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DSAC Minutes 09/06/2000 RSeptember 6, 2000 TRANSCRIPT OF THE MEETING OF THE DEVELOPMENT SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE Naples, Florida, September 6, 2000 LET IT BE REMEMBERED, that the Development Services Advisory Committee, in and for the County of Collier, as the governing board of such special district as has been created according to law and having conducted business herein, met on this date at 3:30 p.m. in REGULAR SESSION at Conference Room "E", Horseshoe Drive, Naples, Florida, with the following members present: CHAIRMAN: Tom Masters Marco A. Espinar Brian E. Jones Dino J. Longo Thomas R. Peek C. Perry Peeples Herbert R. Savage NOT PRESENT: R. Bruce Anderson Charles M. Abbott David C. Correa Dalas D. Disney William P. Dillon Robert L. Duane Blair Foley Sally Lam STAFF MEMBERS PRESENT: Vincent A. Cautero Robert J. Mulhere ALSO PRESENT: Ed Riley Phil Tindall Will Walter Adam Carnow Mr. Salvaggio Page I September 6, 2000 MR. PEEPLES: Do we have an agenda? We still don't have a quorum. Let's get started. We have a motion on the floor to amend the agenda. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Does it even matter -- let's lump right into the proposed schedule. How about the FEMA update? MR. DEVUN: My name's Bob Devlin. I'm the Floodplain Management Coordinator. What I'd like to do is give you an update on where we are now with the flood maps for Collier County, including Golden Gate Estates, as well as the Coastal Study. Currently, we have favorable information to provide you with regard to Golden Gate Estates. Our study contractor, which is Dick Tomasello, Tomasello Consulting Engineers, more or less established -- he authored a study called Sheet 2D Study and he established that when he worked for South Florida Water Management. And what he's planning to do, based on FEMA's concurrence, is to establish flood elevations in Golden Gate Estates. What had happened, initially, in the maps dated 1998, was that the maps for Golden Gate Estates showed D zones changed to A zones. So they were unnumbered A zones. So consequently, what would have happened was, people looking for flood insurance out in Golden Gate Estates in an area changed to an A zone could pay as much as $2,000 a year for flood insurance. That was something that was -- those maps were done that way arbitrarily by FEMA and the intent of them doing that was to, more or less, force the community to make -- do their own study, and they have accomplished that. But we've accomplished some things, too. So that target date for approval of that study was originally August the 1st, then moved to September the 5th. And last week and earlier today, I spoke with Sally McGee, FEMA-Washington. I asked her about the progress on the letter to the community. They gave us a verbal approval but nothing in writing at this time. She explained that the late delivery of the letter was a combination of the bureaucratic process and understaffing. She said that everything was in order and the county should expect a letter approving the Sheet 2 Study the week of September 11th. Page 2 September 6, 2000 Work on the study could begin in late September and be complete by the end of January or early February 2001. After that, we should expect the public meeting process to begin for the Sheet 2D Study. Next, I'd like to discuss the Coastal Study. Our last meeting -- and it was a conference call with FEMA was -- MR. SAVAGE: May ! interrupt just a moment? MR. DEVLIN: Yes. MR. SAVAGE: What goes on right now, is that the $2,000 premium rate that's still in effect right now? MR. DEVLIN: Well, it really isn't in effect. They more or less left things as they were until we could -- MR. SAVAGE: Well, I'm saying if they are not going to make a decision until 2001; right? At least they're not paying that now. MR. DEVLIN: Right. That issue is more or less shelved right now because of the study that will precede. MR. SAVAGE: Okay, thank you. MR. DEVLIN: Initially, we had a meeting scheduled for August 1st that went over. The minutes that are included in your DSAC booklet, and that was, again, moved to the 28th due to time constraints. Our study contractor, Dick Tomasello, Dave Divoky, continued to interrupt him, so he more or less couldn't get his point across to the group. So that meeting was moved again to August 28th. And then due to Tomasello's work load, it's now moved to September the 1 lth. Based on our conversations with FEMA, they seem somewhat receptive, but what they are looking for, I think, is more technical data. However, the committee agrees that Tomasello has already demonstrated a need for a study at this point. What I have here is an announcement for the September 11th meeting. It will be a conference call with FEMA, Dewberry & Davis, Tomasello, and members of the FEMA Map Review Committee. And anyone at this meeting who would like to attend that meeting, they are welcome. I'll be passing these out. It will be held at the Collier County Government Center, Building "F", over in Ken Pino's office. That's the Emergency Management Operations Center, :3301 Tamiami Trail East. The meeting is September 11th, like I said, Page 3 September 6, 2000 and it will start at 9:00 and probably run until 11:00. I'll pass that out. If anybody has any questions regarding the maps, I'll be happy to answer those. Dino? MR. LONGO: I see on the agenda, Bob, that it has a resolution agreement. You're expecting to come out of that meeting with a resolution on the web setup analysis? MR. MULHERE: That's why it's so important for the committee to be there. We can only make -- after that meeting - and I've told them from the very beginning that the committee can't make that decision. What we need to do is take that information, whatever we come up with, to the commissioners and the city and so forth, City of Marco Island and City of Naples, to let them make that decision. MR. LONGO: We are either going to come out of there with an agreement with FEMA for restudy, basically, or some sort of compromise, maybe? MR. MULHERE: Possibly. MR. LONGO: Or it goes back to square one? MR. MULHERE: Correct. MR. LONGO: After that resolution agreement, if it comes forth on that date, the 11th, when does the public response period start? MR. DEVLIN: It won't start until we tell them to start it. I've been holding them off on that. MR. LONGO: So we have to accept the resolution agreement? MR. DEVLIN: No, I don't think we have to accept it. If we decide that we don't want to accept it, we would possibly take it to arbitration. At the next meeting -- I wanted to get Vince's input on this -- what are your thoughts about having somebody from the County Attorney's Office at that meeting, this meeting coming up here? MR. CAUTERO: If we make a request, we can do that. MR. LONGO: Also, Ms. Hahn from Porter Goss's office, as well. I'd like to have her. MR. CAUTERO: You want her there? MR. LONGO: I would like that. If you want me to do it, that's fine. MR. CAUTERO: That's fine, give her a call. Page 4 September 6, 2000 MR. LONGO: Okay. MR. DEVLIN: So after that meeting, I think that the only thing that the committee can do is make a recommendation as to where we feel that the county should go from there. MR. SAVAGE: Are you talking about our committee? MR. DEVLIN: This committee. But I remember this committee made a recommendation to the Board of County Commissioners to proceed with this. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Thank you for your update. Impact Fee Ordinance? MR. CAUTERO: Let me say a couple of words real quick on that. I wanted to thank Bob for all the work he's done, and in the event the committee members may not be aware, the city of Naples agreement with the county was not renewed for the Floodplain Management Coordinator position, which I believe expired yesterday or Monday. Bob has been given additional assignments by the City of Naples, but the City Manager was kind enough to agree that the project -- Bob will not leave the county in a lurch as far as his projects are concerned, and we'll still be able to coordinate with him and use his expertise. However, for any future work, the county is going to hire a part-time, temporary employee, a former employee as a matter of fact, who used to work in Certified Plan Review. We're going to try to do double duty, have that person do some plan review and some floodplain management work, as well. And that will be on a temporary basis until we determine what we want to do long term. But the agreement with the city has expired. We are thankful that the city's allowed Bob to continue on this particular project with FEMA. MR. SAVAGE: You say the budget? Well, this study that Marco and Naples and the county, they'll not renew that or -- MR. CAUTERO: No, that's a different issue. Actually, you are one step ahead of me. The funds for the position, the funds that we were using to pay for a portion of Bob's salary, will now be used to pay a temporary employee here. The funds for the consultant are coming from the reserve funds, the building permit fund, and the committee recommended the board use that source of funds. The initial study was $30,000, split $12,500, City of Naples; Page 5 September 6, 2000 $12,500, Collier County; $5,000, Marco Island. We went back over the minutes of two meetings, February of 2000 and September tSth of '99. And at both meetings, Mr. Tomasello was present and talked to the board about the study, and then in February of this year, presented his results of Phase I, which was the $30,000 study. The Board of County Commissioners gave their approval, if you will, but there was no formal motion on the table because they had to continue the work. At that point, Mr. Tomasello said it would cost anywhere from an additional 50 to $70,000, so the project would run between 30 and $t00,000. The board was fully aware of that. We went over the minutes line by line, but they never made the motion. So I put it on the agenda for September 26th, for the board to pay the county's pro rata share for additional work. Now, one