with dicki to see if he was was aware of it um but we don't we there's a lot surely and i mean the the presentation that i or the
the proposal that i got from them had no detail and so there's a lot of digging of what are we really going to get you know how much pre-event uh publicity do we get we know that in the case of the basketball court hercules was on every i mean everything from the things to the court to the the kickboards to the behind the goals and a lot of that after the first night we went and literally pulled the hercules logo off of the court um and some we couldn't get rid of but
all of that is to be negotiated and presented so it's very new and very raw um on what is it and so then we have to go vet it and put a value to that from a professional marketing organization like a showcase that says well that's worth $2 that's worth $20,000 that's worth a million dollars and how many sports do they participate in i mean i'm sure there's soccer volleyball and
the list goes on and on the original president and it's all negotiable but the i don't think we want the baseball one one i don't think we want the event but um they host oh i mean they've got everything from tennis to volleyball to you know um cross country and a lot of these are in our backyard but the original proposal that i was sent was for basketball and football the two big
ones and we're not negotiating with the sunb belt we're negotiating with a third party the way these things work is this third party goes in and they buy the rights to represent these separate these midsize college conferences across their footprint they don't get the individual schools but across their footprint for their various championships they give you $100 and then they go resell and break that all up and hope they make more than the $100 they paid you it's a really interesting model
yes councilwoman thank you um you said you'd have to do a a multi-year contract that's what they want yes ma'am would you pay that up front would that be paid yearly do you have any idea i'm sure it's paid annually and that's all negotiable as well it's just like our we just signed a five-year contract with the conference to keep hosting the championships and that's an annual payment so all of that is i'm sure negotiable can you negotiate it down to pay upfront who knows i don't know is
there do you think that that sponsorship would decrease your costs for some of the other stuff because now you're getting the advertising that way no i think they they are this is a media buy we have an event buy i don't now going forward maybe does it help us but it's not going to help us with our existing um with our existing contract with what we have with sunb belt because this is with a different third party it's just tied to an organization that we're ti we're connected
to at the hip for the next five years and if you decide to go with this is this a ask that you're going to do above what you're asking here i'm not asking for anything right here i think ultimate ultimately yes we would come back and say yes this tourist development council would like you or visit because they're probably better at media for us or somebody to manage this contract and make sure we get everything we we're supposed to get at the football site at the basketball site and anything else that we can negotiate it does come with tv packages i
know a little bit of it just enough to really be dangerous honestly at this point and so we don't know at this point whether the advertisement would be visit pensacola um like oh it would 100% be pensacola just pensacola well it would be whatever we decided to be is not would not be 100% not be pensacola sports i i never market pensacola sports to outside i only visit pensacola the way to beach okay it is very interesting i mean i think that it's worth knowing about right
jason uh ray i think that's an interesting idea but uh we only have enough information to just you know get a tantalizing taste of the idea i think it's certainly worth fleshing out the the greater details it's a media buy so we need to know reach impressions you know what's the expected return how long is it going to last what are some some comps that we might realize from the sponsorship such as you know swinging a tournament our way or or something else does it tap into our key feeder markets or there are some emerging markets that it might stimulate to produce additional
uh transit tourism so i think it's a neat idea certainly sunb belt basketball has been good to us and sunb belt conference is right in our backyard um i i correct me if i'm wrong but i think visit pensacola actually had a sponsorship at one point correct sec sec and it'd be interesting to know how that worked out whenever you come back with the details of sbc okay and that that's really what i'm looking for is it's just a little i i know you don't know enough i don't know enough but i didn't even want to start and let without letting y'all know that this opportunity is out
there and if you're interested then i'll push it along you know now because it's not going to be out there forever they're going to sell it so if we were interested let's get our name in the hat yeah well i don't think i i don't think we know if we're interested or not until we have more information i certainly don't know i think we're interested in finding out more information that's really all i want to know unless somebody goes "no not interested no way bad idea." any any other comments or questions thank you very much thank you ray appreciate it all right next speaker
is terry hutchinson captain hutchinson welcome uh special welcome uh i don't think you've been to one of our our meetings before uh and we uh are really proud to have you here in pensacola so thank you well thank you mr chairman mr reeves nice to see you sir again um ashley and shirley it was nice to meet you all earlier so thank you to everybody here for your time um as the chairman rightfully pointed out american magic has been here uh since really the fall of 2018
and so the opportunity to stand here and and tell you a little bit about what we're doing uh is greatly appreciated um through the the evolution of our team and through our america's cup program you we've come to find pensacola you know really our home as a team and as a as a newly uh resident at the end of inendencia street um i'm proud to uh to have that now on my driver's license so it's a um from a team perspective pensacola has been an incredible community to step
into um we had different options in the state of florida that we researched and in other parts of the country that we researched and and pensacola was not very well known for its sailing at the time what we came to find is that the uh natural amphitheater of pensacola bay is an incredible place to go uh sailing it's an incredible place for us to develop our america's cup boat our team our platform and as we navigate through ac38 and the evolution of what may or may not happen the
exciting part about uh what we have here is really we're just scratching the surface not only of the development of our manufacturing facility but the development of racing and sailing inside the um inside the bay here we're fortunate to have developed a very good working relationship with the pensacola yach club and they've been incredibly generous to us as a team in bringing us into their facility um for those who don't uh have experience at going around the world
and seeing different yacht clubs and different sailing venues around the world uh i can assure you that pyc is very unique um it has a great uh open space it has a good uh launching uh facility and you know the best thing it has going for it is the bay you know when you go to areas down in south florida you go over to davis island you go to coconut grove they're good sailing venues um but they're very crowded and they're very difficult to access and they're very expensive
and not only has pyc been good but the the city and how they've helped us through the evolution of our base and of the events that we're bringing here has been exceptional you know as a team uh american magic was incredibly grateful to tdc for the opportunity to put uh pensacola florida on our sales in barcelona at ac37 was it was a great representation of our home and equally as important as the flag at the top of the mast so thank you all for that because
it was you know when you go and and you see um you know some of the competitors that we're up against some of the the true nationalism out of the defender out of team new zealand it was it was definitely a proud moment for us uh to have that on our sales and to have that opportunity so thank you all for that today i'm not really here to ask for anything per se but really to update the the council here of what we're doing um over the course of the next 12 months and what we've done
in the past um you may or may not be aware that we held two gl52 uh riatas here in the spring and it was more of a a pilot to see how things were going to go um for not only the logistical side of it but the organizational side the sailing side and pensacola delivered to the nth degree and we had you we had four days of racing in each series so a combination total we had 12 days between the training and the racing and teams coming in the early part of the year where the sailing
conditions were champagne i mean it was it was about as perfect as possibly could be um a little bit about the fleet itself and the owners you know when you know in essence we have to sell something we have to sell these owners to pack up their their boats and we have to sell them to bring them to to pensacola or wherever the venue is and each one of these teams travel uh with 20 team members on their team the boats are 52 feet and they come with a a reasonably sized entourage on average
the spend per event was 200k per boat per team um over the course and we had six teams so you i know you all can do that math and as we go forward into um the end of this year and the beginning of next year uh we plan on three more events here with two more teams it's going to get to a spot where um we're going to run out of space i think you know that we're going to have to cap it probably at 10 teams because it's just going to get to be too much and that exclusivity is is okay i mean
we're we're positioning um the venue itself as a destination venue not only for the sailors but for the families and for the support staff that come and it it's impressive to see uh from a sailing side how quickly the sailors you know jumped into what we were doing and how they were so excited by truly a new venue to come and race and come and learn and and the features of pensacola bay make it very difficult it's a hard place to race your owners on average you know they're high
netw worth individuals you know the average owner owns three boats and either comes here uh private or in a charter not commercial so it's great to have that airport um but that's the type of people that we're dealing with and the people that they bring are investing you know our numbers reflect sailor's you know time uh going to the grocery stores and they're based out of the boat that we raced on you know we we um rented out the oyster bay boutique hotel uh for the better part
of a month and you know so they reflect what we have and and really doing the survey within the fleet but they don't cover the ancillary purchases where people are going downtown to to purchase art or to you know basically go to the bar and have a have a rum and it it's exciting to see that evolution of of how the sailors and how the owners really are embracing uh what we're developing here through again our partnership with the pensacola yacht club and working with them we're working on
developing another six riata circuit that will be in a smaller boat um and we we're we're not across the finish line yet because there's also some manufacturing discussion in there for for american magic services but what you can see is the momentum that we're building here even though there's competition in florida for these these riatas you know people are excited to come to pensacola in the coming months i'm certain i'm going to come back before you to ask for support for these three riatas uh coming up but i wanted to at least update you and again thank you for
the support that everybody gave to american magic in the america's cup and to field any questions that you might have about where we are where we're headed and and how we expect to get there mr chairman thank you a little bit longwinded but thank you thank you charles thank you mr chairman thank you sir for your comments um i'd spoken with the mayor a little bit about uh american magic the gl52 uh the riatas and you know we're presented here today with a couple items we're considering
and uh you know i know that you'll probably want to come back to us and ask us for some support and you mentioned that and i'm wondering do you have a relationship or what kind of relationship do you have with the group that's doing the foiling no we we don't have a relationship you know when you take a step back um what is happening there is exactly what we thought you know when you when you contemplate the vision and what can we actually do to help build another venue a quality venue for sailing inside the united states what's happening there is is what we what we anticipated
and what we thought um how it goes about i'm not necessarily a fan of but in the same breath um you know our approach is that we'd rather underpromise and overd deliver so to speak and be conservative on our estimates and i think when we come before you to do that we'll we'll present what we know are facts we're not going to um i guess sugarcoat or elaborate anything beyond what we know because you know we respect the work that you all have to do and that we're all accountable and so we want
to make sure that our accountability to you is um as conservative as possible and i appreciate that and what you'll see in a few minutes if you stick around i'm not encouraging you to uh is us seeking some facts because there are some facts missing in some of the things that we have here yeah and um you know i appreciate the fact that you will come to us with data on you know um what you think we should fund and why you know and actual numbers um and i i you mentioned me working with pensola
yach club as well you know they're asking us for some funding and i'm wondering is that related to what you've talked about about expanding some of the riatas or is that completely separate no sir it's separate okay and in in fact the the gl52s you know a lot of that operation happened outside of the port you know we did you know because of the size of the boat and because of the um you know the crane facilities and how it was set up downtown at jacos i mean it was really i mean from a from a sailor perspective it was very cool because it was engaging with the community
it got everybody downtown um but you know the gl52 doesn't necessarily fit over at pyc the further events that we were talking about and in the promotion that we're uh trying to encourage other classes to come um to the city and to come to pyc you can see i mean it's an incredible facility but you can also see the need to to work on some of the infrastructure if for no other reason to make it easier to sell and easier to accommodate okay and just one further thing um
i know that you all we're working closely with you all with partnering with you the mayor is working closely the board is working with you um and what we haven't seen in some of the other things i've already mentioned is good coordination before you do something and so i know that you'll stick to that and make sure that the the mayor the the port is is informed and how we can help and how we can uh support you yes well thank you for that and i you know that's a we've gone from being a a guest inside the community and we're we've established um you know we've established our pensacola and
really the bay is our home base for our america's cup team but we're we're working you know pretty hard to be as good a stewards as we possibly can not only of our sport but when we go out and we promote pensacola um you know that when whatever we come back with is a is a viable good solution for both the sailing side and for the city side right i appreciate that thank you thank you mr chairman thanks charles any other comments or questions yes sir brad sir thank you for coming to pensacola you know i've been following it and has really brought a
unique energy to pensacola with the international competition and i know you've opened a lot up to the public uh with different types of resources and i think it's really been great thank you thank you yeah i i want to thank you guys for all the stuff that you're doing not obviously not the just the excitement around sailing that has this ripple effect of the you know foiling week and the other interest in the community but the economic impact that you're making on the community bringing 150 highwage jobs manufacturing opportunities etc uh just to continue to expand
the programs and the the the types of events that you were talking about earlier the regatas just to to bring more attention to pensacola more economic impact uh through tourism and job creation so thank you very much for all of all of you you your team uh the owners everything you guys are doing here thank you thank you for selecting pensacola thank you sir thank you all yep thank you all right those are the only two uh speakers who have signed up for this meeting
um so we will move on to status of funds available stephan hall or jeremy sorry come on down and fyi i have this item on both agendas this and the meeting next meeting uh unless everybody wants to hear it twice i'm just i told them they only have to do it once thank you afternoon council members jeremy paligan senior budget analyst with the escambia county budget office uh i'm here today to present the status of the tdt funds through may 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 may 2025 fy25 collections including interest total 11,393,541 this compares to 11,381,986 in collections through may 2024 reflecting an increase of approximately $11,555 yearover-year interest earnings through may 2025 amount to $858,382
compared to $973,6 for the same period in 2024 to give you a clearer picture the total collections for fy25 through may represent 55% of the annual tdt revenue budget which is set at $20.5 million on the expense side total expenditures through may 2025 amount to approximately $10.86 million finally the current tdt cash balance stands at $29.88
million through may 2025 thank you any comments or questions councilwoman do you ever i just want to have some questions actually before we move into looking at each one of these items so i don't know when it's best to ask these questions now sure okay so on the eligibility um list that we were given so um one two three four let's see hold on just a second
under the um one of them i can't remember i can't find it right this second what it says is that the ask cannot be more than 50% of the yearly budget so it's eligibility do you know what i'm talking about i'm trying to find it it's it was today is
um where is it which bullet number is it uhhuh on the eligibility criteria right and which bullet how many dan
submit proposed budget where government funding does not exceed 50% it should so in the one that's where it is today but it was in the eligibility criteria i thought in what we had in yesterday's here's my question a great deal of these don't right so when we're talking about the budget so it says that the budget can be just you know they can just show the budget towards that
one item that they're asking for money for or what have you so okay so that's the first thing is that a hardcore and what we got the other day though i swear it's up there in the eligibility i'm waiting on mine to load huh i'm waiting on mine to load so i can see okay okay so there's that so that's the first one then i also i need clarification on um it also says for eligibility that it has to be taxexempt under section 501c3 of the earn internal revenue code independent
of a financial sponsor local affiliates may apply under the 501c3 okay of the national organization so when you're talking about something like um santa rosa island authority which is not a a 5013c um or 501c3 is that filed under the lo local affiliate like how does that so if the criteria is that you must be one but then some of these are not i'm just looking for some clarity on
this yeah the jazz festival is the same way it's not a c3 exactly so i'm not sure so we've got both those criteria that it has to be less than 50% of the budget and that it has to be a um filed under that or or that section where it says or it can file under um independent uh so i guess we need legal probably on this yes to see what it is because when i'm
going through these that's my question so there's at least half these are asking for more than half their budget right by a huge amount so i don't know i mean i kind of want to toss them to a side because this criteria clearly stated that we couldn't do that it says that the board of county commissioners can wave it but not us that's where i'm falling i'm curious i do not believe it says that you cannot wave that but ultimately it just says the board under
