Call to order the work session of the Tarpon Springs Board of Commissioners, Thursday, February 5th. It's 12 noon. Roll call please. Mayor Collins here. Vice mayor Eisner here.
Commissioner coleus here. Mr. Donato. Commissioner Banther here. So the purpose. This is a workshop. We're not voting on anything. This is an
opportunity for presentations to be made. And for us as commissioners to have discussion and work through items that will eventually be
voted on downstairs. So our first agenda item tonight is the logo selection. So we have a city manager. Thank you mayor.
Yes, we have Linda mosley and her team here today to present their progress so far and to get some input from the board. Okay. And with that thank you
so much. Appreciate everyone. And forgive me for having my back to a few of you, but I'm Linda mosley. As Charles said this is Katie. This is Katie.
Well she's Katie also. She goes by boat. This is Katie,, this is Catherine. And then we have Mark Mosley. They are three of our staff members. We have 35 people working on this project
back at home. Mark actually went to high school here. So he has had so much fun being in Tarpon Springs and working on this logo. Our company is a destination branding company,
so what we do is destination marketing. So we appreciate the opportunity to work with Tarpon Springs and we love the opportunity. So with that, I'm going to take you through
several things. With the help of our teammates. We did several focus groups and we also took some some tours of the area. We shot a lot of photography. We did a lot of
immersion into the community to look at it from a tourism standpoint and also a local standpoint. We got the youth involved, we got the business community involved. We got a lot of you involved and we're
getting you involved today. So it's going to be a fun process just to kind of see. So Katie, I'm going to let you start talking about the different groups that we did. Okay. And
as you see, we did talk to what we were we consider community stakeholders. And that is anywhere anyone from a business owner to the students at the
high school to agents of certain organizations, civic groups that are in the community, to anyone who really wanted to share their opinion, how about that? And faith
groups, faith based groups. That is a very big part of your community. So it's important to get their take because they also are stewards of the neighborhood and of the
community. So talking to them to talk about what their thoughts were with their current what is Tarpon Springs to them and where is Tarpon Springs going, and what does
Tarpon Springs personify for somebody who may not be from here, who may be just passing through? And I'll brag on Katie a little bit. She was head of domestic marketing for the state of Georgia for a number
of years, and she also has been a point of information officer for Glenn County for a number of years. So she knows Destin Destination marketing inside
and out. Okay. Thank you. You're so welcome, Melissa. I'm fishing a little. There we go. One of the things that we did was what we call a Swot analysis. And y'all are
everybody in this room I'm willing to bet has done a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We do ours just a little bit different. My background in psychology. So I see Charles grinning a little bit up there.
We we really have a lot of fun because if I stand up there and say, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses, opportunities and threats, I'm gonna get the same thing you got a year ago. I'm gonna get the same thing you've got five
years ago. So what we try to do is think outside the box and we ask crazy questions like if. If Tarpon Springs were a party, who would you invite? If Tarpon Springs were a car, what kind of car would that be? Now some
of you are going to say, what on earth, but you get so much information and then we still have the opportunity to talk about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats at the very end of this. So,
Catherine, I'm going to let you talk about some of the information we got from that. Yeah. So some of the key strengths that we saw out of all of the focus groups that we visited were obviously the heritage and history. And just
seeing that the Greek culture and the different cultures are really big part of Tarpon Springs. Step up to the mix. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The heritage and history is a
really big part of Tarpon Springs and also the parks. And we got a lot of feedback on the nature, the walkability of the city, being able to ride your
bikes in the city as well. We also had a lot of the locals mentioned the downtown area and that they really enjoyed the downtown area. Some enjoyed the downtown versus the sponge
docks and then, like I said, walkable and then also the sponge docks as well as a great tourism draw. And you can see these are only the top six. There are a lot of history and
heritage, a lot of strengths that you have obviously here. So these are just the top six of those. So when we're going into the presentation today,
when we went into actually developing this, every one of our designers got copies of these. Every one of our editorial staff, when we're talking about taglines and things, get copies of these. So
we use this going into all phases. Okay. Yeah. And then the next thing we did is just an exercise in describing Tarpon Springs in one word. So we use a cool program called
Mentimeter, which I think we're going to be using today as well. And it lets you put in one word that describes Tarpon Springs. This was you could add multiple words. This was from multiple
different focus groups. And you can see a lot of people chose Greek as their top word to describe it. And then lively, welcoming and diverse were some of the top words. And the
larger the word, the more votes it got. So you can kind of see welcoming, lovely, lively, diverse, eventful. All of those words came up multiple times throughout the process. Okay.
And I'll let you go ahead and do this one. So the next question in our focus groups was how would you describe Tarpon Springs. And this was more than one word. So we got personality, historical nature
and community type words. So inclusive, able to be yourself a lot of unique vibrant. It has charm. It has the small town feel. Somebody even mentioned
it feels like a New England fishing village that's moved to the south. Lots of history. The nature again was mentioned. And then in terms of community,
people felt that it was safe. They're very welcoming and just neighborly people in the community. Positive about
Tarpon Springs. And I will say that this is a very condensed. Graphic for you, but this is going to be the probably the highlights or multiple people
answered with the same thought. You know, that they they want to move here. If I wasn't living here already I would want to move here. Friendly, family friendly, authentic,
authentic is a big deal, I think, because that means it's not. It's it's being real. It's not putting on airs. It's not being something that it's not. And for people to see that in
their town or in their community, a lot of times they just see the what the signage is or what all the plants are and what are they doing at the parks, all the bells and
whistles, but they see the authenticity. And that's a huge thing going for you. Good food, wine, bike, walking, friendly.
Some people did not know about the splash pad. Okay, well now they do and they will. Yeah. And you know that there was more to do here than they kind
of realized when they first were either passing through or when they first moved here, or even having grown up here, they may not have realized how much there was. They didn't feel
that it was overbuilt. There are two shopping districts. Again, did not realize there were two. And some of that is you get so used to going to places you you know, what's the
saying? You can't see the forest for the trees. You're just used to going to a shop. You don't realize you're going to two different places. They appreciate the Greek influence.
So there are a lot of things that a lot of the participants found out. They shared a lot of conversations that were very firm for us to listen to, but
also for the ones participating, for them to be a part of and to share with each other different ideas or different perceptions of the community. And some
definitely see the natural beauty. Others I didn't realize we had as much. But if it's a walkable biking kind of place, it's probably got a lot of
natural beauty. All right, you want to? Okay, this was an interesting one. And I will say, for my own being a participant
and watching and observing, this was the youth focused group. And we were very fortunate for the high school to get us a group of students
that we could find out what their perceptions were and kind of get their ideas of their hometown. And these are what, again, we the percentages that
you'll see those because those were said multiple times, then the ones that don't have a percentage. That's because they were also brought up probably by one person. You will see the
downtown. What is special for you? A lot of the youth said the downtown area that they felt that they could hang out, for example, or cycle a lot of
them. For us, we were like, what is orange cycle? What is orange cycle? I knew there was an orange fitness, but I didn't know. And then it was, oh, because they get to hang out
there. It was very accommodating to the youth to come. SpongeBob, you got to catch it on the way out. I know I'm going to have. All right.
So yeah, the special places sponge docks, their school. Of course, now that whoever the principal is high five on that for those students to say
that's a special place for them, that's a big deal. Home churches, parks, the Bayou Copenhagen cafe. Am I supposed to go there too? How many
places can I go today? So yeah, this was a great example of all the different things that again for the youth and it might be a little different for, you know,
that was one reason we were very we we wanted to make sure that there was a younger audience or a sample that we heard from, because, you know,
what they say may not be what you say, may not be what the middle school says, may not be what other folks say. So I think having them see and they
for me again, the downtown and the school, I thought those were huge numbers. And it said a lot about your community, the dynamic, I would add just the dynamic between those students.
Tarpon Springs is very great about its future. It is amazing about this. The chemistry between them, the ownership of their communities, that sort of
thing. That's right. Yeah. Okay. All right. So so basically just the fact of the just the chemistry between the kids themselves, the ownership of what they feel, the fact, the combination understand about
the traditions and certain cultural aspects, but also hope for staying hopefully in the area, if not going away and coming back. But those are sorts of things you can't buy. You earn it with your families.
You earn it with your faith. You earn it with a variety of things of people that you represent here, you know, in this meeting right now. But it was a beautiful thing to see. But the community should feel great in terms of the the
principal, vice, principal ownership and just the way they had respect for each other. But that was it was a beautiful thing to see. It was. And I want to compliment everybody around this room on this one,
because you do not see this in every community that we go into. When we ask people if they felt like they had a voice in Tarpon Springs, 91% of the people felt
like they had a voice. And that's one of those things that almost brings tears to my eyes, because that's something y'all need to be proud of, and y'all need to feel really good about. As city councilman and and
interested stakeholders out here, because that means you're listening and that means people know you're listening. So kudos to y'all on that one. Okay. So
we part of our exercises was again going back to psychology. We actually presented these words to all the groups without them knowing why we were
presenting these words. And so we had about. We had about ten different groups of words that we gave them. And these were the words that one. And
ironically, I think they work perfectly. This is why I love psychology. But the blue is trusting, honest, peaceful, sincere, loyal, and reliable. And guess what? It also represents all the beautiful
water that you have here. It has the ocean. That was the number one by far, just with word groups, and they didn't know why they were selecting those words and that it just happened to match the the water
as well. Next one was stable, harmonious, growing, natural, prosperous and generous. And then again, it also represents your nature and your mangrove
trees. So you've got that opportunity to take it to another level where it's a group of words. Yes, but it also represents what you have here. And that's the beautiful
thing about the subliminal parts. So orange is warm, happy, energetic, optimistic and spontaneous, and you cannot match your sunsets at your parks. They are freaking
awesome. And I remember when I was dating Mark coming down here and seeing those sunsets. And it's just a memory that is is amazing. And the fact that
orange won out. Then again, think of your Greek heritage, your Greek churches here. And purple was one of the words that came to the forefront. So the spiritual, the harmonious, the magical, the imaginative,
sophisticated, it represents the spiritual and also a little bit of the Greek influence in this area. So now we go to the actual tones that we use. And you can see here we use several
different tonalities of the blue. So we started out with the blue that a lot of people recognize in the middle there. And then we took the one on the far left and the one on the bottom for several reasons. The
one on the far left is probably the one we use most on the logos, we ask. I knew when we saw that blue was winning out, which I kind of anticipated. Coming into this, we asked you to rank the tone of blue that
appealed to them the most. Because we know coming into this, it's important to please everybody in this room, but it's also important to create
an energy that keeps our youth in this area and attracts more youth. So that's part of what we want to do with where we're going with this logo. So that top left is one of the tones
that we got from the youth, far right on the green. We decided to go with kind of your historic tonalities on the green, because you have so much amazing heritage and history
here. And so we chose that historic look to give that option there. And then the same thing with the orange and the purple. Yes, they're there, but we did a little bit more of a
muted historic tonality to both of those. All right. Now I'm going to take you all through. And y'all are going to have to listen to a lot as I go through these. And then we're going to let everybody informally vote.
We realize this is not a real vote, but we're going to let everybody kind of do an informal mentimeter vote at some point in time, because I think it's so important to let everybody express their opinion
without hearing someone else's first, so that everybody gets to say, this is the one that's striking me. And then we probably have some fun discussions after that. I want
to show one more thing before we get into them. The youth especially voted on this, but I had several groups that voted on this, and if our community had a symbol, what would it be?
And the tarpon won hands and above 36%. The sponger was at 20, the boat was 13. And we got several things that we'll talk about later on all this. Okay. All right. So we're going to
start I'm going to show you the top three logos. And every one of them are different. If you think about your favorite art type, if you went into an art gallery, each one, are you going to pick a different art
type. So you may have a wonderful favorite and you may have another one that ranks second, but I'm going to show you all three of them first, and then we're going to go into some details about each one of
them. Okay. This is the first one. This is the second one.