thing I did notice in the documentation, the Golden Gate study would be at the county's expense, solely, because it would not involve the incorporated cities. But in the coastal area, I think Mr. Tomasello said up to $20,000, and Bob and I will discuss what is our pro rata share and what is the City's. So the county is looking at a maximum of up to an additional $70,000, but it will be lower than that because I assume there will be some cost to the City of Naples. But I don't know what that cost is yet. But it's 50 for Golden Gate, up to 20 for the coastal areas combined. That's on the agenda September 26th for the board to formally approve. MR. SAVAGE: Are you happy with that progress? MR. CAUTERO: I'm happy with Mr. Tomasello's work, and of course, as far as progress is concerned, I think we are all frustrated due to the fact that we have a stalemate, or difference of opinion, between the consultants. But I'm happy that our consultant is very technically competent and is fighting to protect our interests. But, I'm very discouraged over the lack of progress and coordination with these agencies. It's very frustrating. MR. SAVAGE: Let me ask this question. What recourse do we have if we find that FEMA isn't smart enough to agree with us? MR. CAUTERO: I don't know the answer to that, do you, Bob? MR. MULHERE: I would say that's why I made mention of Page 6 September 6, 2000 possibly getting the County Attorney involved in it. MR. SAVAGE: That's going to be the only way you can get anybody involved to do anything. MR. MULHERE: Ken Cuyler was involved in the negotiations when it went to arbitration in 1984. So that's why I was following suit asking Vince if that would be appropriate for us to get somebody from the County Attorney's office. MR. PEEK: I think the other thing you asked for is very appropriate, too, is to have Porter Goss's representative there, too. MR. SAVAGE: Ms. Hahn? MR. MULHERE: Ms. Hahn, yes. And we think that would be something to maybe make FEMA sit up and pay attention more. MR. SAVAGE: Absolutely. Bob? MR. DEVLIN: My concern and other people on the committee is first, number one, Dewberry & Davis, they are like -- they are a review contractor for FEMA, and Divoky, Dave Divoky, does the coastal studies. Our concern is Divoky was an employee with FEMA in 1970 and many, like Doug Bellotoo who now works for FEMA, worked for Dewberry & Davis. So I don't want to say the word "collusion" and I didn't, but it looks like there's a lot of friendship there. And whenever they are preparing to rebut Dick Tomasello, they all get together and try to do that. MR. SAVAGE: Beat him down? MR. DEVLIN: Yes. MR. SAVAGE: If you need a rebel flag and all that, bring me along. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Let's move along. Impact Fee Program. We've included a schedule in your package. MR. TINDALL: My name is Phil Tindall, County Impact Fee Coordinator. What we have remaining in our contract with Tindall, Oliver and Associates is the development of an Administrative Procedures Manual which goes hand in hand with a consolidating ordinance that takes all our various impact fee ordinances that have evolved in different directions over time, and as the different impact fees have been adopted, and basically boil all those down into one ordinance that covers all the impact fees. The idea is to standardize our administrative provisions and Page 7 September 6, 2000 procedures in some of the various administrative areas where there's some variation where it doesn't necessarily need to be; just to get that more standard and just updated it in some areas where we think our administrative provisions are lacking. One area in particular would have to do with alternative fee calculations, which I'm sure everyone has read in the paper. We're also beeting up some of our provisions having to do with developer contribution agreements, particularly in areas having to do with determination of evaluation of contributions and some clarification having to do with the signing of impact fee credits, things like that. What we are looking at doing the first meeting in October is presenting the Board of County Commissioners with an overview of what's changing and what our progress is, as far as the consolidation of the ordinances and production of the Administrative Procedures Manual, and on the second meeting in October, actually have a public hearing so that they can adopt the new ordinance. What we would like to have the DSAC do is participate in a review of the ordinance. This is a rather detailed thing, so I'd like to get some feedback from the group as to how we should go about doing this. I don't know if this is necessarily appropriate to ask every member of the committee here to do a detailed review, or would you guys normally appoint, like, a subcommittee or something like that? What we could do is distribute the documents to you for that purpose. We just got them in today from the consultant, and honestly, I haven't had a chance to look at them yet to see if they were in fit shape to