the eligibility the board of county commissioners retain the right to wave the eligibility that is correct yes that is correct so um historically the board gave direction that any any applicant for county funds irregard irregardless is not a word regardless of the funding source so for the folks that are general fund or lost um or even our waist services fund that some of these are funded from
uh they are supposed to generate at least 50% through other sources um uh in order to support whatever the function is that is being provided tdt is a is more unique in that respect um so what i can tell council is um our county attorney's office and my office are reviewing some of these um as we've moved for move forward with tdc policies and various other things um i think our
application uh is in some need of update as well as our miscellaneous appropriations agreements to uh clarify and streamline some of the the verbiage that we have used um but from my perspective the your concerns should not change however you whatever you guys want to vote on or decide on or or fund that really would not impact that okay well i feel nervous a little
bit about that i'm just going to say that there are people there were groups in here that were incredibly conscientious about this so they u i guess i'll call out pensacola sports where they even put in their application this is only 11% of the budget so they were paying attention to the rules that we put forth and if we put these rules out there for organizations and they read it and go "oh i can't apply because i don't meet it." and then we just go i'm just saying that i think that from what i'm reading the board of county commissioners can change that but i feel
like we might need to consider to go stick to the 50% that we were uh told in here was the criteria it every one of their applications says that that that was the criteria for them so i'm um anyway that's those are some that's a big concern for me so i just want to get it out there right now that um i feel like we still have a bit of confused issues going on here so if we're
telling the public it's one thing then we're coming in here and going "eh maybe not." then i'm just not real comfortable with that idea could you give us a list of the ones that didn't meet the criteria that didn't i unfortunately the very first one they're asking for 75,000 their total um they're asking for 125,000 their entire budget is 141,000 so that means literally we fund it i mean so and i i i understand the criteria making sure that they're out there reaching for you know money elsewhere and stuff but we have um uh one of them's asking for 8775 and they're
um they're claiming the budget to be 158 i mean there's just a number of them so i don't know if what we do is cut it down to the 50% and let the bocc overrule that since it says in this they're the ones that have the option to overrule the eligibility i'm i'm some questions here so i'm putting that out there because i'm telling you that that's been um troubling me so a couple of years ago when we started going through and putting in some policies
and procedures and stuff for the applications uh we had a discussion about the requirement for the the 501c3 uh and i thought we had actually said that it's not a requirement because there's nothing in the law to use tourist development tax only for tax exempt 501c3 so i i thought we had gotten rid of that it's on there i i see it um and i don't recall ever having a conversation about the 50% uh piece of that uh also um but since the county commission retains the right to
wave the eligibility criteria there's nothing in here that i see that prohibits us from making the recommendation to the county commission to wave those uh those requirements eligibility criteria uh so if there are organizations who do not comply they're not 501c3s they don't uh their request isn't 50% or less of our request of their annual budget we can make the recommendation to fund them at whatever level that we decide to fund them and ask the county
commission to wave that criteria requirement if it exceeds it just that's an option for us instead of saying let's cut them to 50% uh because i think i don't know what visit pensacola's budget is but they get a whole lot of money i don't imagine it's uh meets the 50% who visit pensacola oh no that absolutely does not meet the criteria but and i tell you i know for sure it's ace
um yeah there's a lot of them that don't meet the criteria but it is troublesome to those out there that are looking at this criteria and um and decided not to apply because they don't meet it right so i think that we are you aware of any that have not applied because they didn't well even okay so okay even the very first one said that they didn't apply for money elsewhere because the criteria says you can't do that so if they're taking criteria seriously eligibility criteria seriously and that's holding them up from what they're doing and then we're saying "well
actually we didn't really mean any of that i just i think it's kind of wonky." i apologize but i do and wonky is a good word all right the only other thing i'm going to just say in the full realm of things maybe next year everything be in the exact same order like people have to turn it in in the same order so if the audit comes first then the audit comes first if the checklist comes first the checklist comes first but the fact that we were all over the place trying to go through 1,513 pages which
we postponed so we could do and we did it you know but it was you know you get going you go "oh man they didn't provide the audit." well it's the last on theirs but it was the first on the other and i just think that we need to have the checklist everything on the checklist in order in the package so i have asked for a portal for next year um wes is working or the county administrator wes is working with our it department so essentially they could submit everything on a portal and it would not let them move forward until they have submitted that document and then on our end it
would file it in order almost like file folders on your computer so i have made that request because 1300 pages was a lot to read through i agree really was okay i was corrected it's 1500 right yes i'm looking at it right now so councilwoman what would you like us how would you propose we move forward today
i want us to move forward but i think that we might need to put something in there that we approved up to the 50% mark and then we leave it up to the unless we don't we leave it up to the board of county commissioners to go the remainder because then we would at least be adhering by what we told the people we're adhering by if they want to take it up let them take it up right but i think that um we put out an we put out an application and a criteria list and we told them this is it so i think that that's probably our place and then let the commissioners
uh do their thing stephan uh question is this application page the general application that you send to all outside agencies regardless of which bucket they're applying it is it is the same application um we've made some specific tweaks to the tourist development uh application uh that are unique to the tourist development tax application um you know but again uh previously you know my board had had made this decision um and again a lot of this stuff
is still an evolution in the process so um but i do hear what the council woman is saying and um we can certainly make those changes going forward thank you all right any other comments or do you guys want to get into the actual proposed budget i do like the idea just of transparency like approving up to the halfway mark and then making the recommendation that the board weighs it that way it's fair for everybody and it's it's transparent for
the board too um just as somebody that's going to have to vote on this on the back side as well i don't know if everybody else feels that way so i guess my question to that is are we only proposing uh to fund up to 50% of their annual budget today ask the county commission to wave those criteria and then we come back for another budget workshop or do you want to go ahead and fund uh fully fund based on whatever we propose ask them to wave and we've already done the work so we don't have to
come back again the second option okay yes and unless you want to do this again i don't want to do this again so uh for the council i do need to know how much we're going to fund each of these uh partners if you will um so that uh you know my job is to have a balanced budget um and so for the county which does include tourist development tax so ultimately whatever whatever we're going to fund each of those agencies so there's the request and then there's what this council is
going to recommend so um i do need to know what the total not not 50% or whatever so i need to know what what is the true recommendation to come from council and then of course we can certainly caveat you know with that but i do need to know that information okay so the my comment that was just confirmed by stefan was that today we actually recommend regardless of those criteria that you that you raised uh we make the recommendation for funding however we
want to do it we have their requests regardless of the 50% etc we we go ahead today make that those recommendations uh and ask then send the message with that recommendation of a total budget to the county commission request that they uh override or or us forgive the what's that yeah forgive those criteria we we today make that recommendation for the full budget amount if the county commission
decides not to then obviously they can cut it to the 50% of their overall operating budget and move forward from that point but it won't then we will not have to come back and have another budget workshop meeting because we can just go ahead and recommend the funding yes sir mr chairman um last meeting when we adjourned and and postponed to this meeting there was a a recommended or proposed amount that i think you had come up with um it's not here to
this this time and i'm just wondering do we have like an allocation is there like a set number we're trying to fit all these into or we just kind of whatever you know we just put it down there and hopefully we'll raise that money i don't so everybody should have this printed the spreadsheet so this the center column is the requested amount from each one of them that have been transcribed over here uh on the right if you look at the top section um the county is proposing to to collect
$21 million through the fifth the five cents and was recommending doing a fund balance of additional 2 whatever 2,310,000 so that there would be approximately what's that $23.3 million of revenue i guess it's 21 million in revenue and then fund balance transfer uh so we're working from that number and then we have a uh statutory holdback requirement of 5% of the total collection
that's if you look at that you'll see that million dollars a million dollar501 $1 million $50,000 uh the negative that's the 5% holdback that has in case the county doesn't hit its collection um projections uh they didn't overspend and then you move down to the next section you see the fifth cent it is been reserved the county commission has uh taken action a couple years ago
to reserve those funds not spend it through the annual appropriation so those are the dollars there after that portion of the the 5% has been withheld uh that also has the administrative costs the 3% removed from it um and so you kind of have this available for funding $18,396,000 uh the next section i went ahead and filled in because these are things that we've already committed the county commission commits the $ 1.5 million to the base center
operations uh the beach mowing is $126,000 the administrative costs at 3% based on the $21 million collection and then we we have agreed to beach nourishment reourishment at $1 million a year based on action we took we were previously uh reserving $500,000 a year but when we appropriated to to the island authority the additional money we committed to they were going to take a loan
from the county and we were going to pay that with an additional half a million dollars a year until that that tax i mean that interestfree loan from the county was exhausted and so that's the million dollars you see there and so that is uh that to that section is the $3,256,000 so that comes off of the 18 million and you can see at the very bottom of the page you've got 15.14 the 15.14 so that's what we have to have these things correct
and as you can see the request that center column uh that total it's higher but not by a huge amount it's correct okay yeah correct it's $1,362,421 over the amount we have to allocate right okay so at the last meeting the sheet that i had uh passed out that had those numbers filled
in were just my own personal recommendations uh i decided to blank those out and just have the conversation since it's not just my recommendations uh so that we can have this conversation and everyone else can put in their two cents and we can take action as a board okay so with that in mind i mean we got to cut something out yes correct
1.362 go to 50% and we're good we're more than good so we um so we can do this a number of ways we can go line by line through these requests uh and you have what we adopted in the current fiscal year and you have what is requested in the next fiscal year and we can make recommendations we can fill in those blanks and and go on to the next item uh we can do this a number of ways i i would
suggest we do it that way it's just seems to be easiest go line by line um i was told that um cheryl was not going to be here at the beginning of this meeting with african-american heritage and asked if we could hold off until she got here she was traveling from out of state so we can uh if that's okay with everybody we can skip to the next section
so the next item is the naval aviation museum um that $100,000 request is a historical request they've been asking for but they've been receiving for about 15 20 probably 20 years i think it was originally a 10-year commitment $100,000 a year the tdc continued the county continued to to make that um appropriation there was one year they requested that uh they got $200,000 we appropriated but i think that was 2020 when
we hit covid and then they didn't spend the second 100,000 because they were having to close down for anyone outside of dod uh so their request their $100,000 is the same request they've been asking for and receiving for 20 probably 20 years or more uh anyone wish to change i would move that we actually accept that their total budget is 4,340,640 yes it's a fraction so 100,000 yeah so the 100 i recommend that we stick to the 100,000 on that one
okay are we taking motions and i'll i'll second that if we're doing that but i don't know what we're doing in this workshop uh why don't we why don't we go through if there's nobody that disagrees then we'll move to the next and at the end we'll do a motion to accept although we can't this is a workshop we're not taking any formal right action we're just going to be recommending it to our next meeting and our next meeting we'll accept it i do have a concern reading through
their application um reading through it i i didn't see do they charge for the kids that come for the naval academy do they charge those kids or is it 1750 isn't it isn't that what it said 1,750 is tuition per child i believe okay and then i did read where it said the 100,000 they get from us feeds the students um for four weeks um and then it said it was uh 180 students a week for four
weeks i wish somebody was here to answer some questions because i'm wondering why tax dollars are paying for kids that are paying to be at the naval as a student and they're already paying so why is bed tax dollars paying to feed those kids so that was a little confusing for me and i i'm just i know and they have a very healthy budget um they have plenty of money so i'm not sure and every dollar that we take from bed tax dollars that's not used properly to advertise and market escambia county is just hurting more people that are actually using it properly so i don't agree
with i know n the naval museum and and everything with navy is great for pensacola but just because it's great i don't think we should give somebody $100,000 to feed kids that are already paying to be fed um so that's my piece on that i did the math on it and it would be an extra $63 per kid if we didn't subsidize it so i don't think that would prevent any of the families from coming and the other thing i saw in that was that a lot of these kids they're trying to get a recruit a lot of kids from escambia county which is great but it's not what bed tax dollars are for mr
chairman i have two things um actually i'd like to ask um anybody from visit pensacola what our uh market adr is our trailing 12 month market adr is right now i want to do some some math here because on the application it represents that uh the the flight academy created 1100 room nights no argument with that whatsoever but i want to apply the math to this to show how much tourism development tax was was generated i can wait for that one the the second point that i'd like to make is if i'm if i'm reading the income and expense table accurately and i i think i am
under the current budget year fiscal year 2425 net income defined as revenue minus expense is sitting right around $2.5 million um i agree with my council member um mr patel that you know you know the navy is certainly an honorable uh entity in our our community um but it looks like they have plenty of money to to fund feeding the kids um with that number i remember it as being $231 but i know there's a huge report that darren's looking through right now
darren are you looking for the adr okay so if we were to use 231 um that means the entity um if we were to use an average daily rate of $231 by $1,11 nights creates u $12,800 in tourism development tax just on a replenishment basis certainly it's an entity that that generates tourism and um stays in hotels and i appreciate that um but on just a replacement basis it looks like about $13,000 and and i would add to that it the flight academy is doing pretty well with 2.5 million
uh looks like it's about a 30 better than a 30% almost 40% uh net operating income so i believe this is obviously they're the the foundation manages both the museum and the flight academy and historically they have used these funds for for the museum itself and for marketing the museum going back through their application real quick
i guess i remember when it was originally stood up and we you know the community supported the first 10 years at $100,000 a year and that was really to stand up the flight academy and get it off the ground no pun intended honestly um but now here we are 15 years into it and um the the mission is strong their their income is great um i think that $100,000 would be better deployed somewhere else
think we're still waiting on darren we still waiting on you darren sorry to put you on the spot darren i should have called according to smith travel research it's actually $142 142 thank you that's significantly less see if i can add so 8,000 $8,000 in tourism tax uh creation and then and to be fair that's just hotels that does
not include vacation rentals that's a different report u for transparency what uh darren is reading is a publicly available report called the smith travel research or the star global report and it's a it's a report that that creates various competitive sets within a specific market and ranks uh performance in that market over periods of time star label yes str one more thing on the original what we talked about earlier with the 501c3 and the 50% of the budget
there was something else in there that said that anybody that's asks for government funding after a certain amount of years every year should be a 5% decrease after the first three is that on after that it has to decrease by 5% it said and i didn't have enough information to go to actually meet that criteria right so that was another thing with this application and several of the applications that were actually upping their amount instead of lowering their amount um that was another point i had for this one that they've been coming for more than 10 years
and that's true the amount's not decreasing any mr chairman yes sir mr we're 1,362421 short yes sir and we appropriating 2 million 109 of all the requests that come to 2 million 109 correct outside of the unified budgets request yes below that you see the unified budget i'm just i'm
just understand i want to understand how much money we have to cut out of the center section well out of the bottom two sections we have to cut out 1.362 i don't think we know how much out of one section versus the other we could very easily do an iteration formula and cut it all out evenly across each one of them based on their request amount it's math without having to think so we've