And this is the third one. Okay. And there's a fourth version. All right. So one of the things we learned with the focus group
revelations is there is consistent confusion and disconnect about are we in the downtown district. Are we in the Sponge Dock District. How do we define and distinguish
both while at the same time honoring the differences with them? So we kept hearing that there is a disconnect between that tourists that come in. They may think they've seen all
of Tarpon Springs, and they don't realize there's a whole nother branch that they're not seeing. So we kept hearing that over and over. So we came up with an idea, and I'm telling you this now, because it will
be relevant when I show you the the second version of the logos that I just showed you. So what we decided would be a great possibility is to define
districts so that you've got districts for the area that unify, while at the same time you're distinguishing the unique characteristics of each district. So we're creating a
clear sense of place. But while we're also giving distinct characterizations to each district, we're going to tell their story, and we're going to give the visitor and the local
a reason to explore and enjoy each district that we have. So with that, the tourists and the locals will have the opportunity to see, let's say,
banners that are on the fly, on the the light post and different things so they can see which district they're in. And we'll give them maps that have, you know, a distinction of each one of them. Even the
locals can explore neighborhood by neighborhood. We can plan the experiences by identifying their interest, and then they can go to the related districts. If they're interested in
history, they can go to the historic district. And these were just the three that we're going to address today, the downtown district. Y'all already have the downtown district and the Sponge Dock District. We added the Greektown district just so you
could see one. You're not as familiar, you know, that is not touted regularly. And then others to come. We just we've talked about Beach District, Bayou district, highway 19 district, historic districts. There's all kinds of districts
that we can set up, but today's not that day. So we're going to go back to this logo, and we're going to show you how it looks in black and white. And then
we're going to show you what it looks like on a business card. So you can see all of that on this one concept. Then we're
going to show you. Whoops sorry. These are the districts with that same logo. So you can see we've got on the top left. We've got the tarpon. Then on
the right we've got the sponge. So you can see how it will look for the sponge dock district. Bottom left. We've got the depot and then the right we've got the Greektown district. So
each district is going to look very similar. But at the same time it will have a unique distinction. Okay. And then
this is what it can look like on stationery, on cups, mugs, the shirt. If you look at the truck, you can see we stacked
the logo. So you can see the Tarpon Springs is over on the right. So it's more of a vertical format to fit with the door. So every single logo will have a horizontal or vertical
type setup on there. Okay. And obviously those we just we on purpose gave you different background colors on the different logos. So we could easily take that one and put a
teal background on the stationery, put a purple background. So just keep that in mind as I show you through. Okay. Here's the next one. And you can see as you go through
there the the shape of the letters. And then there it is in black and white and on a
business card. And there it is with all the different districts. So you can see we've got the city of on the far left, the Sponge Dock District, second from the left, the
downtown district and the Greektown district, same icons. We put them in a in a circle there to kind of match the the
sunrise sunset on the first one. And then here's using the teal background. Same thing though, where you can see how it looks
on the shirts, on the trucks, on a hat, on a cup. Okay. And here's this one. A little more
of a seal. Now I'm showing you I'm going to show you two different versions of this one. This one has a little bit more of the like a classic font to
it. It's got the little flaws on it. It's got the lines. We use the Greek key around the outside here to show the Greek
heritage. And there it is in black and white and there it is on the business card. Now the
top one has the classic font, and then on the bottom one we use a little bit more of a modern feel to it. And you can
see the different districts at the top. We kind of curve that around the outside, above the Greek key. And then there it is
with the green background and the little bit of purple in there. District section. And then there's the one with a
little bit more of a modern, but still a classic feel for the type font. There is that
one in black and white. There it is on the backgrounds. So there's all three of them together. So what I'd love for
you to do is get on your phone. Usually we tell you not to be on the phone at a city council meeting and go to Mint.com and use that code, and you can vote
on your favorite logo. Now, this is not an official vote. Obviously, this is just a fun vote. Everyone in the audience as well. It's up to you all.
Let's just do the commissioner. Yeah, yeah. Let me do the.
Charles. Can I can I ask you a question, please? What is this replacing? I know that sounds very ignorant of me to ask that question. It's a good question. It's a very. What's this? Replacing the seal. Well, that'll that'll be up to you.
They're going to. They'll develop some seal options later. This will be a this is a marketing logo. Right now we use a couple of seagulls. Yeah. Can we see that somehow. Is there a way to see that. I'm
just I'm horrible with art. I need to see it about seven different things that are being. Yeah right now and right now. Can you put that number can you put that number back up? Do you
mind running out the car and getting that report that's out there for. I just would like to see what this is about. Seven different things they're using now. Some people like the chamber is using the sponger
there. I'm sorry. Number back to the number. Go away. There you go. Thank you. There's a sponger. There's some that have
palm trees. There's some that have, you know, obviously the boats if you go search online. Are you online now if you go to our website where that's where
the The Seagull one is, it's on the city website. Yeah. When we did the research there truly was about seven floating around. And then I'm used consistent
colors or consistent type fonts or.
So so so I'm not I'm gonna I'm not. That's our logo. That's the current logo. Well it's not officially or the
picture of the diver. The diver on the water. Oh okay. Yeah. It's on our trucks. We use the
sealer. What? Just the seal? Yeah.
Where was that report on? It's just in that stack of
stuff I pulled out of my. Book. This. This gives you a good example. So this is what's coming up now. So you can see a
lot of different images come up when you search. You've got one option for the downtown. You've got one option for the sponge docks. You got one option for the chamber. You've got one
option for the city. You've got one option for the police. So part of this is we're trying to get a unified presence that's
going to appeal to both the the locals and the people that are coming in as tourists and something that everybody can, can use. Does that help a little bit, David. Yes. Yes,
ma'am. Mayor, when do you want like discussion. Like how do you want to do this? Well, let's let them finish their thing. Let's do our little voting and then then we're
going to go through, you know, each commissioner like we normally do downstairs. We can ask questions. We can direct our questions to the to the
folks that are presenting. And we can also direct them towards the city manager as well. Okay. Well, it looks like several people don't cheat or choosing not to vote. So let's just go ahead and go straight to the
discussions if that's one of them. Just for the I am one of them. Yeah. Okay. So let's go from current slide. And I was
going to put the pros and cons of each logo. But y'all want to have the discussion first David it sounds like you're. Yeah. Let's go through. Let me start it off. And then we'll just go
through commissioners in in order. So I get the concept of, of having this be more this is
more for marketing rather than an official logo of the city. Right. Like that would not become the official logo of the city. Right. That that is up to y'all. We're definitely. Yeah,
that and that's something separate, right. The seal goes on contracts. Right. Okay. This would go on our business cards, our letterhead, our trucks.
Yeah. Yeah. So okay so I get that and I get the idea I'm not adverse to the idea of having one look that then can be used to advertise the sponge docks
or downtown or, or to have banners and things and, and having a change is, you know, gives us an excitement for, you
know, you know, moving forward and progress and all that stuff. I think that so conceptually, I like the idea is fine. I'm not
really sold on any of the three. I voted for one, just a number three, because I don't, for whatever you ask me to pick the best of the three. And it's not
that I don't like them, I just don't think they capture tarpon. And if you go back, go back to some of your like the
letterhead and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, if, if, if you had that when you look at that, what do you
call that where it's faint and you type over it. And what's that called. Watermark. Watermark. That's the word I'm looking for. So when you look at that watermark again I don't know if that was a sponge or
helmet or something. That would be that's tarpon. Like I don't think anybody seeing that fish is going to say this is Tarpon Springs, okay. They could think this is this could be, you know,
Steinhatchee it could be any fishing village anywhere in Florida that doesn't say to me, Tarpon. As a matter of fact, there's a whole debate whether, you know, it was tarpon
springing out of the water or if it was some other kind of fish. So so, I mean, just that that misses it for me. Well, and don't forget that we will have the sponge option. Well, I
see that. But that leading with that tarpon being, that being the seal of the city would be I it's it doesn't fit with me. Yeah. So again I think that
misses again. The heart of tarpon is our spongers our Greek heritage, our water, our beaches, our you know, whether
it's manatees, all those things. And I just don't see it in that fish. Right? In that fish. It misses it for me. Yeah. So and, and I think people feel very strongly when they feel about
what symbol. Yeah. And I and I you guys have a and you guys have a hard task because this town is you know we're opinionated. We're you know we
we know kind of like what we like. And we're this is not a it's a tough everybody doesn't like the same thing. No it's a it's a tough crowd. It's a tough crowd. There's a reason why you haven't done this in
probably a long time. Right. And one that doesn't mean it's not. It doesn't mean that it's not a venture worth taking on. And but right now, those don't tell me this is Tarpon Springs,
right? And I and I do hear you, I do want everybody to go back to the to what the audience said. And that's one of the questions when you say the audience, what was the sample size? It was 100 total 100.
When we got through with every each one of the focus groups. So and I'm not saying nothing's right or wrong in this process, y'all. This is art. So there's not a right or wrong. But we do
try to use the eventually it's going to be an appeal. Eventually. It's whether the fact that it is or it's going to ultimately be an opinion one way or the other, and it's going to fall on this, this
body right here. That's right. Ultimately approve it. That's right. So, you know, so Commissioner Banther, yes. Thank you. And first I want to, you know, obviously, thank you for your work. Nothing we say
up here I don't want you to take as like, you know, discouraging or we discredit that. I'm sure y'all put a lot of hard time in this. And especially, I guess, is that your husband behind you? Am I saying that correctly? Yes.
Besides your husband, who who, I guess lived here at one point. A can be hard to walk into a community, especially one like Tarpon, and do this so, you
know, we just don't do change very well. First and foremost, I did hear that. And, you know, we're the oldest city in the county. We actually predate the county. And, you know, and I'm,
you know, I'm old school and I just I don't like anything modern. I think modern is tacky. It's what the it's what the cities don't like. You know, down county due to be hip and
cool and whatever, you know, number one is esthetically pleasing, but it looks like Rusty Bellies, which is our, you know, one of the best non Greek Greek restaurants we have
here. It's just too childish. Number two is just completely nonstarter with that wavy whatever it is. You know, I didn't vote. I put the comment that if I had to vote, if I was
forced to choose anyone, I would choose three. But I don't like three for the same reasons that the mayor said that I just don't I don't want anything modern. Let me be very upfront
with you. I just, you know, I don't really understand why we have to pick a logo, why we have to change what what like we have. I certainly don't want to change our seal or seal has
a lot of great history behind it. And I just think we should use the seal. So let me ask you this, David, because you're bringing up some good points. How do you anticipate getting
the young people excited about the marketing and about everything without doing some change and without because when we ask the youth and we had the best group there, they were
amazing. Y'all should be so proud of them. They had no idea what the what the seal looked like. And we had we heard, you
know, from all around the room so many different ideas about what Tarpon Springs currently uses. So what is your thought in terms of how do we get them
embracing? How do we get them? Well, I don't I'm not sure if that's the job of a logo. I mean, I was born and raised here, right. And, you know, to
me, with our history and what's behind us, you know, perhaps it's the lack of a job of us, like educating people, the youth. But to me, if you take our seal, correct me if I'm
wrong. Michelle or Irene probably know the best in here. You know, the seal wasn't random. Everything in that seal means something, right, Irene? Everything was picked in that seal for a reason, correct?
Yeah. To me, I'd rather educate our youth or anybody interested in what that seal means. The history in that seal. It wasn't just. I know you didn't use AI on this, but it wasn't just AI
or Adobe Workshop or whatever it's called these days. So and again, I fully disclose that I'm very traditional. So, you know, I can, I can, I can on
that sometimes, but I just I don't see why we can't just use the seal. I mean, maybe take the current seal, don't change it, but maybe make it more esthetically pleasing with the
lines and make make sure it matches. But that's our history in that seal. You know, I so I just I wouldn't choose any of these three if I had to I would choose three. But mayor I think
was was a hit hit hit the nail on the head with why that has some problems with it. So that's Rahmat. But I don't want to discourage you. Or have you all leaving here feeling. No,
this is what this is for. Yeah. And do you do y'all mind me asking questions as we go? Okay. Because I just want to I want us to think this through from every perspective. So what's
happening now is what we saw on this page where everybody's using everything. And one of the things that I think
whatever we do should help us with is to help unify rather than separate. And right now, it's hard for tourists,
especially to know what district they're in, to know what you know here. Am I in downtown? Why does this one use a sponge? Or why does this one
use a downtown? Why does this one use the boats and the you know, so part of what we're looking for in this process is to unify. You know, you've got
seagulls over here, you've got boats over here, you've got spongers over here, you've got downtown over here. So talk to me about how all of that can blend and change. And I don't
think people are too confused as to what's downtown and the sponge docks and the beaches. But I will say this because I have to give you something, or I can't just bury my head in the sand and say, we're not going to change anything.
Something's going to change someday. But I think anything we do and the mayor touched on this if we're going to make a symbol, it needs to have the sponge or helmet, because that's the only thing that makes this different. And
everyone I'm having, yeah, there's not. Otherwise we're the same as Crystal River Steinhatchee all the way up to Perry, Florida. You know what I mean? So, I mean, I just if we're going to pick something
it need, I would have the sponge or helmet and be as non-modern as possible. No wavy lines, no goofy text, just stately and clean that I think
represents, you know, the grandfathered position we take in Pinellas County and Tampa Bay as a whole. Okay. Mr. Can I interject on your time? I'm I'm
all finished. Okay. So I think he hit on something. I think he really hit on something. We we all like our seal. And if you
were to have these districts that played off the seal, right. Like so the seal. So we have go back to the one where you showed all three. Yeah. The
Google thing. You did the Google one Google search okay. Like okay. It's just the seal of the city right there. Number
the second from the right okay. So if you were if, if if that, if we all said, hey we don't want to change our seal. We like what we have, but we want to do this marketing. And I
understand what the city manager's vision was. Right. But if everything played off of that. So let's say you're in the sponge docks and you've got a diver helmet in the center of
that without all the artwork that's in the middle. And then you go to downtown, you got a picture of, you got the thing like you're we're so close to that. Yeah, that shows that. And then you go to the
different districts. You still maintain the seal as the central part of of our I mean, that's easy. Imagine that with the, the gold and the well and the and where the that one.
