Board of County Commissioners

Cr ok, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Public service announcement, please kindly remember to silence your cell phones, electronic devices before we get going. Thank you kindly. Uh, today is MAY 16, 2025. We are located at 4000 South Tamiami Trail here in sunny Venice, Florida. This is the joint meeting between the Sarasota Board of County commissioners and the Venice City Council for the record, we have 4 of our county commissioners present, Vice Chair Ron Kutzinger is not with us this morning. And from the city of Venice, we have all, we have 6 of the 7 council people, including the mayor, Kevin Engleke is absent for the record. Thank you, ma am. Oh, hey, Kelly, how are you? Nice to see you. Ok. Um, very good. Before we get going, we are gonna stand, if you can, we re gonna start with the pledge and the vice mayor of Venice wills, please, sir. Right Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under GOD indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Great, thank you, sir. And I d like to extend a warm welcome to the newest member of local government, and that is MR. Lloyd. Sir, if you would do us a kindness, give us a 32nd, uh, bio about yourself. Oh, very good. Thank you. I appreciate and I m honored to be here. Uh, I ve been a resident of the city of Venice since 1971, uh, proud graduate of Venice High School and University of Southford in Tampa, a, uh, lifelong cpa, uh, been involved very much in a nonprofit world and the area and, um, just consider it an honor to be selected to be part of this body. Thank you. Thank you, sir, and welcome and Commissioner Knight, my apologies, I didn t read the agenda. I had you reading the pledge this morning. I got a little ahead of myself, so, uh, I m, I m going down, but, uh, yes, sir. Ok, let us begin with agenda item number one, we re gonna go into the joint discussion items, uh, a, b, c, and d, uh, a will be the creation of a limited anchorage boating area and uh it looks like we re gonna have who from, from Venice lead us in this? Yeah, you guys want to come on up? Good morning, and if you would just kindly state your name for the record, please. Ashley Cassell, Assistant Director of Public Works. Master Officer Paul Joyce, Venice Police Department Marine Patrol. Well, good morning. Good morning to you. How are you? It s Friday, it s Friday. It s a good thing. We tried to never give him the microphone. Never give Paul. Oh, ok. Ok. You can see it? Ok. All right. Oh, ok, yeah, yeah, ok. So first we ll start seeing. Oh It s on the here, but we don t have it anywhere else. Can we get a little it? I don t know how to get it there. Ok, very good. So ok. Wherever. Everything. You think it might be a few minutes? I want to just go ahead and take a 5-minute break so we can, uh, Use the restroom. There you go, very good. We ll take a 5 minute break and uh I ll be back in about 9:10. You. Ah But Ah to to It ok, welcome back ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate your patience for the um quick technical difficulty workaround, uh, MISS Ashley and, uh, Officer Joyce, you are recognized and we are ready. For your presentation. So thank you so much for having us. Um, we wanted to give you a little update and background on the Anchorage limitation area that is um installed and effective and active in Robert s Bay as of MARCH 1st, 2025, um,,, 1 of the main reasons behind the uh joint partnership with the county and thank you so much for all of your support as we work through this was the proper control and regulation of live aboard and derelict vessels in the waterways is a challenge for numerous municipalities. Ities across uh, across the state and the state regulations are very limited, um, but as you can see in the photo below or next to the um Wording is the their navigational hazards and nuances adjacent to residential properties. There s properties that surround Robert s Bay and uh we get quite a bit of complaints, phone calls, and so forth, and working with pd, uh, we do have to remove them at the city s expense, so there is a cost associated with, you know, removing these vessels as they Lay out there and slowly start to sink and um with the recent hurricane seasons we ve experienced since 2022 here the um impact has been substantial in that area, especially when they re not properly secured for the inclement weather coming through. You know, as, uh, Ashley mentioned, you know, the biggest problem we have is, is a lot of these boats, you know, uh, they MAY show up just fine, but eventually they become, you know, at risk and at risk can be anywhere from uh anything as, you know, uh, you know. You know, open windows, compartments, things like that. Uh, taken on water, so we need to have something to address this kind of stuff, so they then become at rest, then they become derelict, you know, so with this, uh, Anchorage limitation that you know we worked very closely with you guys in the Sarasota County to implement this, you know, with the, you know, it all started with James Buchanan to, he started off with this and pushed it through and then Sarasota County was able to pick up that, uh. The ordinance and that we were able to work again work with you guys very closely and get this, uh, you know, collaborated and get this Anchorage limitation area started. It s, it s been very successful so far. It s still in its infant stage because we just, we just put it in effect March 1st. It s worked very well, you know, we, we haven t had a right anybody, any citations or anything like that at this point. Uh, everybody that has complied, that has been there for the 45 days has moved on and we have a couple of other boats that will be coming soon. That we re going to be talking to, but as soon as a vessel shows up into our area, we quickly identify it, notify