got both sections to yes sir mr chairman yes but i mean we don't have to allocate all of this because what if we have somebody comes forward in the future like for instance american magic wanting to do something and they want funding and we've given to somebody that really doesn't need it i mean i i tend to agree with my fellow council member down there um at first blush the 100,000 looks good you know it's fine um but i don't think they need it you know and i don't think it's the
right source i think they're if the county wants to give them 100,000 they could do that they had plenty of money different places um they could come to the city for some too i don't know but uh probably less than what they'd ask for from the county but if it's a good faith thing we did for 10 years and they don't really need it i think there are other organizations that are doing more with less really um that we should we can invest this money in but i don't think we necessarily need to it it would be nice if we got to the amount and we were zero there you know so that we spent it all but i also want to leave some room potentially if there's
something else we don't like in here i i feel like there's a couple here that we don't have any backup on that got pulled already like the cigar one that's that's out right is that still in we got no backup for that cigar out it's out okay okay wait then also summerfest summerfest gave us we didn't have anything we got no backup for summerfest it was the wahoos cigar and i'm not even familiar with that one cigar wahoos and my girl with unrevised
okay mortyfest is same as jazz summerfest wahoos i think summerfest is jazzfest summerfest no william i thought william banks was jazzfest that's correct he is summerfest that was he might have changed that's the name of his okay summerfest is william banks okay yes okay so cigar if if y'all are okay let's let's stick with the the one item and decide whether we want to fund it uh i understand what you guys are trying to do let's cut out but let's let's
finish this conversation really fast okay then no let's not fund it at this time okay anyone feel differently all right so we'll zero out the naval asian foundation all right uh all right and i did see dr howard come in do you need a moment to breathe or
do you want are you ready so we skipped you i can give you a moment we can come back all right so let's move down to uh pensacola chamber fireworks uh that used to be funded through we used the program was done by um who was it it it was the sto yeah sertoma thank you sertoma that moved that over to the pensacola chamber of commerce
is there anybody here from the chamber i didn't see todd i didn't see todd either can i just make some comments then please um just some general things um yeah i did read all these pages i guess i didn't read every single page i didn't read all the audits and everything but in this one you know there were some obvious kind of glaring errors on zeros but um that's not a big deal um the one thing i think is kind of a big deal they indicated the baseline for room nights in the their application was 4,300 room nights but the highest number they had any of our me
their metrics was 1300 so i'm not sure which is correct as far as the number of room nights just not very good attention to detail and i kind of wanted to ask somebody why their numbers are so predictable and the goals and metrics that they went from 12 12,000 visitors in 23 to 13,24 to 14,25 is there any way to track this and then the room nights also go up by 100 each each year but as i said earlier there's they show 4,300 as their baseline for room nights which they'll never reach that um and then they had an increase of 10,000 contractual services there was i didn't know
what that reflected either so i i'm not saying we shouldn't fund them i'm just saying there's in the category of of things where i have questions that was one of the ones i had questions on is should we fund them at a lower amount i mean we all love fireworks but if it's five minutes shorter i'm not sure that's going to make a huge impact so if we can save 10 $20,000 and cut the show last year it was 10,000 less last year so we could go with that at this point and do the 96,000 instead of the 106 it was 87,500 what am i looking at wrong here then i thought it
was 96 last year was 96 96 is what was on the information i got this does vary from what was in our stuff i'm just going to tell you that yeah they're on application they have to write oh so so they're not in i just noticed this is not in order this is if you're looking at the applications in order that application the 87750 last year was pensacola beach chamber fireworks not the pensacola chamber fireworks i just noticed that also okay then
i got a question on on them too that so i know downtown we do fireworks and beach we do fireworks and we don't have like a new year's fireworks anymore downtown but they'd still have it at the beach um why can't we combine the fireworks and just have them at either or location instead of both locations and does it make that big of a difference i know i feel like and jason probably can answer this fourth of july is busy at the beach regardless of if you do fireworks or no fireworks um i mean it's nice to have fireworks there it's also nice to have fireworks downtown
but nothing's really changed business-wise on new year's eve in downtown pensacola without fireworks um does it make a whole lot of sense to have fireworks fourth of july when the beach is completely sold out i don't know if it does or not um yes we do not want the beach coming to pensacola for the fireworks and we don't want to go there i mean still do that both of them are passed folks that want to go to the beach will they don't care they'll go through the traffic they'll sit through it they'll come back through the traffic there's there's folks that live locally that will do it and there's folks that um tourists that will say "hey i'm going to stay off
the beach because i want to see the fireworks." but i don't know financially does it make that much of a difference again i'm looking at it with a tourist development hat does it drive tourism specifically for fireworks i don't really know if anybody from louisiana or texas is going to come to pensacola beach because we have fireworks humorously i know people who live in town north side of the city of pensacola who rent places out downtown for the night of the 4th of july so they can be there during it and those rooms are hard to come by on the 4th of july so i mean i i would
argue that we are using them but i would you guys are the hotel years i would add i think people are coming to pensacola the reason we're booked is because of the amenities the events uh the quality of life all of those different things uh and so i would i would continue supporting having fireworks at both downtown pensacola and at the beach the ones that we've supported at the beach i think that's for two different that's both new year's and fourth of july it's not just uh so why don't we start at the bottom of the list because that's where the
real money is you only got two million up at the top be nickeling and diamond the top and all you have to do is cut the new request out of the bottom section and you almost got all of them i'm just suggesting right because we can spend all afternoon up to $2 million sanction we moved the meeting to two o'clock so we could do that well i know you love to meet
mr chairman i'm good with 96,000 me too okay yeah if i could if i could speak to to mr patel's uh point i i i get what you're saying i i think that the fireworks enhances the quality of our place if someone's uh sitting in baton rouge louisiana and they're deciding if they want to watch fireworks in baton rouge or get in a car and drive over and stay in pensacola or pensacola beach i'll take that um then then i think that is a shifting strategy where we can get somebody to come into our town we my family also rents rooms to to watch the
fireworks candidly uh i will say however uh or in addition on the expense table it looks like the pensacola chamber has forecasted a a net income of of $4,000 so i would recommend uh an allocation for the fireworks of $12,000 versus 106 how much there 102 there was a recommendation for 96 for level funding from last year are you suggesting the then i would re i take that back
rather the 96 yeah we're good is everybody okay with the 96 anybody opposed all right how much how much more do we have to come up with after that four after those two we say 110,000 so far keep on going chair 1,251,000 junth doesn't have backup either were they cut also yes junth was cut it uh yes okay
correct junth they withdrew their request or it's a placeholder is what you said it's a placeholder so it could be could be whoever wants to do something some type of event h okay so hold on we have so we have a couple years ago when we created restricted funds one of those is a special events fund so if we didn't put that placeholder there there
are funds in that account that we could then use to support something that comes up we're good so we can zero out the 50,000 that's it yes not very big at junth and since we're here and we're not talking about any specific items cigar weekend is zeroed out did somebody also say that marty gro pensacola was yeah that one's gone it's gone do we want to
lose marty i don't think we want to lose we didn't have anything here from them no that was an incomplete application it was in the unrevised applications which is why it was pulled out thank you ma'am what were they missing i can't recall honestly you know that was i believe we were missing their financials primarily i don't think i saw navy days here either that one should be gone that's a zero for this year right and navy days is zero
they're zeroed out they ended up they not getting paid this i believe at the last tdc meeting they they said they were withdrawing their application okay yeah that's i have a zero we're getting there and uh just councilman bear i did want to mention to you so was one of the questions that i asked of each uh applicant you know to provide or tell us the source data for your metrics you know where are you getting this information from so um that was an ancillary question that i had but we will make sure that that is a question added to the application going forward okay thank you
do we feel like not having marty gro is going to impact the hotel rooms downtown if we don't fund that i think that it will impact hotels downtown i mean that there's a lot of floats that come from out of town um there's a lot of people that come from out of town for that so i do think that it would impact i don't know if there's time for them to go to visit pensacola i don't think there is time i know we have our grant committee meetings for visit pensacola on the 23rd of
this month next week so i don't think they have time to go there either um i know there's been talks about doing it quarterly at pensacola sports grants are done quarterly and at visit pensacola i don't think it is it's it's done i don't think they're there yet twice a year so i don't know if you want to speak on it um danny's here would you like to hear yeah danny can you come up and explain where we're at
i just don't want to lose a event that we know is putting heads in beds well we so tax returns were not done marty gro starts january the 4th money comes in the end of one year next year we're working on our tax returns we did get some questions from stefan's staff and we turned those in the day of last your last meeting so it it wasn't in your package before it was incomplete when you got your package last time that's why that we were one of the three thrown out but we gave them all the answers that they had except for tax returns and our down
st germaine report which is the big piece of this to prove our economic benefit has that all been completed now down st germaine said any day i'm saying a week or so i don't know and the accountant will give us a tax return shortly i don't know let's just make sure we've got enough money held back for those kinds of things exactly placeholder big placeholder yep love placeholders all right awesome good okay thank you danny all right but for our budget recommendation
we're going to zero that line out and we've got the budget yep y okay all right so i think those are all the the zeroed out for withdrawals um or incompletes but we do you want to go back up to uh african-american heritage yes all right um now so before we move forward we we do have members in the audience from some of these organizations as we get to them do you want
them to come forward so we can ask questions yes okay dr howard if you would come forward please thank you any comments or questions i i do this one this is one of the ones that is uh taking the request up 50,000 which is pretty significant um and their budget is 141,000 so they're asking for 125,000 out of a budget of 141,000 so this is well over the 50% mark the 75,000 they were granted last year is at the 50% markish so um i i guess i'm looking for why we're
going to go that far above i think the at this point good afternoon cheryl howard on behalf of the african african-american heritage society thank you so much for pushing us back on the uh schedule as i was traveling from out of town you're welcome uh and if i may immediately u respond to that request the reason that we've increased it by that amount is that for at least the past 15 years we've been receiving $40,000 per year from fapen the florida african-american
heritage preservation network to also support having uh an intern and at least one part-time employee and we've become quite accustomed to having that additional help plus they also take care of some of the other expenses that we have as well the uh we call it fapen um fapen is located in tallahassee that budget has been funded by the state every year without question for reasons that i cannot explain this is the first year that fapen will not be funded can you tell me once again how
much were they funding you it was $40,000 per year okay and oh if and if i may uh fapen is uh was designed to support smaller african-american or heritage or cultural museums throughout the state i mean literally from miami all the way up to the you know jacksonville it's of course headquartered in tallahassee and all the way across and the reason for that is is because the history is different significantly different in all parts of the state and so there was the feeling that
it was really important to have representation by museums in all of those places including here in particular where we have the most uh interesting uh history as well thank you one more question how many how many years have you gotten money from this board i believe it's been around 14 years um and we have been in existence since uh september 12th 1990 and we will be celebrating our 35th year uh this year since well technically next year but september thank you thank you okay so that also
goes into the concern down there that after the third year it's supposed to decrease by 5% each year if it continues yeah i don't i don't know where that rule came from that's never been any i don't either but it's in every one of their packets i don't know where it came from either i think that might be the combination of the the requested the form for outside agencies to request based on all the different programs that outside agencies could request of the county uh but that's never been except it was in every one of their for their criteria
wait say that again it was it's on every one of theirs that they turned in that's the criteria that it states right i don't think that's been the form that we've used historically um commissioner hoffberger so when we get to um discuss our budget at the budget workshop so this is some previous um uh direction that was provided um by the board um this actually occurred while i was working at the city um so that's kind of what what i've inherited as we came back um and i think we
need some clarification on that from the board so let's uh get that cleared up and then we can fix our application with some uh a change of direction from the board absolutely agree and i think we're also working on individual applications for whatever so it's a little bit easier for the applicant to understand so the tdc application would look different than maybe if we were funding something for the homeless community perfect thank you charles yeah thank you mr chairman just a couple questions thank you for being here um i noticed one of our fellow council members is
one of your staff members and i was just kind of wondering how your staff works you've got three well we had three we recently um have lost one who fell in her home and broke her right ankle and fractured her left foot so she will not be back for the foreseeable future so we're we're down to two now okay because you requested like six 30 i think it was 65,000 in salaries but you only had three people and that was total up to 60,000 so what's the other five and now if you
only have two employees you're going to hire somebody else well we'd like to we need to and we this is also aspirational because we've had many requests from visit pensacola to do a more robust job with promoting our heritage trail we created the first african-american heritage trail in this area and there's a significant interest for of of individuals both within the state schools and other organizations as well as outside of the state to tour the heritage trail
we just got a call this past week uh of over 45 uh individuals with one family reunion and then another one asking us to recommend a place that they could have a family reunion with 130 individuals and both groups wanted to also do the heritage trail the problem that we have with the heritage trail and we have answered the call of visit pensacola whenever they have asked us to do it is that we don't have staff if someone is out uh touring groups on the heritage trail
then there's no one else in the office and most of our full-time people don't want to also work on saturdays so one of the staff is has always been the a saturday person for every saturday and then the other staff has been all of the other days and in some in the case of some staff six days a week so but you're the only full-time staff member though right i'm sorry you're the only full-time staff member aren't you technically technically okay um and final question mr chairman yes sir so in your um application you say you'd like to secure additional funding and
sponsorships of at least $35,000 in the next year but i don't see that anywhere in your your budget or what your expected revenue is so in terms of partnerships uh it's it's uh secure additional funding and sponsorships of at least $35,000 in the next year is what it says so i didn't see that reflected anywhere in your budget and what your revenue is so is that aspirational i mean do you have any leads towards that because we're dealing with limited dollars here and if you have the opportunity to bring that kind of money in um you know we need to decide if if we
need to offset what we do well it is aspirational because uh unfort in a few years ago we did more um collaborative partnerships at a higher expense with the heritage um uwf historic trust we uh co-c collaborated exhibits and did a variety of different things also with them uh we've also uh collaborated with uh organizations outside of the state uh to bring in uh programming here that
uh members have expressed interest for we would like to collaborate also more with um some of the other museums that are cultural museums and we've been discussing how we can as a can coales around each other to also uh support and sort of butcher buttress the cultural history uh um offerings in this area because this really is an area that has a very unique uh cultural history and it's there's enough of it to be covered by more than just our museum
but some of the other museums have not been around for decades as we have and so i think collectively we could work better together than uh continuing to work very independently um and so we've talked with chappie james we've talked with some of the other museums about working together more and that will take funding some of the some of the other museums um have less funding and so we expect that we would bear the uh a greater financial expense in those collaborations i i definitely
think partnering is something you need to look at for sure it's definitely something we look at in these applications if you have partners um that is always helpful so okay thank you at the um $125,000 that's 87% of their total budget at 100,000 it would be 71% of the total budget if we went with last year's it would be 53% of the total budget um
so one of the things i just wanted to point out um on the income table that you filled out on your application um you know we can see that in last fiscal year we gave you $50,000 we gave you a 50% increase to $75,000 to the current fiscal year and and now you're asking for a 66% increase for next year uh and i think that's a sign i understand uh what you're trying to do and and expand the programs and and bring in the partnerships
uh but but i think you know we made a huge increase in investment in this current year but we haven't seen that and i know it takes a little bit of time but if those are aspirational i think we personally i'd like to see you go out and get those uh this year with maybe some level funding from the current year before we do another increase uh because my concern is we do another increase and then maybe we see less of the outside because we're covering you know a lot of the program costs uh just through our appropriation so i'd like to see personally i'd like to see