be distributed to you for review. But I can get those mailed to you in the next couple of days. Perhaps if you could name some people I would be working with for that purpose, for reviewing the documents. That's basically where we are at right now. (Brian Jones arrives.) CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Would your recommendation be that that go to I. DC subcommittee? MR. TINDALL: That would be a choice. Another option would be appoint a special committee to do that. One or two~ three meetings and be done with it, not an ongoing committee. So that would be one of two options. Page 8 September 6, 2000 MR. LONOO: Phil, the ordinance is just an encompassing ordinance lumping all the impact fees into the ordinance procedure-wise. It's not an increase or decrease of impact fees. MR. TINDALL: The only thing we might do, not necessarily increasing or decreasing existing fees, but we have identified a few land use categories that we should have included in the previous road impact fee update, such as a furniture store we left out. It might not be changing fees but adding a couple categories. That would be clearly explained in the -- now, this ordinance here that you're looking at is, actually, we're kind of combining a couple things. What this ordinance that you see a copy of in your package is what's going to be presented to the board next Tuesday, and this is kind of an interim measure that we are presenting to the board to deal with the golf course issue. Now, we're going to be incorporating those provisions into the consolidating ordinance, but we wanted to show you, on an interim basis, one of the things we're doing dealing with the golf course issue. That is not a draft of the consolidating ordinance itself, that is what's in the package. MR. CAUTERO: To follow up to answer your question, Dino, the Omnibus Ordinance Amendment is what we're calling it, is a cleanup to make sure everything is an entirely consistent type ordinance, and all the fee increases have gone to the board and have already gone to this committee and the board has made their decision on it. This is that ordinance amendment we've been talking about over a year to clean up. There may be some categories the county wishes to place in there that you would go through an alternative calculation now, so you wouldn't have to do that in the future. MR. TINDALL: Of course, that would be clearly identified and explained in the public hearing so there wouldn't be any surprises. MR. LONGO: Would it be easy to get a summary sheet? MR. TINDALI.: Of the type of changes? I can do that for you. If you could identify a subcommittee or group I'd be working with, I could provide you that or mail to you documents to review and give you a kind of executive summary to go along with it. MR. SAVAGE: Perhaps I misunderstood, but this is going to Page 9 September 6, 2000 be presented to the county next week? MR. TINDALL: No, that will be in October. We're talking two different things. I've got to make sure I'm not confusing you. We do have an ordinance that is being presented to the board next Tuesday, but it's not the Omnibus consolidated one. MR. CAUTERO: That's why it's in your packet. This is the ordinance amendment that cleans up the golf course impact fee issue in a nutshell. MR. TINDALL: And that's a very specific, narrowly aimed, focused ordinance, which is for that purpose. Those provisions, assuming the board adopts them, will be included in the Omnibus that will be presented to the board in October. But we wanted to show you what we would be doing in the meantime to deal with the golf course issue. MR. CAUTERO: We need to get this done. We need to fix the problem we have now, to answer your question. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Unfortunately, we can't take any action on it. MR. CAUTERO: We were prepared to ask you to make a recommendation on it today. If you can't take any action, we understand, but we would like to get a quorum. After I leave, I would like it if you would entertain a recommendation even if it's a denial. What this basically says is that golf courses don't receive building permits for the course. There are uses ancillary to the golf course that receive building permits, like a parking lot, clubhouse, restrooms. When the building permits are pulled for those items, more often than not, the staff would assess the impact fee at that time. But that is one of the reasons why we have problems. There are multiple reasons why we have experienced problems. That is one of the problems. What we've tried to do in this ordinance, with assistance from the County Attorney's office, is pinpoint the first permit in the process after the golf course development plan is approved. At that point, the permit would not be issued until the golf course impact fee was paid, or paid under protest when alternative calculation is done. It is conceivable someone could ask for alternative calculation prior to doing this if they were in a position to do Page 10 September 6, 2000 that. This clears all that