Because the seal is the central part point of of of all these marketing items. But then you have a sponge diver helmet in the center where you're in the sponge docks, you have the
Greek diver with like the cross holding the cross that's in Greektown. You go to downtown, you get a bunch of easily done. You got the train station. But we you play off that central theme, the seal. Because again,
you can see I think you're going to hear probably a similar thing all the way around that, that we like tradition and you and you know that that's a big deal here in Tarpon Springs. And then when
you do nontraditional things, that again goes contrary to, well, this one's so similar to that, you could so easily put the gold City of Tarpon Springs,
Florida there and then use the seal, obviously in the legal and city ordinance thing. So you've got a good point. It's easy to do. You have any more easy to do? Thank you very much.
Commissioner. Did not am I am I off on what you're saying? No, I believe you're correct. I just the only thing I just, I would just use the seal and maybe have more of our name around it. I don't like big
Tarpon Springs beneath the seal, because I just think it just takes away from it. But, Commissioner Donato, excuse me,
I when you look at the one with all the different ones, it would be nice to have more of a central theme. And I think what Commissioner Barnier saying in the marriage is that if we can
kind of intertwine those a little bit and work off of that. But yeah, when you have so many different ones, it is confusing.
Very. I'm, I'm the same way. I don't I'm not a big into change. I just give me the facts and let me deal with that. And that's kind of the way I like
to see it. But. Well really, that's it. That's how I feel. I think we work off of one theme that we that we like and maybe
use them and identifying things for each area like you talked about, and go from there. So you're going back to the same thought of having the gold with the city of Tarpon Springs
around the icons or whatever. Okay. For the districts. Yes. Just just one other thing. Sorry. One of somebody mentioned that they didn't like the lettering underneath.
Excuse me, I get that in there and it won't let you. It won't help, but thanks. My point I you can't the seal the city of
Tarpon Springs. You don't see it very well unless you're close enough to it. So on a sign. It's got a lot. Yeah. On it. It is busy. Yeah. And when you put it on a business card,
it's hard to show some way to. Yeah. Some way to let people know they are tarpon and, and I don't even know if you could tie in historic district or sponge docks or that kind of
thing, but I would like to see us tie tie things in, in more towards the seal. You got it, Commissioner. Yes. Yeah, I'm a little bit more. I'm going to
criticize a lot more. Okay. City manager, what do we approve? This study and this whole thing for the total cost of it? So this this part is
right around 50,000. Yeah. And then what's the next part going to end up costing? Well, the next part is the marketing campaign and all that around 10 to 20. All right. Well let's go
back to those three logos real fast because I didn't vote for any of them. I won't even come close to approving any of them because they're not Tarpon Springs. And my frustration does come where we all had
these individual sit downs with Mr. Moses. All he asked me is about how I and we had a good conversation. I know he's from here. We know a lot of people growing up together, but it wasn't about what you thought
the logo could be, what wasn't about, what tone you'd like to use. It wasn't about what font you'd like to use. It was more about how you grew up here. And so I explained that. But how
did that translate to this? And so I have concerns about why did you guys pick the tones that you guys ended up picking? How did you get to those six tones or whatever tones. Did
you just just like I mentioned earlier, the green tones, we went toward the historic, the blue tones we used the this, the blue that everybody's familiar with. And then we had
the youth pick a tone that appealed to them and the blues. And that's where we came up with the bright teal color, because one of the challenges we were given is when we first started this project was we
wanted to appeal, obviously to the locals, but we also wanted appeal to the youth. That would be either choosing to stay here or choosing to to leave and go somewhere else. And so they
wanted something that would appeal to all markets. So we made sure that the blue tones were something that we approached them with. Again, we talked about the the orange for
the sunrise, sunset. So we use some of those tones. We went toward a little bit more of the historic like a little more of the the browns and blacks and the orange versus the bright in
your face. Orange, because we felt like your history. And then the purple, same thing. We use kind of the purple tones that were associated with spiritual and churches, with a
little bit of the historic focus. Okay. Well, number one looks it's too far spread out from left to right, the fonts a little bit too scribbly. It looks too freestyle. Florida's written too small. It doesn't
look like strength behind that logo, I'm telling you now, the second one is built like a lot of these other cities. A lot of these other signs that we see across towns with the wiggly lines. Welcome to so and So.
You know, you got the the sun up there. You got a, an S with the tarpon in it and the as Commissioner Banther hit it right on the head with, with pretty much all these logos. The third one looks too cheesy
with this big circle of the Greek. You know, you got the Greek key around it with this tarpon in the middle, and the font just looks off. As several others have stated, this is traditional town. If I had the
input, I would have said I want more traditional, bolder font to show our community the strength and the history behind it all. I don't know how you guys got away from the sponge
symbol. I really don't know how that even happened. Well, mainly because of the research. Well, no, because of the youth only. I mean, no, no, no, we researched all the groups on the on the group of 30s, group
of 40s. I mean, the the total was 100. Well, let me tell you something. There are new people and organizations in town that want to do their best to get rid of our heritage and culture in this community and try to
wipe it away and bring out this, you know, general assumption within the community. Now, I agree with you. I mean, I think the sponge is critical and very important to the area, which is one reason why we had all the
different options here. Totally agree with you. And you remember the heritage and history was number one on the strengths for this area. Well, yes. But you know what I'd have
to have concerns with when I see the youth 33%, the downtown, the reason why they probably support a lot of it now, because this generation, this younger generation, first fight is a big event for them. And
you can see them up and down all over the place, you know, so they enjoy it. And I understand that. Right. But if you had gone and like I told Mr. Moses, I said, y'all need
to go on these community pages. You need to mess around and start asking people. You'll get hundreds of people's opinions up there, whether you want to hear it or not. Or some people are BSing, but you actually get a general public view. And I
also told the city manager, please provide these logos to us before this meeting so I can have an idea to look at, but I'm not going to move forward. I would rather take these logos to the general public and ask
them to see what they think. But I think the colors are off, the fonts off I get. You guys are trying to do a good thing, but to me, you know, how do you guys even create these images?
Or are they like AI created or they you put artists on staff? We have six artists. Three of them are fine, fine artists.
Okay, then I'm not too. I mean, there's no way we could. Well, yeah, we could use AI, but yeah, we did the artwork. Okay. And as far as you know,
Commissioner car at one point, maybe you can help me. He brought this sign imagery into town that that it's. I'm not saying it's the greatest, but it's not the worst either. It
is what it is for now. It gives a good direction in the community. What's going on? I think that cost us around $40,000. So, you know, are we
going to rebrand and put those images on top of those signs? Are we getting away from that whole branding? And if we don't have anything to do about our history in this community and I
mean our history, this is what we're rich and known for, we're going to fall off. So I think the history is critical here. I think your staff needs to go back and look at what is traditional and what means
strength and what means pride. And, you know, the culture of communities and try to get some better gauge right now. And if you were naming that, you would say the sponge or, oh, the
sponge helmet, without a doubt. Yeah. How could anybody come up here and say anything else? The tarpon is the tarpon. And we all we have the springs one candidates laughing out there.
But that's exactly what it is. The sponge. Without a doubt. It brought the heritage. It brought the notoriety. It brought the the famous ability for this community to move forward. The, the the fish was
a way to name the fish with some old what the northerners that were coming down here and enjoying the vacation spot and what it was. But what put Tarpon Springs on the map? Just like the needle. When you go
walking in Dunedin, you see those signs? What is this? They got the Scottish guy, right? I mean, we can't, you know, for us to even put a Greek person, it would look too much. But it's so easy to use. A sponge
has to be done and so not a problem. The reason why I'm the most vocal, I'm just. I think we make them. We miss the mark on all three of those. I don't like the font at all. And we're going to have to have a couple
more work sessions. I think if this what we're going to go through to move forward and the teal as the main color, I just don't see it, you know. And so these look like other standard
logos across the area. And I want to ask you guys, what did you guys do unique to this approach in gathering information that you didn't do with other cities? This town's unique in very many ways. And
if you just went through your same processes and you know, these are our tones that we're picking, and I mean, you didn't ask me about tones, I would have said either maroon, gold,
a nice royal blue in a way, maybe some white something. And how you guys came up with it. Good. But the logo for Dunedin is too colorful. The logo for Saint Petersburg's too colorful,
the logo for some of those other cities are just too wavy and freestyle. And so I think there's got to be a better other community that I've ever done. Have we used purple? I mean, that was that was very
unique to this area. And we got that because this community selected those words, the spiritual, the magical, all of those tones. So I think, I think it's neat to go into a
community and discover your unique. That's our that's what we want to do. So all you're telling me, great, that is what we're about is trying to discover what makes Tarpon
Springs unique. So let me get this right. During this process is critical. When you go to pick, you basically hear words, and then you associate those words with colors from your. We
do several different things. We actually have people select colors in the 100 that we had come to the focus groups. So they actually said if Tarpon Springs were color, which color would it be? And they stood in
the corners. A couple of y'all were there and selected those colors, and then we had them also select the word groups. So we didn't invent this. This is
that's not our job. Our job was to come in and ask people what they wanted. I have a quick question. Okay. But what did you guys do different from this process than you do from other cities? And branding and
marketing? That's what I want to know. We went to every single shop. We went to every single entity and talked to people, and we talked to both the tourist and we talked to
the locals. And, you know, we talked to all the stakeholders. So we listened to every single person. Residents of this community absolutely don't have
businesses that just live their everyday lives, who just go back and forth to their homes, raising their kids. Did you ask those type of people, those are the best type of people to get a hold of was on those social
media sites. So I'm just I'm a little bit more firm because this is something that's going to last for decades on end. And if we think we're just going to come up here and pick one and go with it, that's not going to
be the case. We got to work with it and go back and forth. That's our job to make sure we get this done. We are here for you. Before we start asking for more money or this job, this part we got a lot to work on
still. So that's what I'm going to say. I'm not going to accept any of them right now, and I'd like to see some better fonts as we talked about. And I'd like to be able to make sure we
do hit a lot of focus groups of general, everyday people who live in this community in their 30s and 40s to get their opinion on this too. So thank you. Now, can I just ask a
question? I love what you said. What if they disagree with you? I just want to hear that. What if they disagree with you? Do we all not agree that the sponge y'all all agree? Y'all all agree. But I'm saying if
you want us to go back to focus groups, what if they don't agree? Because that's my job is to do what y'all want. But what if you tell me to go back to those 30 and 40 and they don't
agree with if you pull, my teenage daughters are going to pick something, you know, out of this, you know, you know, I'm just not let me give you some quick direction. I want to make sure that the vice mayor
has all, has all the time he needs because he's kind of verbose. We know that. So look at epiphany. And I am not Greek Orthodox. I'm. I'm Catholic as they come. So I'm speaking kind of out of turn here. But look
at the Epiphany Day celebration. That's our biggest event here. That's what makes us different than anywhere in Greece usually. Okay, look at the t shirts the boys have worn. Okay. It's not really changed since before I
was born in 82. Right. So that kind of shows you the consistent traditional. And they're very bold. They're white t shirts. Epiphany day, the orthodox cross in the year, they've they have barely
changed. And that and that's all boys 18 and under. I should tell you something there. And I have no education in psychology. You're way smarter than that, than I am. But the coloring I
don't understand the coloring. Like if you're going to say green like green in the Catholic Church is considered ordinary time, which is not advent, Easter, anything like that. So that's, you know, if you get to purple, that has to
do with advent and some things in Easter. So I don't know of anything in the Orthodox Church where they do colors like that. So I don't really know if the color relation to religion is
relevant here. Our colors are maroon and then sometimes blue. So I mean that I think that's where the focus should be. All right. Thank you. Okay. Vice
mayor to the restroom. Sure you don't want to hear my words of wisdom? I'll watch it. Okay. So first of all, let me start off
by saying I could have stopped asking questions after Commissioner Banther spoke because he was explicit, almost covered every detail of what I
could have and should have said. Then I get to listen. You know, I listen to the mayor and I didn't disagree with anything that was said there. I didn't disagree with anything that
Commissioner Donato said, or. I just would have been a little softer than BCC. But other than that, you know, as you're speaking and questions are
coming up, I have to ask these questions. And I'm not really looking for immediate answers, but I just want this is my thoughts as they're coming out. Okay. I was going to first of
all, I want to keep our logo, as everybody said, our seal. Yes. Because my first question would be how is our seal hurting us? It's not. It has
been you know, I'm listening to you know, we're I think it's 147, 148 years here. I'm not that long here, but, you know,
it's not an easy place. I'm catching up slowly but surely. So. And you can hit me with any sarcasm. That's okay. I'm right on my feet. But as I'm. As I'm
reading, it's. I was going to say, how does this. You know, and you don't have to answer me. How does this compare to other surveys from towns of our age? Are they looking to change? Did
they change? What did they change to? So I look for the type of communication that you have. You know, you said that
you interviewed the youth, which I respect them. I like their youthful thinking, but they're not cultured or worldly
enough for us to change something so drastic. I like having their ideas and, you know, maybe when they get into the position of being the dais
up here, maybe they'll change it. How long be gone? But right now, I like hearing what they have to say, but I can't judge that they want McDonald's and
I'd like to eat in a five star restaurant, so that's where I have to just use it as a tool, but not as a deciding factor. You know, one of the questions
I would ask truthfully, whether it would be tourists or what do they like least about the logo? I see all these logos up there.