the, uh, the owner of that vessel that they are now in Anchorage limitation area and that 45 day clock has started. So now This, you know, the brief history of this, we re, we re actually the only municipality in the city in the in the er yeah sorry in the state of Florida here on the west coast of Florida that actually has one that s actually functioning. You have Cape Coral and Pino County that are going to be, uh, picking us up here soon. They, they, we ve been in close contacts with them, uh, they ve been calling uh Ashley, um, a lot and how does this work? Ashley did all the permitting and everything and she ll get into that here in just a little bit. It was very long and very. Tedious. A lot of phone calls, a lot of time getting it all all started and everything and we followed every, every part of the statute on how everything was going to go and it s, it s been great, you know, how it s, how it all worked and how it finally all came together. Alrighty, to give you just a little background on how the process unfolds for anyone who wants to initiate or activate an anchoring uh limitation area. It starts with a city county ordinance revision and implementation as we worked with you guys on becoming part of that uh for the county as a whole and then the municipality is overseeing the bay that the anchoring limitation areas in, so as soon as that was passed and approved, I was then able to begin working with um. Fwc on obtaining the Florida uniform waterway marker permit, so they, it has to start with them and that permit number has to remain on all signage that you put in the ala and you ll see that we have an example of that slide, um, and once you are approved through them, you then have to work with fdep to obtain a request for verification of exemption for the Army Corps of Engineers based on the habitats surrounding the area. You want to put your ala in, in the event you do not qualify for the exemption. The process then has to go through the Army Corps of Engineers as well, which extends the time frame in which it will take to activate the area. Luckily enough, we were exempt from the process, um, and all the sea grass and all the habitats that you have to do, and then once you get that verification of exemption approved, you provide that to fwc and they officially. Sign the permit on their end. Your permit comes with a clause stating without a verification of exemption from Army Corps of Engineers is not active. So you, you, they do have to wait for your paperwork to be returned to activate your permit and then after that you get to secure your vendors for all your buoys, signage, pilings and installation if you re not able to perform in-house, we were not able to do that. We were just a little history. Everything was approved. In MAY of 2020, uh, 2024 with an installation schedule of SEPTEMBER of 2024 and then the hurricane season delayed our installation um with that because the vendor we were able to secure also his name emergency response vendor with their barge for the state of Florida, so they were on our waterways for quite some time and we were able to get it back on the schedule in FEBRUARY. The full installation took place and as Officer Joyce noted it was active MARCH 1st. And here is an example if you were to go through the bay, what you will see, uh, the state signs are the waterway signs are required and as you can see there is the county ordinance. As well as the permit number in the corner, you are required to have mockups made and turn them into fwc as well for approval on your buoys and your signage, um, and we have two, signs on pilings and we have 6 of the buoys around the area noting it. So once, uh, once this went into effect MARCH 1st, then we began the press release. We worked very closely not just with our own public information office. We also worked very closely with Sarasota County Public Information Office and uh make sure that that each before we put out anything in the press, we made sure that everybody was on the same page, uh, both government agencies. Once we did that, then we got that out there, pushed that out there, and we ve received a lot of positive feedback from from the Community, uh, and thanking us in Sarasota County for, for making this possible and And I think it s great that we that we have it now, we have here in in in the city of Venice, we have it here within Sarasota County, and we d love to see it grow from this, you know, elsewhere in, uh, Sarasota County. And uh you know, as far as the enforcement plan goes, uh, how that works, like I was saying earlier, once the vessel makes its presence in our Anchorage limitation area, then we, we notify the owner of that vessel, which we ve done already a couple times, uh, most of them are like, no, we re just, we re only here for a week or so and then we ll be on our way and and that has exactly is what s happened. This will help lessen what. A lot of people ask what is an Anchorage limitation here? Why do you do this? And the whole point of this is to keep vessels moving to keep vessels moving, not to be stagnant, not to be sitting, stored, um, left abandoned, and then now we have to deal with it, and when I say we, I mean everybody in this room, City of Venice, Sarasota County were all part of a removal of a of a derelict vessel and it does fall back onto the taxpayers a lot of times. Of course, we try to get back and go back. After the registered owners for that, a lot of times we do recoup some of the funding from that, but not always. And it s going to reduce the the complaints that we ll receive from all the homeowners. Unfortunately, these vessels, you know, show up in front of homes along, you know, with our beautiful waters and everything like that. People don t want to see that stuff, but, you know, they don t mind the boats out there. They just, they want to make