up, and we are going to present that to the board Tuesday. MR. TINDALL: The biggest problem we had with that was the ordinance did not clearly identify the point in time when the impact fee for the golf course was due, so that caused confusion and created the problem. What we're doing is clearly identifying the point in time when it's due. MR. SAVAGE: You bring up a very good thing here, to me. You mean a developer can develop a piece of property without a permit other than a developmental approval? MR. CAUTERO: There are a few uses that don't require a formal building permit for the use itself. For example, you receive an excavation permit to conduct that activity, you don't get a building permit. You get a site development plan in order to build a park, to start clearing land, but you don't get a building permit. You get a site development plan to start moving dirt to build a golf course, but you don't get a building permit. We're trying to tackle that and incorporate a method that you will see through your subcommittee called a "land alteration permit" for those kinds of things. We're trying to tie as many things as possible down to a permit so that we don't have this problem again. We had all kinds of issues across the board with golf course impact fees. In some cases, where the staff did catch it and we did assess an impact fee, in some cases they didn't go to the board for approval when they were supposed to, it was just done administratively by staff and stopped there. That's the fee we charged and they paid. It's better than not doing anything at all but it's still not enough. Believe me, there is a scenario for every golf course in Collier County. MR. LONGO.' Which subcommittee do we want this to go to? MR. CAUTERO: For this amendment for Tuesday, you won't have time. We are going to ask the full committee to make a recommendation today. The large one, Land Development Regulation, I would recommend that. MR. TINDALL: I'll just get with Vince and find out the names and I'll mail the package to you. MR. CAUTERO: Either myself or Ron Nino, he's the staff member for that. Page 11 September 6, 2000 MR. PEEPLES: Can I add my name to that? I think I would like to participate. MR. CAUTERO: We will do the mailing to the full committee and whoever shows up to the subcommittee meeting will have it. MR. LONGO: Can you e-mail everybody, even who's not on the committee at this time, for this particular meeting when you set it, unless you want to set it now, for the Omnibus? MR. CAUTERO: Certainly. MR. TINDALL: That's going to be, like I said, in October. MR. LONGO: When would that be, Tom? MR. PEEK: Well, our subcommittee is the third Thursday at 3 o'clock. So in September that would be the 2tst, third Thursday. Utility Committee is the fourth Thursday. MR. CAUTERO: So it would be the 2tst at 3:00? MR. PEEK: Yes. MR. CAUTERO: Tom, would you see that Ron Nino has that? CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Does anybody else have any questions on that? MR. CAUTERO: Mr. Chairman, if I may, if you do have another member, Mr. Carrillo or Mr. Abbott does show, maybe you can come back to that and make a recommendation. MR. SAVAGE: Even though we can't make a motion to approve something, could we not, as a subcommittee, have some sort of an action on this if we didn't have a quorum? MR. CAUTERO: I can relay anything to the board saying you moved for a quorum. MR. PEEK: Well, the members present could by individual indication, indicate our pleasure or displeasure with a vote. MR. SAVAGE: If we don't get a quorum, I think we ought to do something of that nature so that -- CHAIRMAN MASTERS: This is going in front of the board Tuesday. Those in favor of -- does anybody have any discussion on whether or not they would be in opposition to forwarding this amendment? MR. LONGO: I think you just poll the committee. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: All those in favor of recommending approval? MR. PEEK: I think, to get around the technicalities, what I've seen done before is you walk around the room, say "Herb, are you in favor of it?" Page t2 September 6, 2000 MR. SAVAGE: I'm in favor of it. (All members present respond in the affirmative.) MR. PEEK: So the seven people present all are in favor. MR. CAUTERO: Okay. I'll present that to the board. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Okay, let's get our update on the fire code business. MR. RILEY: We've been a little busy since we spoke last. I was able to hire another full time person, who started the 23rd of August. She's moving along real well. Still in some training, still learning some things, the way we do things here and that, but she's helping out quite a bit. I've also got somebody who is helping us part-time in addition to that. So we're cutting down the times and getting caught up. So hopefully, that will continue. However, I won't be able to keep that person on -- the part-time person on -- for very long because I just don't have the funds to do that, to keep paying him that time. Of course, that is cheaper than overtime that we were paying. We have in front of you a proposal here that was in your packet of information. We had met with the CBIA on -- actually for a couple of months, addressing the concerns that they had with our office and some of the recommendations they had or benchmarks that they wanted to see happen; certain timeliness of reviews, et cetera. We put together a packet of information, did some research on how the building department functions, the number of people they have doing a similar review process, and we put together the cost numbers based on what we have to pay to draw people in, and put a proposal together. First, let it be known that the current staffing level, with the exception of the part-time person, is covered in our budget for next year and that is one of the budget packets that are shown here. To add an additional person would require the changing in our fee schedule that we charge now, and I have put together a proposal on that here in this package. Quickly, to go through it. I hope you've had a chance to look at it. If you haven't, I'll kind of go through it. The first thing, the goal was to review 95 percent of the initial submittals within 10 working days and 98 percent of the resubmittals within two Page 13 September 6, 2000 working days. That was the parameters the CBIA gave us to look at our operations around that performance criteria. What we did is we looked at the plan review process in the building department and the number of plans they review, the number of plans we review and the number of reviewers that they have. And this is in item number 2, actually page number 2. The building department has two full-time structural reviewers, we have one. That is Mr. Salvaggio here. The plan review, we must review all of the drawings that come through that the structural reviewer, both those reviewers review. We have one person that looks at what two of their people look at. Additionally, we have other things they don't look at; sprinkler systems and fire alarm systems are a couple of examples. We had over 700 of those in '99 to 2000 this year. Those are very technical in nature, especially the fire alarm systems. And again, we had one person doing those. When I was hired, I was hired to run the office and was told I wasn't supposed to be reviewing plans. But I've been reviewing a lot of plans trying to keep up. That's why we hired another full-time person, to cut that slack out, and she's doing all the sprinkler reviews right now. The building department, they average -- structural reviewers average six to seven reviews a day. So we estimated our fire plan reviews, the initial reviews through this year, would be a little over 5,000; 5,066 reviews. Estimated plan reviews for next year, 4,456. We averaged a couple years to come to that number. This is kind of a peak year and we don't know if this is going to continue at this level. But for the budgeting purposes we did and for the staffing purposes we kind of averaged. So far in just a matter of a few months, we had over 17,000, almost $18,000 in overtime, 63 percent of it was in April through June alone, overtime, to try and keep up. We surmise since we didn't have any controversy over the building plan review times, seems to be the fire plan review that was catching the heat, that we weren't getting things out, that staffing and number of plans we were able to do a day wasn't an acceptable level. So we used that, trying to average six or seven plans a day per reviewer. Page 14 September 6, 2000 And that's where we came up with our numbers. On page 3, item number 3, the current fee structure, in some cases, doesn't cover the review process nor does it fairly distribute the cost. What I mean by that is we have the new construction, the new buildings themselves are paying the majority of what we collect. We have fire alarm systems and fire sprinkler systems take more time to review, yet don't pay for our time. For instance, 85 percent of our fire alarm plans are reviewed at a $25 rate, which doesn't come close. They are averaging around an hour apiece, an hour and a half apiece to review them, so they don't cover the cost to review. The fee structure that I'm proposing kind of shifts a little bit from square footage fees to dollar value fees. I think that a little more better reflects the time we take to review certain plans. If you had a 10,000 square foot warehouse, it's very easy to review. But if you make that a medical office building with full interior walls, it takes considerable more amount of time to review that. It's also reflected in the cost. Obviously, the medical office building costs more money to construct than a warehouse, so it better distributes the cost to those who are using the service. Additionally, I think by going to the dollar value as opposed to the square footage, that will better weather the downturns in the economy. For instance, new construction costs may go down, but when the economy sees a downturn a little bit, you have more remodeling going on. Remodeling