the level funding from what we've done this year uh without an increase since it was such a it was already a 50% increase over previous year and mr chairman if i may remind you uh we're trying to also make up for the shortfall of the $40,000 from the florida african-american heritage preservation network that for the first time in more than a decade this will be the first time that we don't have that support and so a lot of the work that we have done over the years we've only been able
to do it because we had those additional funds for example uh having someone to take care of all of our social media to do a lot of the marketing in that's part of a what they call a um and well it's an internship that's paid via a stipen that's a part of that grant and so that's another person who's not listed as an employee for us because it's paid in the past it's always been paid by fapen and it's a separate application process and and they pay i mean it's paid out in a different
way and so without um we're not exactly sure that we how fast we can immediately make up for uh the $40,000 loss that is definite because as you know the florida legislature i think they're done with the budget and i actually brought the um article there was an article discussing how this is the first year that fapen has not been funded since its existence and no real reasons for it but uh it's going to affect all of the all of the heritage museums throughout the
state of florida mr chairman yes sir but the unfortunate thing is we have to balance you know we have to look at what the impact of your program is and then tie increases to that to in some method um my question i have a question for staff um so they would not be barred from getting discretionary funds would they from the county are they by getting funding through this councilman currently uh discretionary allocations at the county are more or less on hold if you
will but normally if they were not on hold they could still receive discretionary funds certainly some some amount okay and the city also has discretionary funds as well so um i'm not asking you about that i'm just mentioning that we've never been eligible we're not even eligible to apply for funds from from visit pensacola because of the way that uh all of these things are written we have never been able to put in you know a a grant application to receive funding to do any
special projects or a special event or anything because we al already receive funding from the tdc okay and that's another uh place where if we could have funding from visit pensacola specifically perhaps for the heritage trail tours that have been very helpful when they've had people come in from out of state who were considering uh representing that pensacola would be a great place for to bring uh customers of tourism agencies here we have answered the call to receive them at the
heritage society we've gotten on their conveyances and gone all around town to show them all of the heritage trail sites and all of that and without this additional funding i'm not so sure how easily we'll be able to answer those kinds of calls and this is something that is really important i think to this community is to be able to continue to have this uh and for tourists to continue to have that experience as at least an option but um i understand you know of course mr chairman what you're saying as well and it's if we did have the shortfall there is no way whatsoever
we would have asked for any additional funding this year because you're correct we start when we first started out for years we only received like $15,000 for a long time and i'm talking about a long time and so it's taken ye uh 35 years to get up to an amount that is uh an amount that we can actually you know run the museum uh with and so had it not been for the dis dis uh investment if you will in uh cultural museums throughout the state of florida we would have kept our requests
the same it had already been rumored that that was going to happen based upon discussions and conversations and what have you with legis local legislators and just you know keeping up with sort of what is going what you know what uh impacts that sort of decision and so in anticipating what occurred last in the last couple of weeks we had already increased our budget to make up for the shortfall so can i say one more thing okay i'm just going to say that i think that gives you a good value proposition to go to donors and sponsors and say we've lost this funding and
if you want us to continue operations we've got to have some additional funding you know i just the tdc is not the this particular tax is not the answer to everyone's issue as far as you know if they have a budget shortfall i mean we really have to be cautious as how we spend it because they're are limited funds they're for a particular purpose um that can be stretched a little bit but you know i hate that that funding got eliminated for you um you know and i think that there we've dealt with that with arts institutions lots of different things have lost funding more recently
and so it's very unfortunate but i hope that you'll understand that the constraints we're working in when we decide how much we're going to allocate okay thank you interesting i have a couple questions yes sir first first of all thank you for coming um do you know or do you guys measure uh with your association how much your association drives tourism or people come specifically for tourism for what you provide tourism uh yes we keep those metrics as well as
uh visit pensacola and sometimes they have shared them with us as well so very often uh people will specifically even will go on uh our site or uh the visit pensacola site and specifically click on cultural tourism can can you tell me what your site is i tried to look it's it's a apensacola.org or african-americanheritage society.org okay yeah and that's the way that um we interact with our
members as well as those who are attending events everything can be done on that one site and how many members do you have goodness probably 300 and do you guys have like a yearly membership fee or how's that work oh yeah we have a membership fee at different levels and how much is normally what what's the level well the the the uh student membership fee is i think $35 or or the one person membership fee is $35 per year then a couple is $50 and then there's the patron uh and
uh $100 sponsors $250 then we have a $500 membership fee that most of the board members take out okay and then um we previously had a founding circle membership um but generally speaking you know we don't really promote that one necessarily because it's $1,000 a year if and yeah so most people at this particular time are not you know interested in doing that one but we have a we do receive some $500 membership fee fees and we have actually received
um a couple in that higher range uh last year as well so for some reason in your paperwork your membership financials was $1,620 and then shows it went down to $1,20 yeah we all if you have 300 members i don't understand how 300 members are only bringing in $1,20 i'm sure that that's not up to date but and and also the reason that it's not our largest event that have uh get new membership expenses are this time of year we just had an event i think it was on june 1st where people
who were members got a discount and everybody took out a membership none of that would be reflected in this and also in april we had another event that was also a membership driven event so i thought you meant the most recent number do you mean the past just what you submitted i'm going by only by what you submitted i tried to look through the website i couldn't find the website to see what the membership fees were the website's been there as long as we have so it's it's the it is our name.org org and this was done february 28th since then we've collected more memberships
okay and then contractual services what exactly is that um well we pay uh speakers particularly uh or if we haveus uh for example if um we're having uh professor or for example we had the uh chairman of the english department do a presentation recently he declined the um to be paid this time but usually we would pay that person under anou and so we call those contractual
expenses um in the past we've had panels when we anytime we've had a screening and uh many of the of the professionals that sit on our panels are considered to be experts in the area of whatever the the screening pertains to and so we have to pay we have to pay them sometimes they also um need to be you know they stay in a hotel we usually put them up somewhere downtown and uh so we include that in our contractual expenses thank you i would suggest and i don't know if it's
available to you or or but i think because of the staffing issue you have that you should i would i i would think that you could look for and get some younger volunteers because i know there's a lot a lot of students college students that need those hours um and and you know they would do it as a volunteer basis so it would and a lot of them young younger ones would help you with the facebook and the instagram and stuff you mentioned so i think um i think it would be something wise to look at and i just think in future applications some of the things you just mentioned none of that's in the application so it's it's very um i don't want to sound negative
about this but it's hard to to to give myself an excuse to say we should give you 75,000 when it looks like there's no sort of cultural tourism actually happening most of the budget is seems to go to salary um that's i'm going by what the application shows so it's hard to justify saying "hey let's give 75,000 but 60,000 of it's going to be for salary." well um all right um folks we got a lot more to cover and we've been spending a lot of time on this unless there's a burning desire to
ask any other questions i think we need to move to move on i was going to recommend 50,000 okay well councilman bear just recommended 50 is there another recommendation or is everybody in support of that mr mr chairman can i just say their their income table and expense table shows a $14,000 uh surplus at the end of the year so i don't think we should go to 75 you know if we go
anywhere definitely go down to 61 but i wouldn't start with 50 but i don't think we should be funding people to have money left over at the end of the year i think that's on their proposed budget where they were asking for 125,000 right we to have the the 14,000 surplus i think we should stick with the 75,000 which is right at the almost 50 it's 53% so it's right about follows all the rules so i'm gonna go back to i agree with that i'm a
everything everybody okay with 75,000 all right any opposed to that y'all are going to get it all right thank you dr howard thank you all right uh moving down uh i have it as summerfest on the spreadsheet but i think he's applied as spring what is he calling it william banks enterprises yeah cadillac i don't see him here today any questions or comments i don't he's not here in the audience i have a few one one comment on on
the uh expense table it for the last several years it has in for the year coming up it doesn't list salaries uh there's there's a zero in the salary line item but when i look at the tax returns clearly there there are salaries listed and i'm wondering if that's an omission or an error or or what's going on um also reconciling the the the income on the tax returns to the event it looks like this might be the only event that the enterprise conducts um in the year and uh we the
county has been funding this particular event for quite some time now i don't know how many years maybe 10 maybe maybe more um that it suggests through the majority opinion um event survey that it's producing room nights i i i wouldn't argue that but it but it also looks like the increase in funding in large part is covering the salaries of the event more so than the entertainment and and the application doesn't reconcile no and the application actually talks about the cost for the
musicians being higher but but doesn't really move that on the budget yeah that's right i i think that's what they're referring to as salaries and wages i really do you know if you look at the numbers i think that they're calling um what they pay the musicians salaries and wages you know they had a loss in 2024 $40,000 a loss of 93,000 well let's see 93,000 and 83,000 i guess in uh 2022 so they've they've dealing with pretty consistent losses um so i kind of feel like that they're
spending a lot on artists and they're operating at a loss i don't know how they're doing that but um and i was also kind of wondering how they calculated room nights um and they've got some really interesting figures on their attendance so their attendance went up to 3200 and 2425 and they said their non-escambia attendance increased from 1743 to 2,800 so they had a significant increase in um in non-escambia but they had a decrease in escambia from like 800 to 858 to 400 but then
later in their uh evaluation it talks about they had an increase in the number of escambia county so i don't really understand their numbers are off um and then they they list on their source of revenue they only list two sources but they don't even include the three-day $150 tickets i don't know where that's reflected either there's just a lot of issues with this particular one um they say they have $125,000 cash and investments on hand but they're deriving a big chunk of
investment income so i'm trying to figure out how are they driving investment income on the 125,000 that's more than the 125,000 there's just a lot of holes in here they didn't sign their application i have no idea when it was submitted i i trust the county that was submitted on time but you know the impact summary is where you they say there were 3,378 people attended the event that would have been for 2024 i believe 40% of it says 40% of those were from escambia and 60% were fizzing
from outside escambia which is 1351 and 2026 outside escambia which completely contrary to what's in their application um and so you know the their economic impact projection for 2526 says they're adding another day of the festival too so i'm like how in the world are they going to accomplish that with the same level of funding they had for the previous year so i wish somebody was here to answer the questions i i can't recommend this for anything at this point because there's so many problems with this particular application and they're asking for more than 50%
questions or comments recommendations i just want to say i agree with all that you what i agree with all that i had some of the same exact questions uh the tax return was not fully i know we we we dinged david for not having tax return submitted but this was not a full tax it was like a one page um i'd love i'd love for taxes to be one page um but uh i think if they don't submit the full requirement of what should be sent in then they should they got to be hit with the same thing that everybody else got okay right right i know all right so the recommendation is zero out yep
all right next item is does anybody else have a problem with that concern or recommendation different no okay next item is pensacon i like the idea that they're decreasing the amount of money that they're asking us for so 350,000 last year 180 this year with a operating budget of 879 i think that they've been i think that they have been actively doing what they're supposed to do to continue to grow that
um festival i don't know if you call it a festival pensacon aon the aon of whatever form of they're actually down from attendance though are they yeah because from 2023 to now they're down 44% and from 24 to 25 they're down 14% i will say they used to come to visit pensacola for grants and they used to get the max the max there's like 50 but they were one of the events that got the
most and then they came last year here and got more than we've ever given them and this year's pensacon was the worst turnout for hotels oyster bay which has nine rooms is down the street from the bay center she told me she said "we didn't even sell out." um and so i know my hotel's on davis highway we usually sell out for pensacon and we didn't even feel any sort of rush from it so i thought it was off so i know i figured i said "let me ask the folks at oyster bay." they're right and she's like "was my nine rooms and i didn't sell out." um so i think i think that's why they came back with such a lower amount and i think the application said one of the artists
canled last minute or something like that is what it said so i don't know how many total artists come to pensacon um but i guess if a major one drops out then maybe people don't buy tickets um or show up so that's what it is mr chairman this one's a zero for me too um i'm not even sure if this application was received on time the date signed says april 1st which is a day late um you know i wish somebody was here from this one too the numbers as as uh council member hoffberger
commissioner hoffberger multiple titles um are about half of what they were in 2023 um and when they received no government funding the hiring guests were only a quarter of what they were when they received no funding and you know i would ask why do you think the attendance has dropped almost in half they didn't complete the projections for fiscal year 26 or the baseline goals for from 24 this application's not complete uh sponsorships aren't reflected anywhere contributions donations private sources they probably need to grow that and according to application
uh their application on page 10 they said they're working on a better way to track cash payments and petty cash expenses during the actual so show so it sounds like to me they don't even have good financial controls in place um so i'm i'm going to put a zero on this one too any other comments i i'm not sure that we should zero it out only because last and i know they were getting visit
money from grants and last year was the first time they came here and they and as i understand last year they had new ownership and new uh people in charge and that could have been part of the problem i think we still have to support this um you know just looking at the expense table perhaps or the rather the the income table u perhaps the $180,000 ask is as a result of the $189,000
uh net income in fiscal year 25 um you know the two together $369,000 and it looks like it's you know pair pursue with with uh the current year's funding at 350 um i agree with councilman bearer i i don't think it's passed the litmus test to uh receive full funding this year and i i concur also there's there's lots of gaps in the application if we're going to be fair to uh everyone we've got to consider the date that the application was submitted um that's kind of something i like going to but unfortunately i i support councilman bear at funding at 0% this year
brett what it seems like this may be trending downward what happens if we give funding and for some reason they delay the event or make it an every year every other year event i mean maybe that's not even a possibility but that funding still go to them well we don't have anybody here from their organization to speak to that i don't i mean it's not up to us on their timing of their events um so if we appropriate it for them for the year and they don't host
it they don't get the money so if that answers your question in a different way it does thank you yeah i mean that was even junth last year happened but they didn't fulfill the request so the money didn't get appropriated last year even though we approved it in a budget the county approved it in a budget it didn't go because of other reasons mr chairman and that's fine but we tie that money up we can't spend it on other things until we get to the end of the year i mean i i work for an organization that gets funding from the county and it's all
reimbursement based and that money it's not like we can just go use it for something else during the year so if we allocate this it's pretty much theirs until you know the end of the year it's encumbered right yes um so i i just i you know we're going to have a placeholder i think it could be a really big placeholder based on the number of things that we are not going to fund and maybe they can get their act together and come back with the right documentation all right well anybody have any i just want to say i agree but i agree that we don't want to
cancel this uh event but i do see that they have a a net profit and if they have a net profit from last year they can use those funds to keep having the event this year and and like councilman said they can get their act together and do what they're supposed to with the funds they get i think when they sometimes when they come here and they get such a large amount it kind of it it it they're going into it thinking we don't have to work as hard because we've already got such a large amount from the from whoever so i think if if they realize hey i really have to work for these funds and i have to drive tourism here they'll do what they're what they need to do