And truthfully, as it was said here, I don't really like any of them either. If anything, I'd like to see our seal look bigger so they could be a
little bit more defined. That's what I would have gone for. When you did your interviews, do you ask the people how long they're living here? Yes, yes, but we don't have the
individual results. But when we're just doing informal. But, you know, but here's the issue with that. If you're asking a bunch of people that are just new newlyweds to tarpon, I'm
like, I don't really want to hear what they have to say. Let me rephrase that. I want to hear what they have to say, but I want to put it in a certain factor versus the people that have been here many years and
know the heritage well. Why don't we do? Why don't we do a community survey and let's ask, let's ask a series of not my job to do, it's yours. But I mean, sure. Well, I'm hearing that if if we do that, though,
I think to save time, let's let y'all approve the questions to make sure I'm asking what y'all want. Does that sound good? So we'll do a we need to do a survey. I mean, well, I don't
know if you need to do a survey. These are just like I said, you didn't have to answer these. These were just the thoughts that one when I'm listening to you giving the presentation, you head down. How many
tourists did you interview? We informally interviewed. I would say about 25 to 30, okay. When we were going to the retail shops. So the tourists we interviewed, 2530 and the
youths we did 100. No no no, no, no. There were four focus groups that we did. And out of the focus groups, there's about 25 to 30 per session. Let me
show you the different groups that we went through. We did a community. We did a I mean, a business one. Go back to the beginning. Here we go. We did
the business leaders. There were probably about 24 at that one. We did the faith and civic organization. We did the youth, the strategic partners. So we did like four formal focus
groups, and there was around 20 to 30 at each one of those. So those together, I think I was at a few of them myself. Yes, I think I was at two of them. The
thing I just I have to agree now that he's back with what was said this to me, I couldn't really I voted on one because I
thought I kind of had to I thought I saw somebody put a gun to my head, but other than that, I didn't really like any of them either. And, you know, I would like to be very careful how we change anything. And
then here's my biggest thing. Let's say we do come out with with one we can agree to. What do we do? Go up to the Chamber of Commerce and say, you have to use this logo and to the
town and say, you have to use this logo if they want to change. Yeah, well, what we found in most communities is once a logo is unveiled and once people get the buy in, but
you have to make sure you're happy with it. I mean, we're not going to stop till you're happy with it. That's our job. You know, we're here for y'all, not for us. So we'll make sure you're happy with it. But once
you unveil a logo, usually the town gets behind it and they want to be a participant, especially if you choose to go forward with the districts, you know, then how easy is it to
just incorporate a few things with what's already in existence? Just have one more question. None of you does anybody get complaints about
our logo or our never once, never once, never once. You know you. So again, I'm sitting here just going, that's not the
complaint. Because one of the questions I put down here is, what is your number one complaint that I always ask when I see a tourist? Mostly when I ask a resident, I go, if
you could change something in tarpon, what would you like to see? Change? Not to say that we could do it, but what would you like to see? Change. Nobody's ever said to me that, you know,
our logo sucks, so I don't know. I don't know what more I could say, but I'm not. You know, I'm not happy with what I'm getting to see. And I wouldn't change anything just from this
presentation. Okay, so I think you got some feedback. We did, we did. Thank you. And as you know, we we pull no punches up here. So and that's fine with me. Y'all don't feel like
you've been too hard. You guys can handle I'm here for y'all. I know you can handle it. We're all here for y'all. I think you got, you know, you need to go back to the drawing board. I appreciate what you've done.
You did this. You brought your first round of stuff here, right? You see that? And I understand what this process is.
It's not we're not I we're not again. My. What I understood not necessarily changing the logo that you're not changing the seal at all. Right? We're not the seal I keep. I'm sorry.
I keep using that. Wrong, sir. It's changing the seal. But I think we all. I think we need continuity with that. We can do that because we use the seal. And if you're going to do this
marketing, and then you got to seal look on all the trucks and then you put this kind of stuff on everything else. It just it just doesn't go right. So and so I think you've got some feedback here that obviously
we're looking for. We want to be more traditional. Right. And go sharpen your pencil. Go do your thing. You got it. The one the one more more more thing mayor. Yeah sure. You know, I'm
not telling you how to do your job. You're much better at it than than I would be. I have no marketing skills. But, you know, I don't think you need to do any more focus groups or polls. I I'm not saying those don't
work. Maybe they do better elsewhere. But, you know, we are the poll and we were elected up here. Y'all are all that matters. And trust me, they people we have no security. We have no staff. They'll hunt
us down if something's wrong. Publix. Our office. Right. This town is not bashful at all. I have that's a different story, but. So I think the feedback that you've been given here is
enough for you to do what you have to do. I don't want you to walk away thinking, well, I just got beat up behind this little board in Tarpon Springs. That takeaway is we all, we all, we all love our seal. And that
needs to be incorporated into what we do. And you are correct that we have disjointed marketing currently and we have a lot of different images being used. So I don't think this was a failure at all. I think it
helped us realize we love our seal. We don't want to change that. But how do we incorporate that into daily use? Okay. Got it. Yeah. And and just one more the so when you, you know,
you're going to go back, you're going to do what you're going to do your thing. We may have have another workshop bring it forward. And then at some point we this group coalesce around something. Then that's then
that's going to get advertised to the community. The community is going to have an opportunity to voice their opinion. We're not going to hustle it through. It's going to they're going to have a chance to voice their
opinion. We're going to have it at and then we're going to have a vote. And that night, residents can come up and express themselves and we want to hear from them. But we want something that again, we can
obviously, it's got to get past this focus group. It's the most important focus group. Once it gets through us, then we're going to advertise the community and then we're going to get feedback. So so I agree
with the commissioner. I'm not sure any more focus groups are necessary. I think, you know, kind of get a sense of where we are here and go ahead and just very quick, you know, your
pictures up here show the the logo, places that we have the seal. I would prefer not to see that again. We're not changing the seal on the trucks. We're
not changing the seal on the shirts where this is just something. Or maybe marketing on on the internet or with the chamber, but so when you're
doing that and showing it as a presentation, you're kind of making me think that you want to change that. And as you heard up here, nobody wants to change the seal. So I want to keep that very separate, but willing to change the logo if
it's a good one for the town. But we're not looking to change the seal, so don't put a truck up there. Don't put a shirt up there, you know, want to put a couple of stationary things wherever we're going to do it?
Or if it's just going to be an internet thing, that's great. So that's what I would say. Okay. Good to hear. Just yeah. So the the mayor said it best about what I believe this
process should go. Please consider some older, more traditional font that show the richness of our. Can I send y'all like a survey with fonts
on it to see it would save some time, I think. So what I'll do is maybe pick 5 to 7 fonts. Does that sound good? And send those over to you? And I know
the city of Tarpon Springs will keep that font the same. Send us some more color tones too, because I'm. That. That's not it right there. I think we need
we're I think we want richness. I think we want more richness in the color choices. Okay, okay. More traditional richness. I know it may not appeal to
youngsters, but as as Commissioner Banther said, you know, he's not trying to satisfy his 13 year old daughter on YouTube. And we and I know you have a lot of the teal on there, but I'm also
hearing but we but anyway, I think you can hear that from all of us that we that we, we want more rich rich. And so even though your seal has a lot of teal in it, just what you
see the do you see the richness I'm asking you see the richness of the blue. You see. Yeah. You can incorporate teal, but you see it's offset by the rich royal blue in the in the
ripples in the water. You see the, the richness in the, in the, the sunset up there. You see the you see the gold all around it. There's a richness.
Now, you know, if if I personally wouldn't have, I wouldn't have an issue with even slightly updating that if you talk about fonts or something of that nature, if we, if we kind of like a different
font, maybe update it. I don't think there's anything wrong with with that, but that's we don't want to move much from that. I hear you. Okay. So I think that and then if everything kind of all the
marketing kind of coalesced around that, then it's then it would be really cool. Like having a special, you know, Sponge Docks logo that look again coordinated with. So you
are open to the district idea. I think as long as we have the main one, that is okay. I think that gives the city manager what he's looking for as far as you know, you know, marketing
areas. And having done, I hear you guys loud and clear and thank you for your honest feedback because honestly, that's the way I work too. I'm happy with it and we appreciate it. Saves time and it saves
energy. And we appreciate you coming up here and and our pleasure. And you did a great job. You're tough. So thank you thank you thank you so much.
Okay. Yeah okay. Let's take let's get back here by. Is ten
minutes enough okay. We'll get back here 120. Nice meeting.
We're reconvening the work session at 120. So we have item number two on our agenda, which is the construction of the new
clerk's office. And we're going to start with our city manager and mayor. As you all know, you each had an opportunity to meet one on one with the developer.
And she made her case for this change. Order. This is your opportunity. I think each of you in those things made a comment saying, I don't know how my colleagues feel. Well, this is your opportunity to
huddle and share how you feel with one another. And obviously we can't make a decision, but perhaps, maybe come to a consensus which might expedite the discussion next Tuesday on whether to grant the change
order or not. You got to you received a very detailed memo from Bob Robertson on the request. They've kind of boiled it down to it's this number or we can't proceed. So it's sort
of simplified the decision whether to call the bond or to to pay the change order, give a short synopsis of the situation for the public to understand
where we are. Well, we I guess, Nick, you have to help me with some of the how far behind this project is since it start date was three years ago. Yeah, for
the record, Nick Makris, project administration department assistant director. Yeah, I can help lead the discussion and maybe hopefully answer some of the questions that you that you guys have. So
this is the second change order that DeMar, our contractor working on the clerk's office is requesting the the amount of the change order after accounting for different
credits that we could go into later on in in the discussion is $398,000. So that includes
different categories of what what is reportedly designed efficiencies unforeseen changes, economic factors. Some reported
credits, unused quantities that they are reporting that they will, that they're getting back to the city, as well as some additional bond insurance fees
that they that they are incurring. To answer the initial question, the project was kicked off in August of
2022. At that time, we provided them a limited notice proceed, which allows them to kind of get the ball rolling with a lot of the early submittals, the long lead times, items such as
the HVAC system, the transfer switch, the electrical items. So the official notice to proceed the where the clock actually officially started was December of 2022. It did take
them quite a while for them to actually get in motion. I believe they maybe broke ground in June of of the following
year in 2023. Currently we are our liquidated damages in the contract are $375 per calendar day. That exceeds, you know,
our allowed contract date. So we had the billing department provided a temporary certificate of occupancy earlier this month. Earlier
actually in January. So that's when I think we we considered the the project to be substantially complete. That's when liquidated damages kind of stopped accruing. So I believe in total accounting for
additional days that we provided them in change order, one, which I believe was about in the vicinity of 140, 140 days and about 30 days of
weather delays, including, you know, multiple hurricanes. I believe it was we're about 530
or 60 days past due. So I'm sure you have other many other questions, but I'm here to help answer. I know you had the memo that was drafted previously by Bob. Unfortunately, he can't be
here, so hopefully I can answer a lot of those questions. But as as the city manager mentioned, I know that there was, you know, individual one on one meetings with DeMar with
and to kind of have them, you know, provide their perspective on why they need this change order. Bob, did you know meet with them weekly for the last few months. So I'll do my best
to try to answer any questions you may have. The vice mayor asked to go first and allow him to start us off. Thank you mayor, I want to zip through
this because I've been through this very in depth with DeMar. And so as I asked the city manager yesterday and I know I didn't give him much time,
there's no definition of what the design deficiencies that total, 116,000 are the economic factors that a 277,000 unforeseen changes. You know, I
know what these words are defined as, but there's no breakdown to know what actually these things are. So I'm looking at this as nonexistent. I don't know why we're getting
charged for a bond insurance. That's something they have to have their credits again in cost savings. Again, there's nothing to justify this. So
these are just numbers thrown at me and I don't buy that. So I'm going to just move through very quickly. They totaled $599,000. And it's a
liquidation damages of 2000 201,000 for the days that they're delayed. None of that covers all the mistakes that were made. So I want to then go
from there into the option one, which was I want to read through the pros allows the project to be completed without further delay and avoid disruption to closeout
activities. That's not true. It resolves all outstanding cost issues in a single negotiated final change order. That's true, but irrelevant reflects
significant concessions by the contractor. That is not true. The counts for. That's what she's willing to give us. Not it doesn't. It's not
significant. It accounts for all credits, unused quantities and liquidated damages is no way I could justify that by the lack of what I just said before.
Avoids the administrative, legal and time burden associated with pursuing a bond claim. I've already spoken to the attorney, and that's not true either. From the minute we
give them notice, we can go ahead and do whatever we need to do, and the bond can be handled separately, reduces the risk of extended disputes,
claims or litigation that could result in higher overall costs. That falls on the person that loses. And I don't think that's us supports a cooperative closeout closeout process and
preserves working relationships with project stakeholders. I don't even want to hear that one, and I'm just being honest. The cons requires the city to
approve additional project funding beyond the original contract amount. We're not doing that. So we go into option two and I was restricted to 15 minutes. So I'm trying to
go through this preserves the city's position that remaining costs should be borne by the contractor. That's true. Potentially reduces and eliminates the city out of
pocket cost. If the bond claim that's true demonstrates strict enforcement of contract terms, that's true. Allows the city to formally dispute responsibility for certain costs included.