sure that those vessels are taken care of and it s gonna make it much safer for the environment with, you know, an environmental hazards or anything like that when we have storms, we, we still to this day, after Hurricane Helene and Milton, we have a vessel in the backyard of someone s home, uh, from, from this Anchorage area, so that s gonna reduce a lot of that kind of stuff, hopefully. And then, and then the, again, reducing the expenses to our taxpayers, uh, making sure that, you know, again, our waters are, are, are clean and in the environment is is safe and all that, and we just want to make sure with the help from you guys and everybody here that we made this possible. And again, I can t thank you guys enough for jumping on board with. And and working very closely with us and making this happen. So with this, at this point, does anybody here on on the board um have any questions at all for us? Ok, thank you both very much for the presentation. I going to look to my right and then we re gonna look to my left and we ll go in that order from questions from the board. So any questions, Commissioner Knight will move left. Commissioner Smith, you recognized. Yeah, thank you. It s very interesting. I was curious, uh, have the city of Sarasota or Lombow Key contacted you all about, uh, your success, not as of yet, the um Charlotte County has that is the next presentation that I m giving in JUNE. They have asked us to come down and and Cape Coral sorry and come down and present. And explain to them how to move forward, but Longboat in Sarasota, not as of yet. Good, ok. Any questions from this side of the dais? Yes, sir, MR. Reed. Thank you and thank you for the presentation. So when did the anchorage go into effect again? What date? MARCH 1st of 2025. And how many vessels have we seen anchored during that time. Well, we, we, we currently have um. We Today we have 4 vessels that are in there after the first week of JUNE. We ll have one. Ok, but is the the one vessel under the 45 day limitation. Yeah, they re, they re under the 4, they under the 45, uh, uh, day and so they re all active, they not the derelicts. Correct, yes, yes, absolutely. Uh, the other ones that I spoke of, um, are gonna be getting removed uh here shortly, the first week of JUNE, uh, for removal and disposal. Uh, and one thing, um, you know, after that 45 days, I did not mention my apologies is then they have to remove 3 nautical miles from that location. And they cannot return for 6 months. Thank you. Very good. Uh, yes, Vice Mayor. Yeah, thank you. Um, I just want to say thank you to our people, but thank you to everyone here. Uh, I happen to live on Robert s Bay and The vessel that they re talking about on somebody s backyard is my neighbor, and it s been there since Milton, um, and it s, it s a bit of a problem because there s a lot of finger pointing going on, but the reality is that that vessel had an owner that had no insurance and no money and so that causes a lot of problems when it comes time to try to get rid of it, so this particular ala is very, very important. The other thing we have to keep in mind is this is an area that is used extensively by the Venice youth Boating Association and so without derelict boats around, it makes it much easier for them to, you know, learn how to learn how to sail like they re supposed to, so I thank you personally for all of this. Thank you, sir. Yes, COUNCILMAN Frank, please. Woman, I m sorry, COUNCILWOMAN Frank, did I say that? I caught myself after it came out. Sorry, sorry, just a quick thank you to the city of Venice. It obviously would not have been possible without the collaboration from the county, but we are a smaller municipality, and when a new tool in our tool kit becomes available, uh, like what was made possible thanks to Representative Buchanan s work on this. Sometimes we like to sit back and wait and let other municipalities or counties take action. Let them work out the kinks, but instead, in this instance, the city really took leadership on the issue. They knew how important it was to our residents, and they, um, led the charge, and now we can be an example to other municipalities and counties, um, so again, thank you for, um, moving forward on something that was uncharted waters, literally, and, um, thank you for the collaboration with the county. Very good, thank you, ma am. Any further questions from the status uh for our presenters. Ok, seeing none, thank you both very much. Have a great weekend. Ok, moving right along onto uh agenda item 1b. Uh, cue the music please. This is a very important topic. I m just kidding, um, which will be the Wellfield Park transition presentation by Sarasota County and Nicole Risler is here this morning to walk us through. Good morning, Nicole. Thank you. For the record, Nicole Risler, director of Parks, Recreation and Natural Resources for Sarasota County and I am being joined today, um, this morning by the assistant city manager, James Clinch, he we re going to tag team this um a little bit as we start and as Jamie s helping to get this up. Um, we ll be providing you an update on the Wellfield Regional Park and, uh, really the work that has been done over the last 3 years to get to. A place where we have a new interlocal agreement for parks operation, uh, the conveyance agreement for Wellfield Park and the funding agreement, which we ll talk about, um, but at first, I m going to hand it over to James to kind of give you a little background of how we got here. Thank you, Nicole. Good morning, commissioners and council members, um, thank you for having us and uh we re very, very glad to be here today to present on Wellfield Park. So, uh, I m the assistant city manager, James Clinch for the city of Venice, and, uh, Nicole and I have had the honor, I ll call it an honor, of negotiating this agreement for over 6 