and then we'll do what we have to do to keep driving them to keep doing that so i think i think it's a harsh lesson but it's a lesson that needs to be taught um so yeah i think well i think some of this also speaks to the discussion about the 501c3 issue um we had this discussion before uh and as an example marty gro pensacola was a for-profit business uh that they converted they created a because they said it's for the public so they created a public organization and so it
now is a taxexempt 501c3 um some of these other organizations are for-profit businesses that we fund they are definitely developing tourism through their programs maybe their application materials aren't supporting that because they're not filling it out properly or completely etc etc uh but that's why you're seeing the for-profit so i think philosophically do we want to continue to support these for-profit um organizations and i don't think that's for today's discussion
but just just putting this out there for future conversations uh is that something you know we've had we've gone back and forth and we had i thought we had decided not to require it to be a 501c3 to be eligible for these funds um because we continue to support for-profit organizations uh because we didn't want to have it really awesome opportunity of developing tourism that might come to us that could be for-profit as an example i think we used in our discussion before was five flag
speedway came to us with an ask for $55,000 ousand because they were going to be on i think it was cbs or something all day long on saturday like a prime time uh doing a race out there and they were asking for $55,000 to market to get this contract to come in and do it uh and i think having our banner along the track say in pensacola uh more than paid for the 55,000 in the advertising that we would have had to pay to get that exposure and so they're for-profit business uh five flag
speedia you know speedway just like pensacon um jazzfest all these others uh so i i think it's when we're looking at should we fund it based on their because they have profits and they should fund it themselves i i mean personally i i'd like to see them if they're community organizations be asking for you know be a community organization but i don't think it's a requirement and so i don't want to say we're not going to fund it because they made profits last year if they did
advertising to bring people here to drive tourists uh to spend money stay in the hotels and shop in the shops eating the restaurants and stuff i want to see us continue to do that but at some point do we continue doing that for the rest of their lives you know the existence of the organization i don't know but not according to the eligibility unless that's changed seriously i don't mean that it's got a it's got a i'm not sure the form is correct based on our previous board meeting uh council
meetings i would and i agree to some to some point on that that i think we want to fund events and and for-profit or nonprofit organizations to hold host events here to drive tourism but at some point in time the goal should be that they can be self- sustaining and that just like they're at visit pensacola they get five years at visit pensacola uh it was five i think it's three now um to be self- sustaining and that's kind of what caused them to start coming here um
so i think at some point at some point we need to have that conversation and if you're a for-profit or you know you should be able to sustain your own events at some point in time and and not just you know say it's a free check i'm coming here and and and the problem i feel is they're getting non-compl they're getting complacent and they're i'd hate to lose this event but i also think the rules apply to everybody alike if you didn't do your paperwork and you didn't do it right it should be hard to get a 100,000 should be hard to get 50,000 because the bank's not you go to the bank for 50,000 they're you know need blood samples and all kinds of things you got to
give them so so i think you know uh we have to hold them to a high standard if you want agree tax dollars you have to do it right i agree all right so we're at zero for pensacon yeah okay zero it is all right next item is the pensacola beach chamber that is the second application on the on there uh last year they got 87750 this year they're asking for 100,500 come on up the
entire events 1585 it's two different they do two different events they had it separated out didn't they yes welcome hi thanks for having me i'm jessica simpson president ceo of the beach chamber they are not separated out in the um expenses and income tables but inside the grant they are and the only reason that there's an increase is based on potential tariff effects there's nothing
additional there's no change to the actual show or the length of the shows both of them um one of them is the july 4th and the other one is the new year's eve and so there's no change to the show other than the fireworks company's assumption of the effective tariffs so they've agreed and i put this in there to requote the shows closer to it was very difficult to quote the price of it more than a year away so right now are both shows
uh are they quoting 158,500 for both they're quoting 100,000 well 158,000 yes for both shows your proposal is 100,000 so we have a partnership with the san rosa island authority um and that's in the total of 158 they're they're $55,000 supporter of the july 4th show and so that's in included in the 158 their partnership which should be separated out in the so the two of us would be the full income say that correct so you're asking 100,500 $100,500 from us correct and
you're saying 48 or something from that 55,000 from the santa rosa island authority mhm and then we have 3,000 in private sponsorships that go towards the shows and advertising i have a question is there a u is there a domestic fireworks manufacturer so we don't have to deal with tariffs it's a great question um only because i have i look at tariffs every day okay we've shifted a lot of domestic uh to a lot of domestic manufacturing i got to think
that somebody makes fireworks opportunity yeah right i can certainly seek that out pyro shows is an organization that does both our shows and the downtown pensacola shows um they are very high quality specifically when it comes to the permitting process i don't know if you've ever had a conversation with any of them but um a good thing and a let's see a pro and a con is that they do shows all over the country and will tell you standing here today
that the escambia county permitting is one of the more difficult in any show they do around the country um and they're very good at it so it's um a very professional show done the right way and and certainly if they have a domestic supplier i'm happy to ask again the shows can be reququed um closer to their date that's what i'm suggesting and i can tell you right now speculation on tariffs is is just that um personally what i ask for people to do is show me the tariff certificate and i'm happy to pay it uh to date i've never seen a tariff certificate
and so what what i'm suggesting is that we could just ask the the vendor um can they manufacture their own fireworks or can they buy domestic and kind of create some bull work against that tariff and just push back on price increases on under the speculation of tariffs right in your request you say additionally we're requesting an advance of 34,750 on october 31st to cover the deposit correct whatever we may appropriate you have to talk
to that man behind you okay certainly we don't actually write those checks so got it that would have to come from he doesn't write them either but he fights to get them any other comments or suggestions i have trouble once again with that high of a percentage of this um of the increase no of your total budget for these two so in your application it said it couldn't be more than 50% of the cost of which i've been
kind of pairing back and adhering to and so um yours right now is uh i mean you're asking for 63% of the total so and i get tariffs sure i mean i get the whole idea and the fear factor and all that kind of stuff and we all love fireworks not a question not mainly mainly we all like them fireworks go ahead could
we 90,500 which is a little bit of an increase but not okay if make okay just one quick note what you're seeing is the program budget not the full budget for the pensacola beach chamber these are the funds used for to and and that's what the application says yes of of the actual event yes yes that's what make that that corresponds to the application okay so the total chamber budget is much greater than the yes yes
$21,000 mhm for the concern about the 50% is it accurate that the uh the vendor they're speculating an increase of about $5,700 on the tariffs mhm with that i'd propose um adding $5,700 to the amount that was funded last year 87,500 for a total funding of 93,500 i like it do you have to pay the tariffs twice since it's two different shows or do they order everything at once it's just one just once okay i
like his 935 okay i'm good with that any other comments recommendations concerns so 935 all right any other anybody have any concern with that hearing none all right thank you very much jessica all right moving on all right uh the next item is
sale pensacola and i don't i don't see tim here i have some comments what's that i have a few comments about this one um first of all the it says sale pensacola but you know it's clearly a foiling it's a new group this year and they mention sale pensacola in their documentation and they cherrypick some things that they think are beneficial and they leave out the important stuff like um some of the expenditures the revenue and things which we did not get a copy of for
um the current year um so and the biggest issue i have with foiling pensacolas or foiling whatever this group is called is that when they did this program i was not in the tdc when this happened but when the tdc voted to fund them there was no discussion whatsoever with the city of pensacola there was no discussion of infrastructure needs for police um any of the challenges that they might encounter and i would encourage us not to allocate them any money until they've had
that discussion with the city because i know for a fact after talking to the mayor today about that they have not and it created major problems with pensacola martyra because they were having their event and we were spread so thin with police it was very difficult to provide necessary u you know crime prevention and um just management of traffic it was it was very very uh much a problem in the city and so the mayor asked me that u before they we grant them money that
um they have that discussion and talk about the necessary their needs down in maritime park area or whatever they happen to need uh before we approve this having said that um the application and i you know i filled these applications out now um i've done it three times uh for count for county funding and there's a little thing at the beginning it says a 25word description of the program theirs was 54 words i'm like how can you not squeeze that down to 25 words i mean don't be too wordy um in the application they mentioned that there was $315,000 from last
year spent on key team members uh there was money from from the 315 that was spent on key team members and logistics i don't know what that means um i don't know what a key team member is i don't know and i know what logistics are because i served as logistics guy in the army but that's not specific enough for me um under the question related to similar partner organizations they said none so they have no partners in this area and we heard it just a little while ago that american magic is not working with them they haven't really asked to collaborate with them it doesn't seem like they collaborate with the yach club um and i i think i would try and have
some partners if i were them uh on page nine of their application they list a goal of 4 to 450 attendees and just below that they have a goal of 300 plus attendees so i'm like what's the real goal i don't know what the real goal of what they want for next year and that's what they talk about when they say attendees they mean uh people that are participating competitors in their um in their races and things um on the income table they listed $30,000 of other income with no explanation whatsoever there's a line for that that says uh what is this for and they all they
had to do is put that in there they as i said they cherrypicked out the attendance numbers and media value from 2025 but they failed to include budget numbers for fiscal year 25 why would they do that why would they leave that out oh it's another organization but if it was another organization you can pick some stuff and not others they list 478 staff members i'm wondering were these all compensated uh i didn't see that and i really wanted them to give me a definition of what a vip was they seemed to spend a lot of time in getting vips to do things and i don't know if the vips are
compensated either so i had a lot of questions but i would tell the council that i think that we need to put this one on hold until they've discussed their needs for um support services infrastructure with the city of pensacola thank you in their family i agree with that um also i had a problem with their room nights they said that they got over 10,000 room nights and next year they're going to get 21,000 any group in the world would love to have those numbers and i didn't see that
at that time of year they could support that so i would think we don't fund them at all so one of the concerns we had last year when we appropriated the money the 315 we went through sale pensacola because luca the man who puts on sale uh the foiling week uh is not he there's no u there's no domestic entity uh that we could somehow have a clawback to or hold accountable uh and so they partnered with sale pensacola last year sale pensacola does not seem to be
a partner in it this year although the the line item says sale pensacola um and obviously the yach club's not and american magic is not so i would support the zero funding i think everybody enjoyed seeing the program last year the foiling week and the videos are pretty i don't know that i can believe that they booked 10,000 room nights um that's pretty i don't know how many rooms we have in this town but um you know even if they did it for a week that's pretty huge so anyway
uh does anybody have any other thoughts they'd have to sell out 25 hotels for nine nights straight uh i don't think they did that i don't think so i didn't get that that was for the 10,000 or for next year's proposed 20,000 no that's for that's for 10,000 yeah yeah that's uh yeah i when i seen that i said uh a lot of their visitors probably can be credited to to marty gro but even that doesn't say that they create 10,000 room nights so uh i know foiling week did not
create that many room nights for that many hotels to sell out for mr chairman i think we're building a nice placeholder for some of these other organizations some of which are in the room right now i think so too okay so uh zero funding anybody else have any problems with that yep that's where we are okay all right next item is pensacola yacht club um i see a couple folks here welcome good afternoon james simkins comment or pensacola yacht club yeah just pull it over
three questions it should pull over to you try comments comments or questions yes sir councilman i'll try and take it easy on you um so in the section on similar partner organizations you didn't list anything so you don't have any partners anybody you're working with because american magic thinks they're working with you we for these events we are working directly with the class associations uh but in terms of local partners we just involve them as they're needed so i took that definition as somebody that we're actually having an equity or a business
partnership with okay i can understand that um so in the past you've been able to host things just fine without county support correct we've we've done a limited number of events in the past independently or through independent fundraising the focus this year is to take that program and just as terry outline the growth of sailing here we've been able to do a limited number of events uh with our volunteer resources and with our budget with some occasional sponsors we're looking to most importantly grow a marketing and a communications discipline or at least be able
to create that to generate more and more higher quality events and our focus is really looking at national and international events and being able to grow that okay could you apply to pensacola sports for any funding in the past we have uh the scope based on the typical funding amount we're looking at larger scope and we developed an annual program and that's what you see before you okay um and then in your goals and metrics you had 64 event registrations in fiscal year 24 and you're projecting an increase to 580 that's correct with the funding the county will provide
that's that's a huge increase it is uh we have uh multiple large events uh we didn't do that many uh national international events we anticipate the wasp class uh and uh also we're looking to have a youth regata next fall uh and both of those are that's about almost 300 new entries right there okay between those two additional events and you mentioned self-calculated room nights can you tell me how you do that well i rather just jettison that number and there should be a supplementary table we a partnership with pensacola sports and they actually uh gave us
and we submitted at a later date the detailed information generated through their contractor okay um i'll look at that and it's as far as i can see you're going to increase your annual budget by like 400% and explain to me why you have $20,000 in there for travel expenses um for some of the international events there's a requirement to have a principal race officer or pro as well as umpires and judges so as we acquire those larger events we may need to fly people in uh
from elsewhere in the country or internationally to help with basically the race management for these larger and higher profile events okay and you said you're going to hire an agency i think to do some marketing advertising for you does the contractual services overlap with that or is who where with marketing and promotion where is that going to come from which one contractual service or marketing and promotion uh professional services that's really where we put the uh expenses for uh contractors associated with program management that was professional i'm asking about contractual oh contractual let me pull up my table here you have zeroed out
for professional services okay so that's where yeah so in contractual is where we placed some of the regata expenses for bringing in principal race officers um and other support officials so marketing would be the separate line item so that would that would be the agency that you're going to hire that okay um and then why why doesn't your application uh for funds have your complete budget in it i had that question let's see let's see are you talking about on the expense table on
page for the total pensacola yach club budget you know i asked that question i don't have any like notes next to us so we'll just skip that one for now i'll let um so you have $62,000 in cash and $860,000 in investments why are you all not spending that uh that's focused on our capital program and that's how we're covering major facility expenses associated with the club okay and then you say the organization is all volunteer but the yach club has like $1.2 million
in salaries is this a separate you separating this out from the correct total yach club correct correct because uh most of the professional salaries are for our our house operations and our professional club management uh and we do have a sailing director who's employed but he does not and he's not part of the specific yaching program so when it comes to race planning race management that's volunteer-driven okay that's it for me now all right thank you any other comments questions tish i do i do have a question the $180,000 request is just to have future events but
you don't have any specific event that you already have on the books or coming up or planning no this this this whole budget was driven by eight events of many that we'll be hosting in the county's physical 26 so uh should be in the application but we actually develop costs around those specific eight events okay and then uh i seen that you have like uh your current year budget you show like a $51,935 in event expenses how much of that event expense is like loss of event space uh that would
be roughly 30% of that okay thank you you're welcome thank you just one question the uh the eight events that you're mentioning are those new events for the upcoming year uh there's two uh existing events that we're looking to grow and the rest are net new outstanding thank you you're welcome and just just to add all of our events if you notice in our schedule they are typically going to be in the shoulder seasons from a tourist perspective our peak season for sailing is october november as well as march and april so that's really where we try to fill our calendar