That's true. So that so far that's good. Until you get into the cons, it's likely to significantly delay project completion. And that is not true because it will not be
delayed. Bond claims are often time consuming. That's also true, but this one won't be no guarantee. The the surety company will cover the full
amount claimed, potentially resulting in. And I say yes, they will. And we're not even talking about that. They're looking for an extra $400,000. So that's not true. It may
require legal assistance. That's true. Creates uncertainty regarding final project costs. That's true may result in strained relationships. We already have that. So I don't even want to
hear that. The problem that we have is we have. And this is what I asked for. I asked for a detailed list of all of the things. So for those that don't
know what those things are, and this is just my big things, is it was poured, the whole unit was was poured too low to start
with. So we had to alter how the water could drain away by making gullies to funnel the water away. At that point something should have been said
done. The unfortunate thing is we get this as we have a completely finished structure that's not done to to pass inspection, pass permit, and
that's when we get to be told. Inside the and and who who's at fault. Some of this could be the architect. Some of this could be DeMar. But when you do a scope of work when somebody
gives you a project, you do a scope of work and you've got to look line by line item for everything that the architect designs. And if you miss something and then later tell
me that, oh, I didn't know that there was going to be Micah. This is not Micah. This is what we they should have provided, but they provided priced Micah and then they up charged it. So
what? I also asked, which I didn't get an answer is in that first, and you don't have to answer me because I want to go through my whole thing. Sure. In in the first part, when we upped them at 200 and some odd
thousand in the change order, if that, I want to know what that covered. Did that cover the change from Micah to Granite? Because I need to know
what that is versus all these other economic factors, unforeseen changes. And. ET cetera. ET cetera. Our biggest problem. So let me touch base with the biggest problem. Sure.
The roof okay. Roof was done wrong. It was done not only wrong, but it was done. They were supposed to do the roof and then put the capping material on it to seal it so
that no water ever gets in. They put the capping material first. They did the roof after, then they did the roof wrong. And the person not only did it wrong, he went out of business
and then he he resigned from the job and then left. That was November 2024. DeMar did not further this and say anything
to us. Matter of fact, in my meeting with her, she didn't even know that that failed permit at that time until I had Bob re explain to her that it
did fail, but why were we not asked at that point to rip off the roof before everything inside was now finished? So for a year and a half we were all
in the blind and all of a sudden the place is finished. We have a dropped ceiling, we have all the material inside, there's carpet in there and there's no membrane. So if we
decide to rip off that roof, we're going to have debris falling in whether we like it or not and make a mess, or the choice we have is to put a new
membrane over it. If we put the new membrane over it, we then kick the can down the road and screw the people 20 years from now that need to do a second membrane, because you're only
getting a 20 year warranty on it. Okay. We have two choices. Rip this off and run the risk of what we could do. Damage to
the already done product that's underneath. Everything's finished, ready to move in, or we can and we would have to go over it, or we'd have to go
over it and even going over it. I have no confidence from the way this whole project's been done, that it can be done to the specs that it needs to be
to be permitted. So since we can no longer take off the capping material and put it under the capping material, we would now have to run a grinder and put a notch around the
whole inside perimeter, put a new membrane over it and put it into that with with special adhesive to hold it, to make a seal, and then put a capping
material over that so that it's like fudging a capping procedure. Again, I don't know where the contractor, the GC, was during this whole project.
I don't know where anybody who was overseeing this project was during this project, but I mean, I'm just shocked to hear all of what I got to hear and all what
I got to see, because every single step of the way seems to just have gotten out of hand. Now. She's seemed to extend, if we do another membrane by her
or by DeMar, she's willing to go from 20 years to 30 years. I don't even know if she's going to be here 30 years. I don't know if the if the company that put the product there is going to be 30 years. The product
that was put on is from what I understand is a is a joining. It's not a one piece membrane. It's joined. So right now we're lucky it's not leaking. But we
have no idea what is down the road. So that's where we're at. Usually you get two coverings, you get a one covering. And 20 years later we get another covering. Like what was done at
the Public Safety building. Where facility Cantos. Dad did it originally and redid it. And we get 4050 years out of it. We're not going to get that
blessing with this one unless we tear it off, but we run the risk of tearing it off and causing possible problem. Or we could go over it and still cause a possible problem, but we shouldn't be paying $400,000
to get this beauty done. Beside that, nobody watched to see where the draw goes to for the for the public to come in there. So they had to build a
countertop on top of the draw. So now we have to just go and build a step so that Irene's workers can go up and employees,
I'm sorry, and can go up and and not look like they look my height. Okay. So the bottom line is I don't know how these things went astray, but you
don't you don't reward somebody $400,000, you know, for these, for these all these, these things. I also heard there was a whole lot of other things. That's why I asked the city
manager to give me a list of all of the deficiencies from start to finish, and put prices on each one. I have also investigated how much it is to
do the rip off, and how much it is to do the put back, so I'm going to hold those in my back pocket because I want to. I was going to speak about it. If I
got a report from the Ma, I didn't get the we didn't get the report correct, which you asked them. Okay. We requested. The fact is we're not getting it because she doesn't want me
to break it down. My meeting with her was not pleasant and I didn't care whether it was pleasant or not. I'm here to protect the city's the residents pocketbook. Like we
all are up here. And there's a lot more that I can say. I'm going to hold back, but my 15 minutes are back, Mike. That's
all right. So thank you. Did I miss something? Okay. So let's I'll go next and we'll just go through other. So one of the
questions I asked and again I need to we need to get a determination from Mr. Saltzman is legal obligation. When I, when I met with the contractor I said all these things you're
asked for, do you feel you're legally you have a legal. We have a legal obligation to pay any of these things. And I didn't get an answer of yes.
She kind of just said legal. Yeah. So. How far are we in liquidated damages right now from them being off timewise
201,800. And under this proposal we're wiping that away. Yes. We're kind of considering it a credit because that part of the for well, the actual
change order calculates 399,000. Is it part of the 390. It is. Yeah. It's, it's a it's a deduction off the 599,000. She's reducing she's reducing
the 800. Well so but it's not. So it's we're eating that and then we're giving her 398. Correct. Well okay. Right. So I mean exactly it's it's a little bit of shuffling. She they owe
us $200,000, right. Yeah. Okay. Actually I mean contractually that's the guarantee that we owe us 200. Now they're asking us to give them 398. Okay, so it's you add them together, you
don't subtract, you add them together. So the. So I understand that it's possible that because we've been approached here at the city
that they have unpaid subs. Are you aware I am aware okay. Yes. We've received multiple notices to the owner the city. So these are subs that should have been paid. Withdraws that were made
are back. Right. Correct. Okay. So the contractors not only should they're asking us for money to pay for subs that they
receive draws on, correct? Correct. Okay. We I can't tell you. Like what? You know what the outstanding amount is at this point. But we received multiple, you know, notice to
the owner that our procurement department tracks. And we were trying to coordinate with the it's it's problematic to receive to receive notification
from subs because normally subs don't go straight to the city to tell them things. Right. You're right. They'd be going through the contractor. But obviously they they're they're concerned enough about getting
paid that they approached the city, that they had to end around the contractor to come straight to us to tell us that they need to get paid. Yeah. So yeah, we'd end up with a
mechanic's lien if they don't, if we don't pay them. But regardless. So one of the questions I asked the contractor was when all these
issues that they were claiming, they, they, they claimed architectural deficiencies or defects or whatever, they did, no change orders were applied
for at those times. Right now, they're coming forward now at the far past the 11th hour, because this project was supposed to be done, what, 500 days ago? Okay. So 500 days
after the project is done and they're and and according to them, they are running out of funds or have run out of funds because they need this. They said to complete the job. Okay.
Now they're saying, oh, this this happened, you know, a year and a half ago or two years ago. And, and this is a reason that we should be receiving this money so that that really as as
just a quick clarification there, there had been early indication that, you know, this was approaching, you know, there was to be expected that a final change order was to be expected, you know, but
wouldn't have come in earlier than this normally. Don't you change orders, come in in a timely manner? Yeah. Well don't you expect them in a timely with most projects? You know, we have we have a contingency
balance that we try. You know obviously that kind of helps. And that's another question with what is our most of do we have a retainage on this project. Well the two separate. So yeah we do have retainage. How much is that. 5% of the
total project cost. How much is that? If you bear with me a second I could tell you. Yeah, that sounds about right. Hundred and 550,000 is about
right. Yeah. Five, 5% of about $3 million. I mean, normally, you know, obviously we want to get this project completed. If
we felt we had some, some really significant obligation to that, we had we had on the city side done something wrong,
then, you know, I would be receptive to hearing that. But right now, I'm not guaranteed. I don't have a guarantee that we don't pay this, and we still
don't end up with the with the contractor walking off. And that threat of walking off the project, you know, and then it takes me to, you know, the
bonding issue. You know, one of the things is that, you know, when the when they receive a bond, what, what they're supposed to do is they have to go produce financial statements.
This is a it's called a performance bond. So they're producing financial statements. And then they go to a bonding company and say, we have this project and or do we have the
wherewithal by those financial statements that the bonding company looks, that they have the wherewithal to complete this project? And if they're incapable of completing the
project, that gives me a concern that, you know, and I'm not going to go I'm not I'm not going to make this. You know,
statements that of which I'm unaware of, but it it is it is concerning that they produce financial statements to a bonding company to perform and finish a job of which now
they're incapable of finishing. So it is something that obviously our city attorney would have to to wrestle with
when that time comes. So I, I can't you know, I'm it's option number two for me. Okay. Commissioner Banther. Yes. Thank you I agree completely with the mayor and vice mayor.
I don't have a construction background, but I do have a business background. And after speaking with staff and speaking with the contractor herself, whom I do know pretty well, speaking with other
professionals in the industry, I think any more money we throw at it is just good money after bad. I if, you know, if we had full confidence that that this money would get it done, I think it'd be a good choice to
to to say yes. But in my opinion, the, the alarm bells and I've experienced this personally at my house, when you have subs start to call you, that's, that's there's just a problem and it's just it is what it is. And I realize
calling the bond is not some magical wand. And we move in tomorrow. It's a year plus process, but the sooner we start that, the sooner we actually can, can can, can, can
finish the project. And I just believe that any more negotiating or, or paying any money to the current developer is going to delay the process above and beyond the bond. So I think we should call the bond
and move on with it. Thank you, Commissioner Donato. It's a it's a tough one both ways. For me. I had the prerogative of talking to Bob at length about
it, as well as the city manager. It's disheartening, but it is something that you run into. I think maybe they bit off a bullet that they couldn't
totally chew. I don't know what everything happened, but there were some unfortunate things. Bob had a 200,000 roughly line
that that he he whittled it down to made so much sense to me. But I in keeping with what has been said so far, I'm very
uncomfortable paying them money now until we have a CEO period. I just because they could indeed walk and then we would have to go above and beyond
what we're considering doing now. I'd like to see it negotiated out. I still think they're hitting us on the high end, but it's imperative to me
that the bulk of the money be held back until there's a CEO, a full CEO. Because. Because currently we have a temporary certificate of occupancy.
Temporary, I understand I want it to be locked, sealed and delivered. And as commissioner, vice mayor brought out, I. I'm comfortable with the roof myself. I'm not a construction
person either, but I've experienced a faulty roof and they are really difficult to get. Right. So that's an ongoing cost that we have to
look at in the future. It and I don't. It's a bad situation and throwing money at it may not
solve it. I I'm willing to work with the parties that be. But I, I think the 400,000 should be whittled down more close to the
200 and plus figure from from my talks with Bob, I was privy to that, so I wasn't privy to that. But I understand, sir, I
think you had that on you, Charles. The $200,000 figure that Bob was talking about. Well, I think, you know, after your conversations we were looking at, there was a
difference between price just went up on things, and I didn't get a sense that anyone was willing to help them on that. And then there were things where they asserted it was a design problem, and we were going to sort through that, as
was the original intention of this workshop. But then we came back with, if we don't get this money, we're you might as well call the bond. And so that leads me to believe they're
just out of money. And I'm also concerned that this wouldn't be enough to finish it. And we would. That's my concern that we would pay it and we'd still owe at the at the end of it
wouldn't be done. Yeah. From the legal aspect, you know, we've been told roughly a year to go through that process. Is there any way to, to shorten that. So I would defer to Mr.