years, um, which is pretty impressive, uh, span of time, and, uh, I can say it s been an active negotiation for that full 6 years. Uh, but really, Our work on the interlocal extends even further back than that. Um, it s been an active conversation between our organizations for over a decade, um. So I think that just speaks to the uh uh significance of this agreement that you you both approved this past fall, um, so it, it is really something that we re uh happy with, proud of, and, uh, thrilled to see implemented for the benefit of our, our residents, both of our residents, so, uh, this interlocal agreement really, uh, is based on the county s 2016 Parks master plan that recognized. Their role versus municipality roles for regional and then non-regional park operations. And you might be kind of asking yourself why it took so long to get where we got, and I think that speaks to the complexity of this agreement and lots of moving parts and pieces, lots of interest from the public, lots of funding challenges that were associated with this. So, uh, Nicole asked me just to kind of speak and highlight, uh, some of the strategies that helped us to get to the end of this, and I think that uh these are strategies that can help us with, with all of our Inlocal work, which is on numerous different agreements and and there ll be many, many more into the future. Um, so for Nicole and I, when we started in 2018, our first focus, number one was improving the staff level relationships. Um, our staff, city and county are working side by side every single day in our community, um, which is great, and that s what we want, um, there are, there were periods in the past where that relationship was strained and it wasn t as positive and and functional as it is. Today. Um, so that was our number one goal is let s make sure our staff and her staff recognize, we both have the same mission. We re both here to serve our users of the parks, which are city residents, county residents, residents from all over the world, um, and we have very, very similar goals in that respect, um, and we made a lot of progress on that. Number 2, we worked on is joint Capital Parks planning, and I, I wanna thank our, our board especially for this, you know, we really made Park capital improvements are priority over the past 6 years we ve put a lot of resources into our parks in the county helped us to prioritize and recognize where those resources needed to be spent. Uh, Nicole and her team, they spend every day in a lot of our city parks, so they know what the needs are and and where we need to focus on improving, um, and then it was our role to step up and say we re going to devote the resources to that, and you all have done that. Our parks are are really uh from a capital standpoint and the best place they ve been in a long, long time, with the exception of Wellfield, which we re going to get to in a little bit, um, and then we also did joint projects, which is pretty cool, um, you know, and when covid happened, in 2020, uh, we found ourselves with uh a lot of parks without people in them for a period of time. And we use that as an opportunity to do a lot of projects ourselves using our staff to make sure that that they stayed busy and that we could improve our parks, um, during a period where you didn t have people actively using them, so Nicole s staff and our staff got together and we did a lot of projects in-house and together within our in our local parks, which was great. Number 3, which was really pivotal to us, um, moving this agreement forward to you was kind of recognizing and and accepting what our different roles were as an organization. So as a city and as a county, you know, we have different strengths and different weaknesses as an organization we share a lot of common goals and missions, but we re also very different and uh it was important as we negotiated these agreements, we recognized the county is strong on regional facilities, athletic facilities, these, these big high impact uh park facilities and the city s a better situated for these neighborhood, uh, very boots on the ground, uh, community parks, which we, which we believe we do a great job taking care of. And finally, I have to mention all of the emergency work that s happened over the last 6 years. So, um, I ll probably MISS Items, but it s been a very busy 6 years when, when you think about red tide, uh, covid pandemic, more hurricanes than I could probably mention every one of those, uh, incidents, uh, Nicole s team and our team switch out of, of parks mode and we go into emergency mode and we re side by side in the trenches and we, we talk a lot about how how we use blue sky relationship building to be ready for the emergency, but we, what we found is true too is that the emergency relationships actually carry back over into the blue sky. So these emergency, um, the work that we ve done together has really worked to build trust and understand that, uh, you know, if we need something from each other, we re gonna be there. And that, that really helped us move this agreement forward. All right, so going back to Wellfield Park, uh, you know, it became apparent really quick that this was gonna be the focal point of our negotiations. For a lot of reasons, you know, it s a, it s a significant facility over around 80 acres or so. Uh, it s very regional, has a lot of activity for, from many different sports, um, youth and adult sports happening there, very active and uh very old, you know, it s, it was built in the 60s and 70s and a lot of the structures and fields are original, so it s reached the of its design life. Um, so we knew that this was gonna be pivotal to the interlocal agreement. And um You know, cost sharing to upgrade this facility really became the biggest challenge, which we all know, um, you all are redoing a significant uh