um can i please yeah i think this is an event that we should con or this is an expenditure that we should consider strongly to fund because with the america magic here we've have we kind of challenged the yacht club to go out and host more sailing events well they're doing that at eight events that $180,000 and i i just think it's it would be a wise investment to support them i would agree especially in the off season that's what we're looking for is more tourism in
the offseason so thank you we don't we don't call it offseason anymore we're trying to we call it a shoulder season but trying to bring the tourists not tell them we're closed um i would agree i think especially that we saw how much excitement there was around foil foiling week last week uh last year i guess a few months ago uh and you know obviously we're not moving forward with that project right now uh and there will be other regatas that american magic says they will be bringing to us uh i think this is a great opportunity just to continue to expand that
program uh and bring these people in because generally they stay longer and spend more per visit that's a high impact mr chairman i just wanted to mention that one question i asked you it was because you're just a segmented part of the big yach club that we're talking about so that's was my question so that's why you didn't include that that's fine um and i appreciate all your answers you're very well prepared which i'd hope for um and i definitely support this especially hearing from american magic and the fact that you are going to work together i think that's critical very much and one story i'd like to tell just to end all this is you talk about a butterfly
flapping its wings and a hurricane forming so in 2018 we held a youth riata and we invited american magic here to be part of the kickoff presentation uh and that really is what uh one of the ways they found uh their way to this wonderful place for sailing so this is a child's sale flapping brought about american magic and everything great coming with it and i read that in there too and i thought well they're they're claiming all the responsibility for bringing american magic here which maybe it was you know i mean i like to think that our mayor and other people in this community
helped them stay but they needed an introduction so we provided the spark that's great thank you we gave them one and a half million dollars up here that helped incentivize triumph gave them eight and a half million gave the city eight and a half million to build a home for him so that did help it helped any other comment so are we at recommendation of the the full request of 180,000 all right anybody have any concerns no sounds good thank you very much thank you
well we knew i don't know who he was but you should ask who the regata chair was all right next item is wf historic preservation the trust we had the chairman here a little while ago but i guess he couldn't make it he's like a squirrel he saw something else shiny rob overton executive director of the trust welcome all right uh any comments or questions council the request is
an increase to 265,000 from 250 rob i got a question why are you taxed with maintaining the cemeteries because the county border county commissioners told me to about five six years ago they when they were unifying visit pensacola ace and pensacola sports budget they unified the cemeteries that were funded separately under us so we don't maintain them we just reimburse the cemeteries much like visit does with the other entities who owns those cemeteries uh they are
owned u city owned some one st michael cemetery is a state park they do get some state park funding a couple of them are owned by just i don't know if they i'm not sure who owns those things but who are the different the $15,000 increase is not for the historic trust and the museums it's increase for the cemeteries and that's because basically it's the maintenance of those has gone up is is there a reason why the city won't maintain it you don't know used to ask
do you know any of the city council members i can ask don't know any uh the city has u we they have received the cemeteries have received some funds from the city and the city has also helped with the cemeteries with sending out some of the city crews after hurricanes for some of the larger so the city has been a partner in that is just not giving us the funding to pass through they've done it in kind support mr chairman yes sir um so is that the $2,400 from the city is that what they give uh that
comes to our organization just to help us support the historic trust they don't have i don't have money in our budget from the city for the cemeteries the city has helped other through other departments i think through the tree fund they've given they paid for trees and things like that what about grants do you all apply for grants do you get grants we do grants uh we have uh we've done we do quite a lot of grants we get grants from the state we've also last year we're in the process of spending an impact 100 grant for our children's museum okay uh we have gotten other grants from the humanities council those were cut back a little bit and then
um we've gotten some other private grants so last they vary this year we've budgeted to receive about $70,000 in grants okay last year we got a little over a million dollars in grants okay i know we're looking just like a small portion because even when you look at like the top five employees that doesn't reflect in your budget because that's some of them i guess wf uh funded positions we little unique we're direct we are a nonprofit that manage has a contract to manage properties for the university the university provides staffing for the nonprofit
so they're paid out of the university's budget gotcha okay all right thank you any other comments or questions i'd support the full amount me too all right so there's a recommendation for the full 265,000 any any other amounts no all right thank you thank you all right so we'll put in 265,000 all right so that gets us through that first section uh then down to the next
section of the unified budget um ace but i do not see anyone here from ace um so so that that top part was 642,000 uh no 709 did i just do something wrong what did i miss 709500 i don't know what i did missed something so we knocked out one point i we just knocked out 1.4 million which is more than we had to knock out
so the unified budget uh the three organizations just because we have a lot of new members um the county commission asked those three agencies to work together uh they had all separate appropriations years ago and they asked to go together to unify that's why they called unified budget uh and there is anou among the three organizations on how they split up whatever appropriation goes to the unified budget i believe now they might have separate appropriations ations again because of the dmo um designations uh but it's i can't remember the exact percentage but
it's like 74 and a quarter or something goes to visit pensacola yep that's correct darren welcome so um yeah 74.25% for uh visit pensacola pensacola sports is now 11 11 um and 14.75 for race yep and so now pensacola sports has been separated out um and is handling its own accounting and
submissions but ace is still underneath the umbrella of visit pensacola as far as that appropriation so we have two separate agreements and then we have a sub agreement with ace any comments questions about any of the unified budget organizations or their requests so we seem to have the money because we cut 1.4
4 million out of those other requests and we only needed to cut 1.3 whatever 1 million 362 so is that a recommendation so shirley's recommending fund fully fund the request is there any comments concerns hearing none we'll put those in as the placeholders great thank you all right thank you
council members just to reiterate or bring back to your attention what you said earlier you know this was going to be set aside more or less as a reserve for for some of these other agencies to come back possibly um has that it sounds like that may have changed i don't think so so the i think what stephan is saying is when we zeroed out some of these and we said we can come back to them those funds will have to come out of
this amount that we've appropriated this year do you have the amount of the special event uh reserve fund to see what's actually in there that could be appropriated in the year do we need to appropriate the remaining amount as a placeholder yeah actually so we don't have that much i mean current special event i just some something told me y'all would ask for that so i i had it ready
um this fully we are just under 1.7 million in special event dollars um okay so correct that is the current reserve for special event are we going to have any more do you anticipate at the end of the fiscal year the unspent money the way we had it structured will that get funded so that will be your base um and then it'll go from there so if there's any additional dollars it'll be added
to it um so that's how i treat these financially so once these are set those are those are there unless we move something out which is why i ask for clarification you know when when council is um um approving some other event or something during the course of the year okay so we currently have in that reserve fund 1.7 roughly 1.7 roughly it's it's to be specific it's 1,691270 okay so we have funding in our reserve or special event restricted fund to cover those other items that
uh we discussed putting placeholders how much almost 1.7 million that we can allocate to like pensacola martyra or something yep okay is there special events that we could okay we could fund out of that reserve that restricted fund because we only had like 38,000 over this we didn't yeah there's there is a reserve fund that years ago we set up these restricted funds there were no reserve funds uh and we put in funding mechanisms through you probably explain it better it's a it's the council's reserve policy yeah yeah we have a
reserve policy and they're funded through like when there's additional money at the end of the year that's unspent that we brought in maybe above and beyond what was proposed correct it's more or less a reserve and fund balance policy for uh tourist development tax dollars as they roll from year to twoyear yeah so it has accumulated almost 1.7 million 1.69 so it would there's plenty of money in that fund to fund these if we continue to go ahead and fund the unified budget at their request okay all right okay thank you for the clarification yep thank you all right
uh is there any other discussion related to these items i think we've gone through every item every line item mr chairman there is one uh one application that's not on your line items it was a santa rosa island authority for beach renourishment that was included in your backups you can find it on pdf page 538 yeah phil we so we did that in a previous meeting where we've already approved those those funds so thank you so the and we have on this spreadsheet hundred,000 and $1 million
for beach reourishment half a million is our normal annual allocation we've done and the additional half a million is to pay down their loan from the county so thank you for bringing that up i appreciate it all right so uh let me save this before i forget uh and i'll get this what we've and if you weren't writing it down i've got it i can send it to y'all uh so any other comments questions about that all right so we can't take any formal action
at this meeting but this is a recommendation to the the our to us at the next meeting to the tdc which is soon which is in just a moment all right um well with that the only other item is closing remarks do you want to do that now or do you want to reserve those to the end of the tdc meeting next meeting all right well then uh with that we'll call this meeting adjourned uh and we'll reconvene for our regular meeting and give us five minutes five minutes thanks
they came back all right y'all ready we still missing information i guess she'll come back when i call up the order
all right she'll come back i guess good afternoon uh welcome to the escambia county tourist development council meeting not to be confused with our previous meeting which was the budget workshop uh this is a regular meeting uh it is june 17th it is approximately 4:46 pm uh phillip if you would please uh was the meeting properly advertised the meeting was properly advertised again on uh the 12th of june great thank you and if you would please call the role matish patel james reeves here ashley hoffber here
shirley cronley here david bear here brad mullenex here charles bayer here jennifer breer here and jason nicholson here great thank you we do have quorum uh so this meeting is officially called to order this time we will uh do public forum i do have a lot of uh signups for public forum so please limit your comments to three minutes uh because of time um we do have first uh dion dunn
and if you would please when you get to the microphone introduce yourself uh and say i don't care if you told me where you live go ahead my name is dion dunn i live on pensacola beach i'm a uh native to pensacola born and raised here um and i'm coming to you to ask you to not fund the project for the gateway project to the demolish the toll booth we don't feel like those funds
are appropriately used there we'd like to see the money put somewhere else if at anywhere but not there the um toll booth is fine it's existing it's not going to really improve the traffic the traffic issue on the beach is from lack of parking it's from 20 plus thousand people coming here on a regular basis so unless you're going to increase the roads put more parking there's no need to
um none of that's going to help the traffic so the toll booth is there the transponders are there the uh plate readers are there just remodel it if you want to minimize the toll um increase the flow of traffic so they can hurry up and get to the red light and stop that's fine but um i think the money would be better spent maybe going back to the bathrooms the way they were supposed to be originally and that would improve um the experience for our visitors who
seem to be very important over the residents the residents who come here who call pensacola beach home they like to uh drive and park at the casino beach parking lot i did that when i was a kid use the bathrooms and that could be um funded there but my whole point is please do not fund this gateway project and do not put that sign over the road thank you just for clarification there were never bathrooms they were changing rooms without plumbing or any other utilities ashley yes ma'am
are you referring to the bathrooms at casino beach i'm referring to the $250 we reallocated from the changing stations not from the restrooms are we referring to two different things we may be okay um are the changing rooms at casino beach no they're not because we did not move forward with the construction the changing rooms we did not move forward with the construction on those okay but the al the money you were going to put to that has now been for the changing rooms not for the bathrooms there were never any bathrooms thank you for that i appreciate that yes ma'am
regardless wherever the money is coming from i don't think it needs to go to the gateway project as it is has been presented in its current state thank you thank you dylan uh and i do apologize uh i just i noticed that you'd signed up to speak to the agenda item not just public forum so you're okay okay thank you all right uh i just excuse me i just wanted to be on record that there are me along with many others are not about this gateway project okay thank you all right but the
folks who have signed up the other speakers who have signed up just for public forum kevin wade kevin wade 43 southeast bobblets uh just trying to get to the point uh i'm hoping that commissioner hoffberger will be able to bring back back the changing rooms like that uh and
with whatever happens with the gateway project i hope that she can bring that back or all of you can bring it back um i have a little video that i'd like to show if dave can roll this um of business is under other business public facilities um funding requests commissioner bender um i think everybody has a packet in front of them
and commissioner bender would like to present it thank you commissioner thank you mr chairman um this is something that i've had our facilities working on and um looking to move forward in a design build um project but uh one of the things that i've i felt was lacking on pensacola beach was the the ability for um a uh a beach facility uh for for changing rooms um and so oftent times the bathrooms under the the public safety building they get wet hot damp muggy
uh but there also bathrooms that people go in to try to change and so to have a a separate building immediately in front of the bathrooms um adjacent to the showers that are currently there so someone could shower off walk up the ramps to the women's or the men's side and um and and change there would also be family changing rooms on each side so that if a mom has you know two or three kids um they could all go in there or the dad has the kids uh we could do that all right any other we have a motion on the floor and a second is there any further discussion
seeing none we'll call for the vote uh since we're voting to spend money why don't we do a roll call jeff beos yes james reeves yes mary hawking yes shirley cronley yes david bayer yes ronald rivera yes matish patel yes tenade broton broton yes casey jones yes all right thank you board thank you
and thank you for that um then there was a bit of the middle that was definitely missing from that um as there are in the conversations all the time here and i i love the beach i thank you all for what you're doing and the wishes of the people from the beach um just astoundingly wonderful people all the time all the time and i would love to see the the changing rooms come um that's one
of those little amenities that isn't going to have residual dollars you're not going to be fun like uh the the funding sources that it's going to be bringing are going to be the kind that will return in people's mind year after year after year after year of just a tiny little thing that was an amenity that the beach was able to go ahead and provide and that the tourism dollars were able
to go ahead and provide and um that like bring it on um yeah and i i hope that i hope that this can come back to that thank you i don't know how to stop it sorry i don't know how to stop it thank you kevin how do you know you're next do you need to take that nope that was my timer i have to set the timer thank you chairman bear michelle pino thank you and we are here to respectfully
um request that commissioner hoffsteader now that she's had some time i'm sorry hoffber sorry about that that was an honest error i'm tired you guys did not win the um paint drying contest this week because of trump's birthday but i i mean fiscal responsibility is not sexy right um but you guys did it and it's really really important i mean we were right down to the difference of $4,000 on one of those projects correct um and so i hope that with a little passage of
time it will become evident that what is going to balloon into a 10 million plus um project on that sign and i'll get to that argument on that actual item what got killed was a $750,000 changing station that many of you just saw you voted for um mr reeves i'm sure you already had gotten to all of this and maybe you were going to bring it up so if you were i'm sorry for stealing your thunder because i know you're a hawk on on um tracing things that
you voted for and what your money was for so i'm not here to be combative i'm here to ask um that there's a change of heart on this because there was no really good reason given for why these needed to this scant amount of money needed to be taken from a fully formed project and um commissioner bender what's missing in the two clips you know there was a discussion in the middle and commissioner bender and burggosh had a discussion about that 750,000 came distinctly
out of the bcc's um money that they give towards tdt projects and jeff was saying well you know you better hold some back because i want some bathrooms on purito key and robert said yeah this is some contingency so his project was actually only 560,000 they voted for 750,000 for whatever reason straight out of the gate commissioner hoff berger um canceled the project and even before she was actually sworn in as elected molly barrows makes it clear on the sheet
that i've presented to y'all that that project was stopped in october and then commissioner hofberger wins the election november 5th straight out of the gate two nights later um no november 7th um board meeting packed into a budget uh the the consent agenda it was just voted for on mass and even in the backup it doesn't specifically say that it's going for the the gateway it just says "well we're going to cancel this contract for the changing rooms and it's going to another project."