Saltzman on that. But I don't think he's going to be able to guarantee you for sure. He can give you an estimate on it. But well, as with all matters of the law sometimes, and they can
get complicated and lengthy. So and again, I'm not offering any legal advice. But, you know, from our experience based on, you know, another project that will I will not I'm sure that all of you are very familiar
with where we had to go through the whole surety and bond process. It wasn't it wasn't pretty. It was a significant delay to get a recovery contractor on board. However, this this project, obviously
every project is unique. So this this may you know, you can't really compare, you know, the projects. But I will say we involve the surety early in the project when we received early
indication that, like I mentioned earlier, we provided the notice to proceed in in December of 2022. We hadn't seen any action, any movement after countless, you know,
attempts at communicating, when are you guys going to get out here and start, you know, mobilizing and actually get this project going? It took them a full almost eight months to actually show any type of
work on site. So at that point, we thought it was we proactively reached out to the to the bond and actually let them, you know, gave them the indication that we are already starting to see warning signs
here. So at least we've kind of like, you know, kept them in the loop early on, if that helps. And Commissioner, I just
want to reiterate, I'm comfortable going forward with money until the project's completely done. If not, you said I'm not. I'm not in favor
of getting the money. Completely done. Mr. Yes. I'm a little indifferent being that this is we've had. Obviously, we know about the gross avenue
situation and what happened with that, and none of us were even on the board when that got approved, you know. So. Every time the change order happened, we ended up I don't think we
asked as nearly tough questions, and we paid the money that we had to do to really get out of this situation. And yes, it was one of the bigger roads. You know, we but this was something,
you know, we had to take care of. I'm, I'm different from my fellow commissioners because when Bob had this meeting with me, his confidence about paying
these, this change order would be enough to solve it all. Do you do you feel that way? I don't know if I could comfortably answer that. I don't think I have. I don't
have the full details as, as as as Bob did have I mean, there were there were weekly meetings, you know, with, with, you know, with and so, so here's another thing, this work session, as
much as I you know, Mr. Makris is great for it all. He he. Bob needed to be here for it because there's a lot more details that need to come out of this. You know, when I had
that talk with Bob, it was, you know, this was going to be. So if we go with option one, we pay the 400,000. And, you know, supposedly the job's going to be done start to finish, demolish the old clerk's
building and we're going to cut a ribbon, supposedly. Right. Supposedly we go with option two. We and this is our bond or their bond. That way I have a better understanding. It's a
performance bond okay. So what's going to happen. How long are we going to wait. And what are the chances that possibly we're going to end up spending a lot more than the 400,000? There's a lot of questions I think. Yeah,
possibly that, you know, there I don't know if I could provide those answers to you. So, you know, this board, the rhetorical questions are but I don't know. I'm honestly but
it's unfortunate Bob's not here right now. But guys, I do believe I've heard that, you know, they provided us assurance that, you know, that this is their bare minimum.
There's I think, you know, even in the memo, Bob mentions, you know, when before he left on medical leave, you know, he drafted this. And I believe that they provided him assurance that this is their bottom line minimum amount for
us to get us to the finish line for ribbon cutting. There are some other factors that play into this. So take take it as as that I don't I don't think this work sessions I mean
there's a lot of incomplete answers. And honestly, if this board wants to take direction of taking the bond on and delaying progress for another year, year and a half, possibly
two years for if this stuff's going to go on for we got some big projects coming up guys. And you know y'all you guys have all been rolling into one another and we're already at
and I'm counting. Believe me, we're at 1.5 to $1.6 million in change orders since we accepted the one the October 1st budget. So when we talk about, you know, the wool being pulled over my
eyes, unfortunately, that wasn't the case. So this board needs to decide. We sometimes we got to take the responsibility of projects that we didn't accomplish. We didn't even start except the realities
of them for this government. Pay them off and learn to deal with some of these projects one step at a time. So if we're going to bond out just to let this delay on for a year and a
half, I mean, it's going to cost us a lot more as opposed to possibly getting a $400,000. They completed it and maybe they needed a little bit more of a change order. I don't
believe that case, but, you know, it'd be nice to have Bob here. I'd like to go with option one. Get this off our hands and look where the money's coming from again.
Stormwater, sewer, penny funds, water, sewer. Non-Departmental. These are all funds that were supposed to go towards projects that we were supposed to budget for this year, but now we're
using these money that was supposed to be freed up for projects this year to pay for projects that were approved back in 2021, from Gross Avenue to over here, the city clerk's
building. So this board needs to pay off some debts that we had nothing to do with. Get these projects done. That way we can move forward because that building sits there for a
year or year and a half and it's like that. It's not good. And I'm telling you, it's going to be more than the $400,000. So for the way Bob presented it to me, it is confidence. I had
to believe him in the way he said it. So that's why I want to go with getting this paid off. And originally was going to be five over 500,000. So they've worked it down to
400,000 at this point. So when that was presented to me it was a little over 500. So guys, you know we're going to borrow money to pay for other projects,
but we're going to bond out just to not finish projects that are going to incur way more change orders in the future, plus costs for our bond. If we sit there and play this,
you know, long waiting game, we saw it with gross ave. None of you guys made us think about it, you know, and but yet now we want to pick on this one so things happen. Unfortunately,
they've been very you know, they were back to back on some of these projects and we're either going to pay it or y'all are going to play hard and we're going to prolong this for a year, year and a half, and
it's going to cost a lot more. Plus, with all these other projects we got coming up that you guys so hard wanted to push through, it's going to be a tough year for staff, I'll tell you that. And that's why staff and project administration
needed that extra help. That way we didn't overburden them. So it seems like this board wants to bond out. I think it's the bad move because it's going to cost us a long time and more money in the future, and at the
increased rates and this different money we got coming up, seems like we need to be shoring up things that we're out of our control initially anyways. So thank you. So yeah,
we'll go one second though. What the one thing that's different than when we spoke to Bob and City manager, we were unaware of these unpaid subs.
Right. Correct. My understanding was in order for work to continue, she needed this money to to get them back to work. I it wasn't clear that they were behind on their
payments to us. So we don't and we don't know the total. So even if we give her $400,000, then how do we know how many, how much of that money is going
to end up going back to to subs who did work a year or so ago, and then so the chances of that
were the worst case scenario is, as we give this person $400,000 and then they don't finish the project, they use a chunk, a big chunk of that, because we
don't even know what that number is. And so I think in my opinion, to to proceed, one is we need the city attorney to work with the bonding company
to find out, okay, what the process is, what the timing would be if we go ahead and call the bond in so that we know exactly how much time that is, because it may not be it
may not prolong this a year and a half or whatever. And then we obviously can't give this. We we can't in good faith, give
this contractor money when they haven't, when we're going to have possible mechanic's liens all over this, all over this project of which we're going to
have to pay again for. So I just don't think, you know, I agree with Commissioner Gulyas. We don't have enough information to make this call. I think that again, given what
I know, I would pick door number two, but I still think we need to do some research on that. And again, I don't know how we're going to find out
short of sending out confirmation forms to every single sub. If we know, even if we know who they all are, to find out whether or not they
have all been paid is, you know, is I don't even know that we could even do that. But I think at this point, you know, our procurement department is working closely with the surety
to kind of, you know, compare notes to find out, you know, here, here are all the notices to owner that of nonpayment. And then I guess they can kind of like understand. Well,
here's their list. And who got paid and what are the outstanding balances at this point is we don't know that even giving them the 400 will complete the job to we don't know how much of possible
mechanic's liens could get put on this property. I mean, we could give them 400 and have a half $1 million in performance liens put on the on the property. So we don't even we
have no way that we can hand this this contractor who has not fulfilled their obligation, $400,000 of taxpayer money. I can't see how we do that. And
and I know it's it's be nice to have that thing done. It'd be nice to have the ribbon cutting and and it'd be nice to get the all the clerk's staff in that nice new building. But I can't
go ahead. You said you want to say something, I definitely do. So there's been a lot of questions here, and I have the answers to these questions because I asked them already. So I have to disagree with a
lot of what Commissioner Kulas said, because I don't know if he asked those questions, but I'm going to answer them for him. First of all, as the mayor
just said, we do not know how many mechanics liens are out or could be out, so you can't even begin to offer them $400,000. I did ask salesman, should this
go to a bond? How long will that sit? He said as long as we provide notification to them that they're no longer on this job and they broke the contract, we can move ahead and do what
we need to do. So this is not going to go on for that. We still could be responsible for the mechanic's lien, but each mechanic's lien has to take on their own lawyer and deal with
us. Okay. But as the mayor also said, that could be way over this amount of money. And we don't know if what this amount of money justifies, because as
I said in my comments here, economic factors, that's a nice word, but I don't know what it means in English. I, I think things she's taken, DeMar has
taken no responsibility for what is wrong. I want to know how much it is to do that roof over, and I want to be compensated for that. The roof should have been done right the
first time, so we should be getting credits back for removal of that roof and a new roof put back. That's a as far as any of these other things
that have gone on. There's so many that the reason I asked the city manager to ask DeMar what all these things mean. And again, I wasn't told at that
meeting that we had mechanics liens out there. All that has to be done before we make a decision. We need to know all the pluses and the minuses. And I feel bad that you're the guy
up there. One of the questions I asked and I'm going to bring this up, I asked Doreen what why she went ahead in November 2024 when she failed the permit.
She said to me, and these are her words. City manager was there. We didn't we didn't. We did we? We didn't fail the she didn't even know that she did fail. And it was Bob who had to
tell her that she failed it. So you cannot be a GC and not know that you fail something. And at that point was the time for her to decide to remove the roof or
fix the roof or put it back. I don't think she had the money. This is my guess. I don't think she had the money then to do it. And her her roofer went out of business. We can't make a
comparison between Gross Avenue and here. Gross Avenue started the project and then it was the GC that went out of business. It was the guy. This is not the situation here. Situation here
is we have a completed project inferior, done in inferior. And at least the roof has to be decided whether we're going to rip it off and redo it and get
our 20 years out of it. With a 20 replacement, she offered us an extra ten years. That's that's snow to the Eskimos. That means nothing to me. So
there's a lot of things that we need to be here. But I did ask, like I said, salesman and it's he didn't seem to be a problem with that. And we need to have
all the factors of what all these numbers are and how much she's willing to cover the mistakes that were made. You
know, like I said, we do any GC does a scope of work. They price the scope of work. Did she miss price? The scope of work? If you mispriced the scope of work, you've got to take that on. The biggest thing
is if we renegotiate this contract, then we're opening the door for every contract after this to say bid low and then you could renegotiate because that's what Tarpon does.
I don't want that. I don't want to have the reputation that we don't know how to set a ground rule and stick to it. You know, change orders come from the person that's asking, not from
the contractor, unless the contractor brought up something and says, oh, by the way, I found this could be a better idea that we didn't look at, but otherwise we don't do change orders of $400,000 and
then not where that know 400,000 is even going to go. So all right, anybody else have any other comments? I would just say option one has a lot less cons than option two. And
option two relies on delaying more expenses, more legal, more everything. When I'm we need to have Bob here. Bob looked me in the eyes with the utmost confidence, saying this was
going to get the job done. I believe the man you know, this extra vendor stuff wasn't told to me. None of none of us knew it. So he just found out. Okay,
that's what we don't know. We don't know. We don't even know what that amount is of those vendors. That's a problem. So I agree with you. Bob said the same thing to me. But this is a new twist. Okay. So we got to
look into it. Yeah if it helps. So yesterday in our in I was in a conference call with, with our procurement director reaching out to the charity. So when we I know there was mention of mechanic's liens. So
I think it's synonymous. I'm not I'm not an expert. But you know there's payment bonds. So all these subs who have not received payment are going to the surety saying we did not
receive payment. So this is kind of but and what they what they suggested to us there is, there is if we decide to go forward with providing a change
order instead of just paying more directly, there is an option to go through the surety who acts as kind of like an escrow agent. The funds would be, you know, into an escrow account, and then they, you
know, distribute it and disseminate it amongst all the subs that actually provided a claim to them that they didn't have, you know, nonpayment, if that helps. That's what I'm
calling the bond. Or is that with calling the bond? No, that would be that could be concurrent, I would think to even know it would be instead of calling the bond, they they would act as a when they act as
an agent to help us facilitate the project. They, you know, the bond. The last thing the bonding company wants is to have to us to call the bond, and then they have to go hire a contractor because they lose
money on that, because they got to get a contractor to come in and fix things that that they didn't start and they got to mobilize. And there's a lot of costs involved that this contractor wouldn't have because they've already
mobilized. So, you know, it's but we but we have unknowns here. That's the problem. And we don't know who these people are. And the last thing we want is, is for us to spend all the
money on, on sub on paying old subs and then turn around and give her 400,000 and still not have a guarantee. She finishes. Now. That option with the bonding company helps a little bit. But still, you know, we're
still we still have to be able to rely on them. And that's a problem. Do we have a list of what is still left to be done? Yeah. Yeah. We could we could compile that, say again, we
could compile that for sure. I mean it's not it's not here. Yeah. We don't have like a detailed list of remaining outstanding items. That's another thing we need to have. Yeah. So why don't why don't we.