costs are usually done a little higher price per square foot, depending on what you're doing. And those will pick up when the new buildings drop off. So the square footage may be limited or small, but the amount that it costs to provide that service goes up. In remodeling, we don't have to look just at 6- or 700 or 1,000 square feet. We have to look at how it affects the rest of the building. Sometimes you'll increase travel distances or other things, so we have to look at what's already there in addition to what the remodel is. So that better distributes the cost and takes into consideration some of the economy issues. The way I estimated our fees and the methodology here was the job value for architectural reviews. We did a four year actual job value -- this is what actually came through the building department. These numbers came from the building department. Page 15 September 6, 2000 The year 2000 was for six months and we doubled it on an estimate. We took that total number and divided by four, that's the average we had for over a four-year period of job values that came through the building here. For budgeting purposes, we took 70 percent of that average, and we're proposing to go to a .1 percent of the job value for our review costs that equates to $440,000. Additionally, the other plans are the sprinkler alarms, those types of plans. That's the next section down. We estimate we are going to bring in approximately $35,000 this year from that. Through the proposed revisions on page 4, item C, we estimate that we can bring in approximately $88,000 for those services. And that will more realistically pay for what those particular reviews cost, the sprinkler alarms, fire line standpipes, those types of things. Right now we have a minimum fee of $25 to review. We're looking at a $30 minimum fee, plus a cost per head or per bottle or per something else, so it does increase the fees somewhat. Some systems more than others. Another portion of that is we want to -- on page 5 -- propose re-review fees. The first review and the first re-review would be under the standard permit fee that would be included. But additional re-reviews that are required because the resubmittals are not accurate or the corrections haven't been made, would then be based on an escalating scale that's on page 5; 10 percent -- for instance, the second re-review would be 10 percent of the original review with a $30 minimum and it would go up to a fifth review of 100 percent of the original review or $200 minimum. We have a number of plans that have come through five or six revisions because they just didn't get it right, or corrections rather, not revisions. That takes a considerable amount of time that shouldn't be necessary. Most of it should be able to be taken care of on the first re-review or at most the second re-review. Additionally, on the bottom of page 5, giving just some figures for informational purposes. Year-to-date through July 31 we had already reviewed 4,384 plans. First reviews, first time we saw those plans, 3,124 were the first reviews. 1,260 were re-reviews which was 29 percent of the overall number. Page 16 September 6, 2000 The alarm reviews, we did 329 which was 13 percent of every first review we did and sprinkler systems was 12 percent of all the reviews we did of the initial plans. As you see on a percentage basis, re-reviews on sprinklers and alarms aren't as high as they were in the architecturals. Generally, when we give our comments back, they are getting them right on the re-reviews. But they would also be subject to the re-review escalating schedule there. On page 6, what I did was put together a little spreadsheet. These are actual permits, the plans that we reviewed, permits we issued that the dollar sign at the top was the actual cost of the job. That didn't come through on yours? If it didn't come through on yours, we'll get you another copy. The dollar sign was actually what it cost to build the building, the next one was the square footage numbers. The SDR review is what structural review was. That's what the building renew numbers, when they got to review. Next was fire old review fee, that's what we got under the current fee schedule, and the new fire review fee is what it would be under the new fee schedule and last is percentage of change. For instance, we go anywhere from 34 percent to 70 percent on building or architectural reviews and on fire sprinkler systems to 126 to 152 percent, but you look at going from $25 to $56. Sounds like a lot more than the actual dollar amount. Fire alarms is 56 to 68 percent based on approximately 10,000 square foot buildings. We had to pick a target number and try to build everything around that. On the last page is the legal size pages there, seven and eight are current budgets that has been approved for 2000-2001. You notice it's for the Fire Code official and two assistants and a secretary. And it's broken down line item to what it cost us to run the office. You'll also notice that we -- at the bottom of page 8, we do have a carryover or