um i don't believe although i could have missed it that it ever came back to the tdc to get your input on shifting these funds but to be clear this was a recommendation that the tdc voted for unanimously to recommend to the bcc on this project and uh many of you who were up there actually voted for it so i hope maybe we can have a return of it thank you thank you all right that's our final speaker on during public forum
um that has signed up so next item on the agenda is review and approval of the uh meeting minutes we have two set of minutes to approve uh the april 15th meeting minutes of our regular meeting and the may 20th budget workshop meeting uh that we started and stopped uh but we have minutes from those uh do you want to take them individually or is there a motion mr chairman i move the approval of both sets of minutes april 15th and may
20th i'll second it so we have a motion and a second is there any debate or discussion any additions or changes any objections hearing no objections please show those adopted all right uh next item was status of funds available does anyone need to hear jeremy say it again great moving on thank you all right uh next item is action item um approval of
proposed annual budget uh so we just went through a long meeting a great discussion uh and philip printed out a copy of the uh recommendations that we just went through uh please look over those and make sure i didn't make any mistakes mr chairman i move the approval of the proposed budget all right i'll second it we have a motion and we have a second is there any uh discussion
hearing no discussion philip if you would please call the role since this is appropriation matish patel here yes or no yes on the motion that was not the question james reeves ashley hoffber yes shirley cronley yes david bear yes brad mullenex yes charles bayer
yes jennifer breer yes jason nicholson yes all right motion carries thank you so much uh seven how many people we have nine people nine to zero thank you uh next item is approval to roll over the remaining 2024 appropriations into the 2025 year for both visit pensacola and ace uh stephan do you want to come up and uh discuss that so last year we made the appropriation uh some of
the funds for each of the organization uh were not spent in that fiscal year uh and they're asking to roll them over into this current fiscal year some of them uh were spent but maybe not reimbursed by the clerk's office some of them uh like ace uses for theirs those are fufu fest funds who which actually doesn't happen until the next fiscal year but it's appropriated in the previous fiscal year so they there was never in the appropriation agreement they received this year the rollover
of those funds and so they're uh the county has encumbered them for those appropriations and is just asking for this formal process david you sum some summized that pretty well um so the accounting process so these are not new accounting rules these are the existing accounting rules that are current now being applied um uh the clerk's office is uh has sent out basically um today and uh and the acrruel process year- end acrruel um and what things should should be acrruled based on
uh the the accounting uh treatment of this um that has been shared uh with visit pensacola and and ace and various partners i don't know if you were copied on that email chairman but if not i will make sure that that you get it um re uh tourist development tax reimbursement process is currently being worked on um and we should u have that process uh out soon um in my conversations with the clerk's office so so those things are moving forward um so for for for
the i'm sorry did they give you any uh any idea of an anticipated date that we could have that process completed and ready to go i feel like it will be within the next month and that may be maybe maybe even sooner okay just there's some staff people out right now so when they get back um they're going to get together and go back over it and then they're also going to meet with me and we're going to go over it together as well great thank you um so again so for for ace
and visa pensacola so with with those accounting treatments uh certain things uh became ineligible um through through prepayments and things of that nature so um these activities have to have a deliverable they have to have occurred and the uh if let's say if it's a tv ad the tv ad should have ran prior to september 30th you know if it's a a magazine article it it should have ran ran before september 30th of each fiscal year so due to those accounting changes those things that hap that may
have been prepaid for 24 but ultimately happened in 25 those were recorded in 25 so the balances um that i believe has been shared with council those are the current balances of the pos um for fiscal year 24 that we will be reappropriating into fiscal year 2025 all right any comments or questions the approval second so we have a motion a second is there any
further debate or discussion those are already approved by the clerk to be paid or we don't know so the clerk is basically finished with 2024 um so the again these are the balances ace has not is purchase order has not technically been closed yet but the but the 2024 visit pensacola purchase order has been closed and the 1.4 million roughly is the balance so would visit pensacola get their funds if aces is not closed or how does that work so
we are in the process of closing uh aces i think there's still a few more questions um for for ace but the funds have been approved by us and the county commission for last year's appropriation agreement just haven't gotten them approved for reimbursement or i guess final approval of the the expenditures yet they're in the process correct and if this makes it easier for council so upon
closing of the fiscal year 24 po4 ace whatever that balance is the council could recommend u bringing that forward yep yep so the amount that you sent in the email that was shared with every it should be pretty close to that i don't have it in front of me so we need to put that in the motion what the numbers are um i would say the b you could just say the balances of those fiscal year 24 purchase orders okay is that an amended amended motion do
you amend your second to uh i'm with them okay so the motion uh to roll over the remaining balances from 24 into 25's fiscal year all right any other debate or discussion hearing none we call for the vote if you would please call the role matish patel yes james reeves yes ashley hoffber yes shirley cronley yes david bear yes brad mullenex yes charles bear yes jennifer breer yes jason
nicholson yes 90 thank you motion carries thank you everybody all right uh other business um pensacola beach gateway project um i put this on our agenda there seems to be a lot of noise around this project yes right now and i we do have a couple of people that signed up to speak do you want to hear the public speakers before we discuss we can i have a narrative and some background that might answer a few questions can i give that first sure okay wonderful um so i want to take a moment
to share the story behind the gateway project and explain how we got to where we are after um yes and and be responsible and transparent back in january of 2025 i met with debbie bowers and requested a solicitation to remove the old toll plaza and build a decorative arch to house the tolling equipment that solicitation was issued as requested but when the contract was negotiated i was surprised to find out the scope had significantly been reduced from what i had originally asked for the first time i was made aware of these changes was the kickoff meeting
on april 1st i was then told that we could do a change order and bring the project back in line with both my original request and the solicitation that went out then on april 25th just days before the may 1st board meeting i was told that we could not move forward with the change order due to legal concerns at that point i was confused the project had been downsized the staff was recommending unnecessary layers of contracts and contractors and the process itself felt very convoluted so my office submitted a public records request for internal communications related to the
gateway project the documents received back were minimal here's what most people don't realize during the blackout period in procurement commissioners are not allowed to communicate with the vendors the selection committee or anyone involved with it in the purchasing department that means we have no role in negotiating contracts as handled entirely by our staff under the direction of our county administrator our only job is to vote yes or no on what is brought in front of us in the meantime we learned that the design submitted by the selected contractor was not
original it appeared to be copied from a private website i asked wes our county administrator how he planned to hold the employee managing the project accountable for the reduced scope and what the repercussions were for the firm that submitted the non-original design work i was told he was going to oversee the project going forward on april 30th a second solicitation went out this one specifically for the design of the decorative arch you can view all of this online then as i was reviewing the agenda for the june 20th meeting i saw that the county staff had negotiated negotiated a $1.1 million contract just for the pretty part the design of the decorative
arch itself even more confusion on july 13th our county administrator called my aid melanie luna and suggested we move forward with just the gantry and a message board and delay hiring a professional design firm for the decorative arch even though the whole purpose of the second solicitation was to hire a design firm melly and i were both left wondering if the chosen firm isn't a true design firm how did they win the bid in the first place from the beginning of this project i requested a design and build approach one firm handling everything because it is more
cost-effective and faster instead we have ended up with a drawn out process that has now ballooned into a $7.5 million project so that is the backgrounds on the gateway project we are working diligently to get this in line where it needs to be we are meeting with county staff it's really hard to do when i don't get to negotiate that i do still believe in the project because the entryway to pensacola beach looks like the entryway to our third world country it's barricaded up the
tolling equipment in there no longer works we found that out when someone hit the toll booth last year and it says in all caps please keep driving forward so i don't think that's what we all want for the entry to our economic driver but i also agree we need to be fiscally responsible and not spend this much money on an arch so the question is how do we marry those two up i don't have an answer for that because i don't get to negotiate that but we are working with county staff on that okay there's the background so happy to answer questions going forward
so we do have a couple of speakers um kevin wade please limit your comments to three minutes again kevin wade 43 southeast bobblets um dave got a
couple of pictures i want to put up i not want that um the sorry the the the the entrance to the beach looking like a third world nation um it looks
like many of the spots when you're driving through eggland or many other military base you're correct military bases where yes it does you need to stop or get checked in one way or another and you know the the gantry i didn't i didn't learn that word until moments ago um but quick quick quick jump on the internet and you find that there are some of these gantries that are very sleek and unobtrusive and uh some municipalities say great we're not going to olude uh your view of
the sky when you're driving to our place and this is a toll booth um this is an automatic toll system just like uh what we have right now but it's very you know trendy i guess um i i don't know if people have been paying attention to social media but the the options of designs
have been widely panned in thousands of posts on facebook and threads and twitter and um yeah um shifting the money around seems kind of funky yes it did get noticed in some way but glossed over quickly um you know there's a lot of like keep it sleek
find a way to make it sleek the the you already have the the the iconic sign that that points the way to the beach you know leave that icon it's it's a very nice icon we you got the beach ball you got the dolphin on the tank thank you i do appreciate you bringing up the gantry sign as well so if we move forward with just the gantry we are at $5,370,000
so that is the amount that has came back from the contracts that we currently have out so thank you for bringing that up so people had a visual i appreciate that our next public speaker melissa pino melissa pino 413 southeast bobblets kevin and i have been fighting for beach stuff starting with fighting to kill the roundabout out there which the hotel years should all be thanking us for now that they see um the disaster that a poorly designed
roundabout that was born of special interest could have interjected to the intersection of via duna and fort pickins and i started off by fighting that roundabout by running traffic stats on just one entry of the via duna from any given saturday and had to um vulkar had to admit that um the stats were right and it was going to fail uh but if they the county wanted an emergency backup plan they'd be happy to make one of those for a few more $100,000 we've been fighting bad
projects for a long time and we are here to be polite and respectful i was that wasn't a shaming exercise on the changing rooms we want them back we advocated for that this board voted for them um gantries run about $75,000 on the simplest um gantry that kevin showed um with installation one gantry arm with not even two could um easily take care of one side of the beach might want to
consider putting it up on the other side installation all in 250 maybe 300 design firm and then i can you stop my chair chair bear could you stop my time so she i i don't want to keep talking over her go ahead go ahead do well do you prefer to interact or do you want me to answer your question i i'd be happy interacting as long as as you're okay with that sure absolutely so i do have the numbers for the gantry design and the cost that jacob's provided do you want me to share those with you um my answer would be that that's a single company that has been um they they've been
hired to do the entire project from design all the way through and so they've coughed up some numbers on a gantry but i'm talking about the bare the the m the the actual material cost of a single arm gantry that goes over one side of the beach runs about 75k so the construction cost that they estimated for our wind loads and what we need here on the beach was $2 million for the construction cost and unfortunately and i did not know this until this project we don't get to go with the
lowest priced contractor when it's a professional service such as engineering or electrical we actually have to go for the most qualified so it doesn't matter if they're twice the price as the second or third ranking person when it comes to the gantry the only qualification is that it can hold up to the wind mitt standards um from dot the the you know the state windmitt standards and that it will not come down in a tropical storm or hopefully a cat one or two hurricane um and it's nice that we got that bid from them but that's why you put a bid out um with a more
well-defined project and respectfully this thing has been jumping all around um i i blaming county staff and administration for it is only going to go so far but okay you put out a narrative of why this thing has gotten so convoluted it is convoluted to the point that it needs to completely go back to the drawing board and then probably the very good answer is don't draw it how about fixing parking out on the beach and if you want to be a monumental commissioner fix
what the ones that came before you didn't don't you don't have to answer to special interest is trying to to force a campaign promise that timeline that i put out commissioner hofberger you were a brand new commissioner on a governor appointee ship when you can't that that the work stopped on that project and then rammed through the cancellation of the contract on the changing rooms and sort of alluded to the money going to this project two days after you were elected
that's a that's a lot for somebody i study and i do my homework i will also say as the mom of a four-year-old i feel like those changing stations are very unsafe and it is not somewhere i would want to take my daughter in it's just not safe if you look at the statistics and you talk to law enforcement what people refer to them as i am not going to repeat on this das one of the things that i absolutely adore about how well the city keeps up their facilities is that when you go into one of their facilities they're lit they have toilet paper they have um amenities there are places to
change in many of them so again there's i'm well aware that there can be a answer made for for any of this but it's funny because it's a deja vu all over again because other than the hot lane that commissioner bender got and then fighting off the reiterative demands that the stupid roundabout go in which thank god he did nothing has changed out there and there's never been any reason why it kill it kill it and fix parking and make graded parking and charge for it and make twice of
what you could make on a toll you can leave some free paid lots everybody knows that the the sria building is completely blowing space with about 10 employees you know all of the solutions because they've been the same are you aware that we do have a solicitation out for a traffic management plan that is not a roundabout with the idea of putting a parking structure in casino beach parking lot i was not because i didn't know that the original congestion management plan that was passed under commissioner bender with i believe david forte's assistance did that is that
has that been cancelled that was the roundabout no the congestion management plan went in after the roundabout that included the hot lane and some some other suggestions so you know you could make the lane on the way back there are all kinds of things that could happen but you need to listen to your constituents you you really be careful what you wish for be careful what you wish for and many of the people who live out on the and i agree the and just to give some background on the renderings that went out for people to vote on the initial design that we all really liked that ended
up being borrowed the bones of that was good the designs that went out for people to vote on was more how do we dress that design so we wanted the community feedback and i was excited that we got almost 4,000 people to vote on that and the idea was that we would take that feedback and provide it to the design firm so they could take the bones of the borrowed design and dress it with something that the community had put input in i was asked several times why we didn't do a town hall and it was exactly for that reason we had over 4,000 people who voted and were heard you
don't get that at a town hall i would have had to do at least 50 of them to make that happen it was a push poll with no ability to say no sign so there were people who did comment on that and we did read through those but several or i would say the majority and you can do a public records request most of them um just voted for one or the other well look like i said you're a um you're a formidable adversary and that you have very quick answers for everything and i was expecting all of that and i honestly think that you and i could go back and forth for three
hours and you could provide spin and i could answer it but that's not going to be helpful i'm just asking that you really consider bringing the changing rooms back and just sending this thing to the trash heap and starting over at zero because it's apparent to people that this thing happened way too quickly and what the provenence of it probably was thank you thank you melissa any other comments from just one yes ma'am um just because i don't i think it was impossible for all