We request recircle. You know obviously you know what the concerns are up here. Let's let's, you know, we're each of us individually can talk to the city attorney if we want to
have more assurance on timing and everything. Yeah. And I put together some questions that I'll give to Mr. Salzman. The bond processing timeline
particularly, is this going to be six months? Is it going to be a year out? Attorney's fees for, I'm assuming, prevailing party depending on the contract language and some kind of
assurance that, you know, if this was a payment made, that it's final payment for the complete project and it wouldn't require anything additional. So if they would need any additional language or
some kind of other, the problem is when you when you when you're giving money to the contractor in order for them to have enough capital to finish
the job, you're trusting that that contractor. And that's the part. That's the part that's that's very difficult for us. They they want us to give them money so they can go pay the
subs to finish the job. Yeah. And but they have a history of not according to what we're hearing. They have a history of not paying the subs already. And so there's not a guarantee that we don't have all the
mechanics of the subs. Pay them the 400 and they still don't finish the job and they do it wrong. What about you? You mentioned the third party that we we could do the and they would pay it out as, as the, as
the construction was completed. Can we do the whole process through that? In other words a third party that controls the money and it doesn't go directly to them until they finish? That's my thing. I want
them to finish before we give them any money. I, I firmly feel it should be 200, around 200,000 instead of 400,000. I'm negotiable because I do like to
see the project completed. I I've experienced had had been in places where they set for years actually. And they don't get better, they get worse. And
then you got to go and spend money to get that all ready to go. If there's some way to to have a third party involved, maybe, maybe it's more
reasonable. Well, let's you have enough. I think you have enough direction, I think I do to go forward. Why don't we go ahead and and again get Mr. Saltzman in on this and let's.
And then if we have to the 24th, we can push it to the 20. Yeah. Let's let's push it. And if we have to have a workshop in between, we have to, to to hash all this stuff out. But let's
get the information and then we make a decision, a better decision. And hopefully by that time. And if there's if you have any ideas about how we can
flush out all the, the unpaid subs, that would be helpful as well. Do you know how much a new roof is? I don't we should know that. I will say I was
tasked and I actually did reach out to roofing who actually just finished, you know, our public safety building to actually provide a quote to Dmaa when we first were notified that, you know, there
were some deficiencies with the roof. So Dmaa did receive a quote to repair the roof a while back. However, I'll, I'll kind of put this disclaimer. I
believe Kontos is not an authorized, approved, you know, installer of this type of product. So therefore the warranty is not valid. You know, it's not valid unless they have a, you know, the their own. But
he gave us an idea of a price. He did he did give me a number that we can say, okay, we've had a contractor give us a price to to redo that roof. Right. So well, I don't know
about redo repairs. There's, there's a lot of like, you know, iterations that we could kind of consider, but you know, there are 400 not paying the roof. Correct. Right. So it's
not doing the roof too. So we got the roof. We got that I have I have a estimate for rip off put back and go over the old. And he is licensed but just not with that roofing with
his own roofing, which is what we did at the Public Safety building. So I don't need that. But we don't we usually don't have commissioners getting
quotes. Yeah. So all right. So no, no, I mean sure. All right. So all right. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.
Thank you guys okay. So as a since we have some additional time, any commissioners who want to stay in on this, Tommy Kiger is going to give us a
little bit of a briefing on what's going on with the Harbor Watch situation. We're not making any decisions. We're just going to he wants to give us some data. So anybody that wants to sit in on that, well,
it's not it's not in the work session. It's not in this work session. Yeah. We're adding it on. No, no you can't add on something that's not in the work session. That's right. He's going to give us a briefing. No you can't do that.
And I asked the city manager not to put it on and he didn't put it on. So now you're trying to bring in something that wasn't even supposed to be on this agenda, and I'm the one who wanted the reconsideration
for it all. So we don't decide we're going to make a deal without the neighborhood there. No deal. So no deals for me. So. Exactly. Well, the people aren't here anyways. Anyone who wants to. Why aren't you
meeting anyone who wants proper meeting? Anyone who wants it on the agenda? Anyone? People don't know the we didn't know. We didn't know we were going to have. We didn't know. Can we do can we discuss something in a
workshop? Not on the agenda. That's what it boils down to. Okay, okay, I'm good until 245. Then I'm going to walk in. Yeah. And the reason it wasn't put on
is because we didn't know if we were going to have time. We thought this these items were going to take over. And if we had some time, Tommy was going to come up and talk to us a little bit. Anyone who wants to
stay in the meeting can. And well, I told you guys I was leaving because I'm not going to we're not going to have this debate on what type of deal we're going to give them without the people being there. I think that was wrong. And
what we're happening, we didn't we're not making it. We didn't make any deals on whether we're going to or whether we didn't make a deal on the logo. We didn't make a deal on the construction of the new clerk's
building. It's a conversation. Once again, you pulled a fast one. If you would have been transparent with you once again, you would have put it right on the paper. Once again, you you. Therefore, I'm going to leave because that's not transparent.
That's your neither does the HOA know about it or the citizens that we originally canceled the agreement upon. And I'd ask the city manager when this type of stuff happens, put it in writing for the meetings, because this is
unacceptable. They're not aware of it. So I'm leaving. Okay. One day we don't cancel stuff without people knowing. We can be more transparent. Okay, so
I'll go ahead and begin a quick briefing. So Harbor Watch is a private gated community in northwest Tarpon Springs, a private infrastructure, private water pipes, private roads,
private sewer infrastructure. It's all behind a master meter. And historically, we've offered Submetering as a service to this community. And then in October 2025, the BOC voted not
to extend that Submetering agreement. What's the city policy as it stands on private infrastructure and master meters? We have two pieces of code that are pertinent. One, private, privately maintained
potable water facilities shall be master metered. That's a requirement that's applied to all gated communities, apartment complexes, mobile home parks within the city. With this one exception. And
also we don't maintain or service private water infrastructure on gated communities, private roads, et-cetera that's also in the city code. It's cited here for your reference. For context,
there's 183 millimeter or multi-family metered water accounts in the city, and they serve over 4500 residential units. And this is the only one that we've provided Submetering
for in the past. So reasons that we're providing to help inform the board why we recommended discontinuing this agreement. One is there's a lack of billing accountability.
The HOA was in charge of maintaining the meters. They've been consistently in poor condition, but the city is collecting the money. So we're consistently in a position where we're forced to estimate bills and we're issuing bills
to our residents of this HOA, and we have no reasonable assurance that these are going to be accurate or representative of their actual water use. Two is that the HOA has not been meeting its
contractual requirements in the agreement. The agreement requires the way to maintain all the residential submeters 20% of all the accounts have current meter failures as it stands today. Lastly, the
committee will actually save money. So the combination of billings that they're doing here, having the master meter and then submetering everybody else because of how our water tiers are structured, in addition to the the customers,
the metering charge, they're actually paying an extra 1800, maybe $2,000 more combined as a community by having us provide this service than if they were, you know, under a master meter.
So they're overpaying, you know, for the same service that, you know, and we don't want that. Also, it's a drain on city staff. We have three city employees basically to process
10,000 bills for utility accounts every month. All of these meter failures and the inaction on the HOA to correct the problem has really been straining our city staff, and it's caused a lot of time for
billing, estimation, complaints, all that sort of stuff. And this is impacting our service and response time for other residents. There's private options available is another
good reason many communities use Submetering services to read meters and build residents. We actually did a quick, cursory look this week to see who might be interested in taking over this. You know,
that's not really our place. They can contract whatever they wanted, but within 24 hours, we had three kind of budgetary estimates from area contractors. And they're all very affordable, 350 to $6.50 per account
depending on what services were provided. You know, very affordable, very good deal. And lastly, but also importantly, you know, we need to follow the city code and we want to provide consistency for all of
our city customers. We have heard frequently that the the, the residents, they want to be treated the same way as everybody else in the city. And in fact, the matter is they're not in that. They've got a special agreement that we're
providing submetering this private residence, this private community that's not available to 182 other multifamily residential accounts in the city. So it's an uneven use of city resources. It's not
available to other communities to provide a little bit of context about, you know, what we're looking at on the nuts and bolts of administering this contract. This is an example of we've got the contract terms
that require them to to maintain their meters and maintain the infrastructure. And this is the most recent list of meter failures that we sent to them. We send this monthly, and you can see the
litany of problems that are occurring within the privately owned meter population dead batteries, meters installed backwards, negative readings, damaged electronic registers. The meters are physically
stopped. Some of these requests for maintenance actually go back to April 2024. So we've got, you know, some meters that we're having to estimate for, for for years. So here's a
basically a summary of the situation. I think at this point nobody's really getting what they or what nobody's really getting what they want out of this agreement. So the residents want accurate bills
for each home. They want to save money. They want someone they can trust for submetering, and they want reliable meter maintenance, and they want happy neighbors and residents. That's not what's happening right now. They're not getting
accurate bills. 20% of the bills are estimated they're overpaying to the tune of 1800 bucks a month. You know, on average. Or, you know, as a rough estimate for less for the privilege of having less
accurate bills. Neither the city nor the HOA combined can guarantee the accuracy of these meters and subsequently the bills. They're out of service for long period of time, and now everyone's angry. At the
city also has desires. We want to not be doing maintenance on private property. We want happy customers. We want to not be liable for billing errors between private parties. We want a reasonable staff
workload for our billing staff on estimation and customer service. And that's that's also not what we're getting. We're getting you know, we're spending more public resources on one private HOA in the whole city. They're getting plurality
of our billing estimates are coming from this one neighborhood. It's providing a drain on staff time, which can affect our level of service for other city residents. Our folks are dealing with angry
neighbors now because they're getting inaccurate bills, and they're getting all these multi-month, you know, sometimes years long billing estimates that aren't getting addressed. And then when they call our staff because it's a meter failure and we don't take
care of it, our staff has no, no, no ability to fix the root problem except, say, call your HOA and tell them to fix your meter. So we're having to act as the go between and get the
brunt of angry people, but they can't offer any solutions. And lastly, we have a billing process. It's very manual and it's really taxing and already kind of overstressed. Billing system is what we're finding.
So ultimately what we're recommending is the solution is to provide a private provider. Why it keeps jumping ahead. So
the staff have offered to assist the HOA in the past with finding submetering and building contractors multiple times, both to their HOA board and to some of the individual concerned residents. All the
times we've offered that it's not been accepted by the HOA again, we did just quickly look to see like how easy it would be to find this sort of service. Yeah, again, within a within a
day we had multiple, you know, budgetary estimates from interested contractors, very affordable. They could potentially implement this at a total cost to the community of 400 to $800 a month. And that
would they would end up saving about a thousand bucks a month as a whole community. And they would have more accurate bills. There's at least seven other communities in Tarpon Springs that that use the services like
this like Stonehenge, Keystone Ridge, the Meadows Mobile Home Park. And we haven't, you know, again, it's a private concern, but we haven't heard any complaints from them. So our
recommended path forward at this point is, you know, we have continued to provide some metering and billing agreements, billing services to Harbor Watch despite the agreement expiring on the second. The
contract terms allow us to continue that through the the transition period or if the contract expires. So there's there's no need to extend the contract for us to continue that service. And our goal
isn't to like leave them in the lurch and say, all right, it's it's October 3rd or February 3rd. Now you're you're on your own. We want to have a smooth transition for them. We have been working with the HOA on a
transition plan. They told us they might need to update their budgets and work through contracts, and maybe amend some of their, their agreements. But that's that's what we're recommending is to continue to provide submetering assistance
during a six month transition period under the existing contract, with no renewal required. One other thing is knowing that there's some liability associated with this.
Discrepancies between the master meter and how we're deducting residential bills off. We did talk in the internal auditor would be open to reviewing this at board
direction, if that was desired, to look at what the financial implications are of of having us in the situation where we're kind of the go between for collecting money, that we have low level of certainty about
the accuracy of the bills. Thank you. So let me just let me say something, not just to the people in this room, but whoever's watching on, on the
YouTube is that despite what the commissioner said in his diatribe on the way out, I'm a
businessman, okay? And I think if you've seen me now functioning for nine months, right, ten months as mayor and you'll see that and I think the
vice mayor can attest to it, and all of you can, that I look for solutions. I don't look for drama. I don't care about it. I
want to get to a so when when I the reason that I wanted you to come up, you know, if we had time to have a conversation because you shared some data
with me, that if we can find a solution to this, that can work. And once I have an understanding from my fellow
board members that it's reasonable request, then I can reach out to those people short of a theater at a meeting and
see if we can come to a resolution that they can live with the city can live with, and we avoid a drama show. I don't care about drama shows.
They don't matter to me. I care about results. And I want to see any time I can resolve things with the residents and
is is always a win for the city. Okay, you know, we have had a whole, you know, somebody somebody said to me one time
not too long ago about, you know, you know, and we hit the the nerve, right. Anclote harbors. Right. Anclote harbors. If you look back and you say,
what did we learn? Did we learn anything? And I always do that. I always do that in all the time that I in my practice with my staff, anytime something would happen, I always say,
what did we learn? What what we learned was that when you go Defcon four, you get nothing, okay? You get nothing. And and
somebody asked me about affordable housing. Why couldn't we have gotten affordable housing allowance from them when they were
building 424 apartments? They're gonna build 424 apartments. What if we. Maybe we could have got 60 apartments at an at an affordable, discounted rate that could have
been used for teachers, for firefighters, for police officers that want to try to live in town. But we couldn't because when Def Con four,
right, it went into lawsuits and and and and we again we went hard right. So that's not my style okay. That's not my
style. So I'm a businessman now. I'm not I don't compromise I voted no on in Cold Harbor and I vote no again today. I think it's it didn't meet the comp plan on the traffic but once it
but but again when you go Defcon four there's no room for compromise. Right. It's either it's it's it's it's it's die or nothing okay. And and so anytime these things come up
and I see people get heated up and we had people from Harbor Watch come over here, we we all met with them in, in the, in the room. And we had talks and we heard a lot of different. It
was it was kind of wild. Right. So you know they, you know, issues between the residents themselves and meters and accusations that meters have been tampered with by other
residents and all kinds of, you know, kind of silliness. We saw, okay, rather than we fight that downstairs where we can get information to approach them and say, okay, here's an option.