regional athletic facility now and wrapping that up and so you know how expensive and, and uh uh resource intense that that project can be so that became the biggest issue and I just want to, want to applaud the work of both of these boards coming together to provide that funding solution because that was really the key that allowed this agreement to move forward. And at the end of the day it s gonna benefit our entire community, our city residents, our county residents, our visitors, our businesses, it s gonna have a ripple effect throughout the entire community, so we re very, very excited about that. These agreements were approved in the fall of 2024, um, actually between uh for the commission, between the two hurricanes, uh, which was pretty significant. I remember being in the eoc and Nicole pulled me aside and said, hey, our interlocal just just got approved, um, which was one silver lining while we were in the eoc there, um, so, uh, the next steps though, we re not done. We ve got a lot of work to do, uh, we ve been communicating almost daily on Wellfield Park because we re working right now on the conveyance, turning that proper. over to the county so they can really start on the redesign, redevelopment project for that regional athletic facility. Uh, we re getting very close. I will say we re, we re months away, just a couple of months away from conveying that property. We have some loose ends that we re working on, um, to, to get to closing, uh, but we re making very, very good progress there, and we re looking forward to uh to that happening. And then of course, OCTOBER 1 of 2026, the city will be taking over 7 local parks and the Venice Community Center. So we re working very actively. On that, we want to make sure that s a smooth transition as possible and that there s no interruption of services to our residents, so with that, I will turn the presentation back over to Nicole. Thank you. Exchange. All right. So just for some background, we re gonna, I m just gonna give some highlights on the 3 agreements that James just really spoke about that were approved last year in the midst of between two major hurricanes. Um, the first was the interlocal agreement, and I could not um agree more with James the last 6 years and the work that has been done, um, from both of our staff and us to get to this point has truly been remarkable. Um, the new interlocal will take effect OCTOBER 1st, as James just said. Um, and in kind of the major components of that is that the county will continue operating um of some variety of parks that we consider regional, um, so that is all of the uh beaches, um, as well as Marina Park and boat ramp. We will return 7 of the current parks that are under the inner local to the city of Venice for operations. Uh, we will continue to operate Pine Brook Park, um, on your behalf as part of kind of that bigger regional park um with Wellfield, and Chuckyer uh will uh we will operate for 3 additional years until OCTOBER 1st of 2029, and then it will return to city operations, of course, all of us hope that at that point, we have been able to collect. Actively um relocated, um, Little League off of that site and it can be redeveloped for other city operations, but we ll work through how and and how that can happen. Um, the term of that new interlocal agreement is 10 years, commencing on OCTOBER 1st of 26, and there is an automatic renewal for 2 additional 5-year increments. The second agreement, um, that was approved was the conveyance agreement, and so that s the agreement for Wellfield Park, uh, to be convey. And transferred to Sarasota County. Um, we are working very diligently on some last final things surveying, etc. Uh, to get to closing and um that means we will take full responsibility at that day, including all capital improvements, so I m sure the city side is happy about that. Um, but we re really excited and we ll talk a little bit more about what the next steps are in terms of that redevelopment. Uh, and then the funding agreement, uh, so the funding agreement was truly a pivotal part of this, um, along in this opera uh negotiation. We didn t want to take a park that we didn t know how we were going and to, to actually redevelop. And what that funding plan would look like. We didn t want 5 years later, um, for the community and everyone to be upset by the fact that it still looked exactly the way it did. So this was probably the biggest sticking point and really had, uh, to get to a mutual. Agreement. And I think, um, what was the outcome is amazing. Um, so that funding agreement does have the city providing um $20 million to the redevelopment of Wellfield Park, um, and, uh, the county, uh, contributing a minimum of $20 million we do anticipate that it ll be more than that, um, when it s all said and done. So just from a perspective, making sure everybody knows, you know, this is a vicinity map, and the reason I put this up because I know everybody knows where Wellfield is, but it s in really close proximity to some other key parks and preserves for us. Pine Brook there to the north of Wellfield, then Curry Creek Preserve, um, which is an environmentally sensitive land acquisition program, um, and the addition of the Edmondson, um, parcel as well. So that really kind of has that continuous, natural area of Pine Brook into the Curry Creek Preserve. And then down to the south and to the west, um, I point out Bypass Park, uh, Foxworthy campus, and you ll see in a few slides why we really believe that, uh, through the redevelopment in the community engagement process, all three of those parks, Pine Brook, Wellfield, and Bypass will be important in the master planning of all of that for lots of different reasons. This just is a close up of what Wellfield Park, um, and, and the pieces that are going to be conveyed, the yellow hatch mark at the top is