of us not to be watching this on social media if you're on there at all and there were some really interesting designs that people were putting out there is there any way to do something where there could actually be a competition for the sign like the city did at the entrance at the bottom of the um you know so that then it is the people's and instead of ours we were told that there were design restrictions on why we could or could not do that and that with it being needed to
be hurricane rated that was a risky move so we chose not to do that there are options and again we're trying to figure out how to slim this down to downsize it and just move forward with the gantry for now because believe it or not it the current toll plaza does cause traffic problems if you sit out there and watch you can see it so it is a traffic issue additionally $1.5 million of building this gantry is also to run fiber to the gantry so we have consistent tolling and the ability to do that and fiber to that red light because when
that red light goes offline there's a guy in a room that controls it and that happens more often than we would like for it to so we would like to have the fiber ran so that it is more than just a toll plaza but to answer your question yes right now we are looking at is is there a way to phase it and is that the best way to move forward so we're trying to figure all of that out thank you yes ma'am thank you any other questions or comments from anyone else um so i do have a couple questions and comments um david can you put that the presentation back up
uh turn to the page it talks shows the cost i think it's like page 10 maybe uh that one yep so question um we talked about you mentioned it i think you said $7 million but this is showing for roadways 2 million landscape lighting 800 to2 million gateway
3.5 million so that's a total of between 6.3 and 7.5 million and then in another column we've got a $ 1.6 million estimated design cost so that's over 9 million possibly up over $9 million for this i understand you're saying you don't like this cost you've sent it back we're going to do a gantry to start and downside this project i looked on your uh your agenda for friday's emer meeting um it has a contract for jacobs for $6 million with a clause in there that says "oh but it might change up or
down." so change orders always cost more they always cost extraordinarily more than was ever allocated or budgeted this is significant amount of money um and and so this is just one issue i wanted to address i think this is significant amount of money i i don't think anybody uh that i've ever heard say "we don't need to get rid of those buildings that are there they're in the way they're they're bottlenecking traffic they're ugly looks like a war zone." uh i think i don't want to
conflate the two different issues one is those things need to go and i know there's certainly a cost uh and i think everybody agrees to that uh the other is what we're going to put up there and at what cost i from what i've seen on social media and the news obviously uh some people don't a lot of people don't like the design i know you did the the survey with the other three options one of the things that really surprised me was to find out that this was inis freey's design and uh what and all due respect we have an ns-free employee on this board uh a senior member of that
organization and that was never even brought up at our meeting um that this was an ns-free logo or i guess intellectual property uh i you know i think it's a beautiful design i don't know that that's what i want to see at the entrance but that's my personal opinion but i heard it from a lot of people uh that they don't want to see something like that obviously you can't use that you put out three other designs i've also seen a whole lot of other designs um on social media that were proposed personally i like better because they use some of the
iconic symbols that we already have we have this the sailfish in gulf breeze a lot of them use some of them i saw use that same font some of them use the font that's on the beach ball um that we have at the beach and so concern is the design uh obviously i understand there's engineering concerns about wind load and what somebody might design right obviously somebody's talking about designing something uh artistic and then the engineers take that artistic uh design
and figure out how to engineer it if it'll work um so i think there's still an option for that i mean even the w blue wahoos came out with the a design like a a um contest to see who could name them and you know it's and their logo etc i think these are just i think this is important for our community this is going to be like a legacy sort of thing for pensacola beach and i think everybody in the community obviously you can't make everybody happy but majority of people should be in support of it
not opposed to it and i think there's a lot and i'll own that the messaging around the ones that were put out there for people to vote on i did not do a good job messaging that we're looking for a theme um so i could have done a much better job about messaging the feedback that we were we were actually looking for we just wanted feedback and a theme to provide to a professional design company to give us what you're looking at here minus it not being afree logo which in industries defense it's actually pensacola beach.com and doesn't mention industry on there at all um so
just to clarify that but nonetheless a borrowed logo with a company we are still moving forward with mr chairman just one thing um well a couple things actually um yeah you as you pointed out uh i do work for industry hotels i'm the senior vice president of development asset management prior to that i ran the operations division for about 28 years i was actually on the team that developed that logo and i'm very proud of it uh it was developed for pensacola beach.com and and it came quite as a surprise to us that the agency that was hired to create this that logo
that you're looking at on your screens is the logo for pensacola beach.com um it i i have to say it was also flattering that the agency picked up on something like that and wanted to replicate it uh i'd be happy to license that to escambia county for free uh it's still a pretty classy logo you can't argue that um and it's gotten us a lot of traction on the website but that is that is quite frankly the genesis of it uh there was no collusion whatsoever and internally when we saw this we were we were pretty flattered yeah that that's an awesome entrance i'd prefer to say
budweiser no we we laughed internally we thought you might be part is there room for beer logos on hey good work good work you can't argue i i agree and the beach people actually really liked that one so and again the idea behind the three that were released was give us a theme let us give that to jacobs let them dress this arch with that theme and give us a professional rendering um but i cannot move forward with it at this price we do need to do something so the question is what
do we need to do i have my weekly meeting with our county administrator on wednesday so nothing on the agenda is going to change until i have a meeting with him he could have some great ideas um and then i know i have ideas so we have to figure out what those look like so the board meeting agenda item is just going to move forward until you have your meeting tomorrow with the administrator and maybe it'll change yes and i also want to have some discussion around this with the other county commissioners because i know that they've received emails as well i've probably received about 300 and i would say a third of those had other commissioners copied in
on it and rightfully so it is a big decision um so i don't know if it'll be removed entirely or moved to a discussion item okay just for kind of interest here is um council members in a different municipal organization got got messaged on this as well asking us to be mindful about this so it is a big deal i think to all of us um you know i i think all of us own the beach as our own in our
own way this is our our town our beach all that kind of stuff and we do want it to be represented and i mean if there's any way i'm looking at this one right here if there's any way there could be a design that's somehow mitigated up on that where there's a competition and it's the people's i think that that really should be considered i i do believe that you know we did it on here i think we've done it in a number of places around you said the wahoo someone did and i think that is a legitimate um idea so that you get the buyin you're looking for charles mr chairman um what is
of this total amount what is the amount that's tdc or tdt money so the original money that we budgeted for was the $7 million because it was between 6.3 and 7 and a half so we went right in the middle with seven we were expecting a million and a half from the state which we found out on friday was not approved in their budget so that is also a reason to divide it into two pieces um and then we asked tdt for $2.5 million and that's what was approved what we voted on in april right and i voted for that um you know i i guess i i want the toll boost to go away i i know that i see people
slow down there when there's tons of traffic you know they're going to have to slow down there anyway but it does slow people down it's a pinch point there and i think that definitely needs to go i think there needs there absolutely has to be a way to do sunpass um so you've got to have some type of gantry or or whatever it is up there um but i also i get distracted by the sewage tanks that's the stupidest place to put them i think it may be the only place we could put them but that's never going to change you can paint them they're still sewage tanks um and i think that's going to
affect whatever we do there i just would like to see the something that's windres you know that's as best we can do something that it doesn't have to be very decorative to me it just has to get the job done and be you know aerodynamic so when winds blow hard that doesn't get blown down that's my concern i also have a lot of interest in changing rooms you know as someone who had young kids not now but um you know i think those are important as well and i i i hope these aren't mutually exclu
ex exclusive that we can look at doing something like that i know some people don't feel the same way about them but i think when you look at what tourist dollars do um you know there's a number of things we spend them on but i think making sure that tourists have a good experience at our beach and i think changing rooms is one of those things i don't think this particular sign is going to greatly improve a tourist's visit to pensacola um i love going through the the overhead gantry at disney world it's like i've arrived at disney world but this is not disney world okay
and what awaits me i know is sand some place to shop places to eat but the sand is a big concern too and if i have young kids i want a place to maybe be able to change you know um so i i think that's important as well so i'm hopeful that we haven't completely given up on those um and i'm also really concerned about the cost um but again you know i'm a city councilman i live in the city i don't live at the beach uh i'm going to defer to what the beach residents think quite often and what the commissioner who is um you know representing them but i i do think the cost has
kind of gotten out of control and the fact that we didn't get the state money too is is unfortunate but not unexpected so but i appreciate mr chairman thank you any other comments um i'd like to give a breakdown for just the functional part so if we were just to tear down the toll plaza and put in a gantry just so everyone is aware of the cost on that um to tear down the toll plaza that demo is $70,000 the gantry design which we've already paid for is $600,000 the gantry construction is
$2 million the tolling equipment to go into the gantry itself is $1.2 million and then the roadway fiber install including running it to the red light is $1.5 million what was that total i wouldn't that is 5,370,000 okay and that's with no no frills no thrills just we can probably paint it blue okay well any other comments thank you commissioner appreciate the
update on all of that stuff and and the dialogue um all right uh next because that's not an action item so the next item is just closing remarks we'll start with you tish yes i'm sorry we're it's comment section's closed sorry thank you just want to say thank you to the council members uh i think we're headed in the right direction i like to see the i see the improvement and then the decisions we're making it's in a positive step just want to say thank you to everybody that's
on this council thank you commissioner this was my first budget meeting and i actually really enjoyed it so for everybody that's been on the board for a while jennifer that led that um um and councilman breer or bear i appreciate that um it was really informative for me and i think it was really good prep work going into the county budget season thank you charlie yeah i concur with the comments made um i think we really did a good job on who we were funding for the upcoming year and looking
forward to a good year thank you brad thank you to all the support staff work behind the scenes i know they were really cramped with a lot of pages a lot of documents to process and get it ready for us and appreciate that it was a good meeting thank you charles thank you mr chairman i want to echo that for the staff i know um there's a lot going on with the budget staff uh dealing with multiple issues with five commissioners with the clerk's office with constituents and there's so much and i feel like you're understaffed and uh you know i'm going share that with my my commissioner
who's also a fellow council member u hofberger um is that i really feel like you do a great job but i think you need some support um this was a crazy agenda uh the but not this one the budget workshop just with all the moving parts and with what um council member hofberger just sounds weird to call her that because you know you know she's a commissioner and i know we're in the council so um but with what she said about the portal i think that's going to help i think the biggest thing is
that we need to have a consistent guideline as to what gets submitted in what order you know and and what is the right thing to submit not the first page or 990 which one of you all did out here but um and all the all the parts need to be assembled in a way that it's easy for the budget staff primarily for them i mean we you know we need to be able to review it too but i think the budget staff is the one that has to be the the group looks at it first to make sure it's accurate and i think they we owe it to you to all the people that submit to have a process that's easy to understand
and easy to comply with so um you know i want to thank all those who came out i don't think most of them are here anymore that came out to answer questions um unfortunately some of them didn't show up but i think it's important uh whenever i apply for funds through my organization uh i show up because just in case there's a question there may not be any questions but you know you know i'll have questions i mean it just happens and i appreciate my f fellow council members for for listening to me because i talked a lot today um but i really dug in you know and i just feel like
we need to understand and we need to let people know that um it's important what they submit to us it's not something we just gloss over uh and that the information they submit to us is important to us making our decision and recommending to the county commission so that the county commission understands we've also reviewed it so i think there's multiple steps in this process definitely room for improvement but i think our staff the budget staff here and the council members are doing the best we can thank you thank you councilman bre obviously you have to listen
to the council members we always have something to say but i want to say thanks for that 1,513 pages plus an extra email today and so it was intense and it is you know that order would be fantastic but i'm going to just go back because when i'm reading this last thing here this page right and i read this afterwards and i'm sorry that i'm going back on this but i'm i want to say it is i looked up in the state um i looked up definitions of convention center stadium arena museum aquarium
auditorium coliseum and i am sorry to say but i don't believe nep on nm road for the $25 million fits anywhere in any one of those definitions it it is not an arena by their definition it is not a stadium it's not a convention center it doesn't meet a single condition and i don't know how that works when we have appropriated $25 million to something that does not meet the state standard of where money can be appropriated and i have serious concerns you know i had concerns on another notion
of that and i find it a little humorous that this past week there was an entire piffas presentation locally on the news because we are under lawsuits because these things are dangerous and they they are very dangerous for people so i do have concerns about that i hope on friday when the commission looks at this they think twice um it's a lot of money for a short period of time on something that i actually if you go and read all these definitions absolutely does not fit so thank you for your time thank you councilman jason um i would i would like to thank and appreciate extend
my appreciation to both uh the speakers i know it takes a lot of courage to come up to the dis and share your passion and your thoughts to protect your community and um your quality of life in your community i also want to extend my appreciation uh to my fellow council members for your courage on a budget session like this there were some hard decisions made i think they were in my opinion right for the community and the economy in which we operate um i uh i i you know i'm speaking last so i'm going to say i i do or second to last i i do have a strong opinion about the ball fields i
believe that they're a tremendous demand generator i think that there's there's a segment of sports tourism that we've not yet tapped that could be uh an overwhelming uh success for the community um and i'm i'm anxious to see it happen thank you mr chairman thank you uh thank you council members uh for both of these meetings today i think these were great discussions i think we did great work uh so thank you very much thank you to the folks in the audience for enduring uh the public
speakers and the applicants for the requests uh and the folks doing all the work so thank you and staff uh doing yman's work uh thank you philillip for stepping up and uh stepping in and taking over this role uh and getting these documents available uh and stefan um just so you know the 3% administrative fee doesn't all have to go to the clerk's office it goes for administration and if your costs uh for this project require some of the funding then the county can retain up to but
not to exceed 3% of the tourist development tax for administration of the tourist development tax program thank you chairman i appreciate that thank you he walked all the way up for that uh and one other comment there is an attorney general opinion uh specifically about baseball fields and using tourist development tax uh that was presented um by i think kristen hule to the county commission's meeting previously um so i think it does fit under the attorney general's opinion under the stadiums
um for whatever that's worth um i do too think it's going to drive some tourism but regardless of whether it can or cannot drive tourism it's whether it's eligible for the funding it's about i'm a sports mom y i mean all my kids play sports all the way through that's not a question at all i would have hesitation if they were paying from a young age on those materials and and if we were if there's something that just disintegrate and fall apart in under 10 years 25 million bucks in under
10 years is just to me uh not feasible thank you for your time sure thank you all right uh i have no other comments um we have no other business so with that this meeting is adjourned thank you