Now they can say no and they can come down and we can have the, the, the drama show if that's what's necessary. But wherever we can avoid that and get a compromise for the city,
it's good for everyone, right? Am I wrong? I love a compromise. Okay, okay. So that's what this is. This is not trying to break transparency. We're on TV. It's
not there's all the transparency in the world. So and I'm saying exactly what I want to do. I'd like to cut a, an arrangement with them if we
can. If we can, if we can't, we can't. Okay. So if so we have an option to give them a period where because right now we did
not cancel the contract. The contract expired. Yes. Correct. Okay. So the word cancel we the word saying we cancel the
contract is not accurate okay. The contract expired. And it's whether or not we renew that contract to continue to read meters again that we know that
that you say and I believe every word you say because I, I really respect you and we have to respect our staff. If we don't respect our staff, we we
fail to function properly. You know, we have a we have good people working here. And I know you care, just like every single person up here in our in our in led by our city manager
who had nothing but. Good feelings about. So when you tell us it's a an issue we have to listen to that. Okay. We have to listen to that. And if
it's taking unnecessary time because all these meters are busted and not working, when we do, do we have 25% of the meters in the city in ill
repair? I hope not, no, no. So but we have 25% in this community that are under repair. So and normally what you have in you know, and we have the,
the, the fire chief, assistant city manager sitting over here who lives in a gated community. They have a master meter. Okay. So all that, we have 18 communities that are private
communities that have a master meter, which means that they there's one bill, one usage of water that comes to that
community. The community can choose to either have individual meters and have them read. So everybody pays exactly what they think of, of that master amount that each should
pay, or they can allocate. Right. And in the, in, in in chief Young's case in his community, they allocate, they say okay all the two bedroom
apartments pay this much. The three bedroom pay this much, you know, and and so forth, so on and so forth. So that's a choice they get to make. Every community gets that choice to make. In this case we had this.
And I think I actually think the our former mayor would may have been around when that whole deal. So I think he can give us some history a long history. Yeah. So he can give
us a little history on it. But regardless of that, it's a choice right now to do something we don't do for all.
817 other communities 183 182 I'm sorry, 182. There's 182 master metered multifamily communities. Okay. I'm way off. I'm I'm I got zero left off.
Okay. So anyway, so master metering is not uncalled for. And we have a you've done the research for them which we, we offered at that meeting. And
you offered that you would find them a private meter reading service that would bill them and, and do all that that was actually cheaper than what we're charging them here at the
city now. In order for them to do that, they need to bring their equipment up to snuff. Right. And that's why if we give them time, whether it's six months or we give them a
year, I'm fine with giving them a year. We just keep doing it for another year. I know it's a pain, but we've been doing it this long. You do it for another year and then during that year they all can buy the
proper equipment and then have their meters read privately at a at a small savings from what we're charging, and then they have complete control of their, of their affairs. Am I wrong?
It's actually there's more than that. Even the some of the contractor or the contractors that we talked to, they gave us kind of ballpark estimates for if they if they needed the contractor to come in and standardize everything, which
would facilitate the entire thing. It would be a sort of one stop shop. You'd have one guy, one service that would take care of servicing the meters, reading the bills, doing rereads if necessary,
doing any repairs on a, you know, on a cost basis, creating a customer portal. And they even do enforcement for nonpayment and late fees and all that sort of stuff. And if
they I think if they wanted an entire new metering system, the the private contractor seems to be doing it. Some of them seem to be doing this as like a loss leader. They can actually replace the entire meter population for cheaper than we
can buy the meters from from our manufacturer. So what what what I was hoping to get from the the other commissioners that stayed here is just a
feeling that if, if, if they feel okay for us to approach the city, whether it's city manager, whether I do it, it doesn't matter. Approach the
the their board and make this offer prior to again going through a whole big public hearing downstairs because I think there's a a simple
solution. I think this a lot of this is going to get exacerbated because, you know, whenever you go downstairs and you have people coming up and it gets it gets different, that's again, that's my style.
So like it or not, you get you got a little over two more years of me and anytime. Thank you. Anytime I can facilitate things like this, I'm going to
do it regardless of whether I'm accused of being a nontransparent. So this one former mayor, would you please. Well, I won't go into all of it
because it's some of it's not. I will with you later if you if you'd like. I mean as far as the meeting is concerned, but it it there was, there were
problems with this in the very, very beginning when they decided what they were going to do. And, and I don't think everybody else is aware of that. I think, Tom, you probably know a little bit about that. That's
number one. Number two, you said 182 master meters. We have. How many of those are similar to Harbor Watch? Quite a few. There's we have a lot of you know, that's a mix you know, of
like I'd like to know because you're opening Pandora's box too, which is something we've got to consider. And. This was an agreement that was made way
back when. And, and, and I think you're exactly right in trying to work it out with them right now, as I understand, you're dealing with two different groups. You're dealing with the board, and
you're dealing with some people that don't like the board. And I would say we don't belong in the middle of that. So I would love to see it just worked out.
I think that's what needs to happen. You're you're 100% correct to provide the board some context for how like a typical of an agreement this is. So we've talked to several
other nearby utilities Oldsmar, Dunedin, Temple Terrace, the county pretty much no one offers private sub submetering of private master meter communities. And oddly enough,
one of the private contractors that we were talking to, just to get budgetary like estimates on this, they were kind of offered an unsolicited opinion of they've been doing this for
a number of years, and we have hundreds of accounts across the country that we provide this service to, and they've never heard of a city doing submetering for an HOA. So it's it's very atypical. I couldn't find any other examples. Other
cities that do require submetering. They require it as a contractual thing. It's mostly for like landlords to make sure landlords aren't taking advantage of folks. But
I don't want to forget. One other question is. What if we renew this for another? What? What was it, a 30 year
agreement or 50 year five? Anyway? If we renew it and assume all of that, then how much are we assuming? In other words, I think the bottom line is they know about what they're
going to have to pay upfront. And and I'm attorney may want to tell me to shut up, but I, I think they want us to pay for it, not them. I think it's
enough I don't think I don't think they've ever said that. Several of the contractors that we discussed, like they can utilize the existing metering infrastructure. So there's going to be a sunk cost no matter what, of if they want to
if they want to elect to continue submetering, they need to, they're going to have to fix all the stuff that's broken out there. But the good news is, is that all the investment that they've already made for, like
the portions that are still working, those are it seems to be readily, you know, convertible to a private system. So there's not like a bunch of sunk costs that they would have
to oh, we got to get rid of all these and go on to a new system or something like that. Commissioner Banther. Yes. Thank you. I fully agree with the mayor, and obviously I appreciate Frank's insight because because of his tenure,
and I did speak with George Pappas today, who I believe was on the board. That's the email I sent you, Tommy. And I really appreciate your, your your your concise presentation. Thank you.
You know, I think, you know, obviously, and I, we me and my partner used to own a nationwide company. We manage Scotts. Scott Scott's, Scott's neighborhood and we all in
master metering is very common. And you hire a company or we've even hired meter readers to go in and do it. It's very easy to do. And I think in the long run that's going to be best for Harbor Watch, right? But what I
want to do and I kind of learned more after talking with with George Pappas and members of the board. I think we need to give them some time to make that transition, which I think is what you're saying, mayor,
and I think that is best handled outside of a public meeting just because of the theater. And you don't know, you know, unless they represent unless they have one person speak for them. You don't know who you're who you're negotiating with. And obviously
so it's not ideal what we're doing for them. And it's not ideal for them with water bills that, that, that don't, that don't that, that, that don't match and the outdated infrastructure. But I think we need to give them some time to
change. I think if they knew they had 1 or 2 years, say we give them 1 or 2 years extension on this, and they know in that time frame they're going to have to come up with their own system and, and get
with a proper, you know, master meter company. I think that's fair. I just don't want to leave them hanging, which I don't think we're doing because we because I don't recall canceling an agreement. I tried to rack my brain. We didn't
like we didn't like, not do it. Did we vote not to renew at a meeting? We voted not to renew. Okay, I must have just missed that. But I just want to give them the time. I would like to have the meeting that that that
that the mayor's proposed where everything's laid out. Show them how you know. Yes, I know it's convenient to just have the agreement continue. But here's what's happening and here's what's being different
in your community as opposed to others. And then give them, say, 1 or 2 years time, we will continue to, to, to, to to hobble along for 1 or 2 years. Just put it in writing and then
they know at the expiration of that, that's it. And they can fix it in time. You know it's hard for association law moves slow as molasses. It's worse than city law far worse. And
they might need two years. They have to have meetings, votes, majority votes, special assessments. It's not as easy as it sounds. So I want to make sure we give them the time they
that that they that, that they need for that. And just to be fair, but I think it's obviously clear to me we can't continue on how we are with them or with any community. But
I want to be fair and make sure we're giving them the chance to to understand what's happening and to make a plan to change. And I think that's what you're proposing, mayor. So I think that's the best path forward.
Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have four minutes. I'll be using three. I heard what the mayor said. I agree 100%. I heard what Commissioner Donato said. I agree and heard what
commissioner said. The only thing that I do have a differ, which I'm not familiar with, is the turnaround time. I don't know, I it may be fair to give
the 1 or 2 years. It's kind of like putting us back and making a deal on five years. I think if you give that, I would like to ask them their opinion of
how long it would take them to get this done, and not for us to supply a because usually if you give somebody that time, they will take that time. Good idea. Yeah, that's a good idea.
So what. Yeah, I could ask the vendors if I may. So but hold hold that thought because. So I do what I do want to do is I do
not want to be I'll listen to the residents, but I want to negotiate with the leadership because the leadership, I don't even know when it changes. So we could be sitting there talking to this leadership
right now and next year X amount is voted out. We have a whole new leadership and we could be dealing with that. So I don't want that either. We need to move forward with this and we need to move forward.
You know, if you want to grandfather something in I'm okay with that. But it has to be something that we decide to do because it's wearing down our billing department. Our you
just went through a whole things. Meters are put in backwards. We're getting 40 different meters that aren't working. All of this is a headache. And we're not giving
this special treatment to anybody else. So why give anybody here a special treatment. You have an issue. If your issue is you don't trust the board, vote in another board. But we cannot
get into the weeds of the board's good. The board's bad. I don't want any of that. I don't want to touch that. So that's that's where I'm coming from. And I want to be fair as
well. So if it comes to the two years, I, you know, but I want to stay with the same people that are that originally were negotiating with. I don't want them playing musical chairs
with, with the board members so that we well, I don't I he said that I didn't say that because I've seen how these boards go and that's why I'm not part of one. So that's what I have to
say. So defer that item on Tuesday. Well, that, that that's exactly what I was going to say. I think that what we need to do is we need to have
the get leadership, the leadership, whoever is no leadership over at Harbor Watch. Oh, yes. We need to get the board to come here to City Hall.
Sit down with you, city Manager. If they if you guys want me in the mix, that's fine. We we give them this proposal, we go through it with them. We work
through it with these people. Not downstairs in a, you know, in a open forum, which is very hard to negotiate downstairs. We can't do that. You don't even know who you're
negotiating with. Just like the vice mayor's 100%. Right. We got we don't know who the heck we're talking to, so we. And this thing doesn't need to get demagogued that this is just
this is a this is a this is a business transaction, okay? With this between the city and and and and a neighborhood. So let's back this up. I think if
there's an agreement to pull this off of that agenda, I think that's the smartest thing. I don't think we can vote on that though. Well, no, but he can. He has the right to pull anything off the agenda. Okay.
He wants. So if he if he sees that we if you feel that I'm good with. I just didn't want to. No, no. He has the he has. That's his. He makes the agenda. He can do whatever he wants. So
we could want to raise. Yeah. And so we we we. And then let's just back this up. Find out get get some subs I mean get the vendors. Find out from the vendors again what the vice
mayor says. We don't know the amount of time it would take to change all their stuff, get it all fixed up. It could take a year, could take a year and a half or two years. Like, I don't think I'm going to bet
two years, but I could be wrong. He could be right. So let's let's back up. Sure. Let's get the right people in the meeting. Let's figure out what we need to do, that they can be happy
and live with the city can live with, and we move forward. Okay. Yes, that that's a great guidance that that's actually what we were working towards back in December where we had kind of left our don't do it
downstairs. No, no, we had been talking there and we had proposed, hey has a six month transition period. And they're like, well, we really feel like we need more like a year to get our financial house in order
and, and put some SOPs in place. We're like, well, bring us a schedule and we can look at that and see what that looks like. And that's what we're kind of waiting for. I think they will wholeheartedly prefer this. So yeah, I think it's
good all around. Yeah. It's best for you to get this done behind closed doors rather than in the entertainment field downstairs. Yep. Yes. All right. Thank you so much. So meeting everybody okay. With anybody
have anything to say? No. There's no comments. But he has a comment. They can make a comment. Anyways I think this was a good meeting. So meeting
adjourned. 242 I got I got thank you.