reserves through the interlocal agreement. We're permitted to have a reserve up to two years of the budget. We don't have anywhere near that right now and we don't intend to get there any time soon, but that should carry us in a lean time if it drops down. And we can continue the staffing and continue to provide the service that we need. Page 17 September 6, 2000 Page 9, 10 and 11, the last three pages, would be the budget proposal with an additional person. And we had looked at the revenue -- projected revenue was approximately $533,000 and the cost to run the office was $53t,000 under that with this staffing scenario. Most of these costs are fixed. We work through the interlocal agreement with the fire districts under North Naples Fire Department's rules and regulations. So most of the salary benefits package, et cetera, those things are fixed by the North Naples Fire District's union contract that they have. So they are bound by that and we are bound by that. So a lot of these costs are fixed costs that we can't control. You will notice in here that we have some office costs that we're spending a lot of money for an office space. There isn't office space available here so we have an office on South Horseshoe where several of us -- all but Bob is located over there at this point. When the renovations are done to this building, the addition is done, we'll vacate that office and move over here back in the Plan Review section. So we'll all be in this same building where we should be. That cost won't totally go away because we have an agreement with the county whereby we pay for office space out of our budget that we would use in here. But it's not quite as much as what we're paying over there. If there's any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. MR. PEEK: I have a question, Ed. On page 3 where you start your discussion concerning going to the percentage of the value of the permit. MR. RILEY: Correct. MR. PEEK: You show us what the values were for '97, '98, '99 and projected 2000. MR. RILEY: Correct. MR. PEEK: Then you've got the average. Then you only used 70 percent of that average for calculating what your percentage should be, really, to generate enough money to cover your projected budget. MR. RILEY: Right. MR. PEEK: My question and my problem that I have with that is that we're meeting a projected budget to address $741 million worth of construction, but we're only using 70 percent of Page 18 September 6, 2000 the value so it causes the fee rate to go up. If we're going to use the number of people or the staff required for meeting -- reviewing $740 million worth of construction, why don't we use that number for generating what the fee structure should be, which would really be about .07 percent instead of .1 percent. MR. RILEY: The difference there is when we are projecting the number of plans we're reviewing next year, we're not projecting the number we are reviewing this year, we are projecting fewer. We estimated that number also. We averaged that number. So we're not averaging, we're not basing it on the $741,000. If you look at the other numbers, it's gone up year after year and that's not going to keep going forever. MR. PEEK: Right. MR. RILEY: What we want to do is make sure that there's enough money to operate the office. We're not trying to gouge, we're willing to look at this in a year or two years, evaluate where we are and if we need to lower the fees at that timel that's fine. Another thing is that if we are bringing in more money and we do have more work coming in, we'll have the money to hire another person. I would be able to put another part-time person on or another full-time person to cover that cost or cover that added work load. So it gives us that flexibility to add if we need to. If we're falling behind, if we can't keep up, if we have the number of plan reviews that require the additional staff, the money will be there and we'd be able to handle it. MR. PEEK: You're correct. I picked the wrong number. You used the $634 million as your average over four years? MR. RILEY: Yes. MR. PEEK: And you used 70 percent of that? MR. RILEY: That's correct. MR. PEEK: So my comment still goes to the same place. If we are using 634 as the average, why don't we use that as the basis for generating the necessary fee to cover your staff? I know it will be the same answer you just gave us, but it would seem to me like your fee could probably -- maybe you don't go to .07, maybe you go to .08. MR. LONGO.' The average he's showing is based on the average of four years. He's lowered that number because he's Page 19 September 6, 2000 projecting less reviews, less number of permits to review next year from this year. MR. PEEK: Then the other side of my question is, if you got fewer permits to review, do you need fewer people? MR. LONGO: No. Based on what he's thinking his projections are going to be next year, he's come up with a budget of 440-something thousand dollars next year. MR. RILEY: Actually 531. MR. LONGO: $531,000, and along with the architectural review fees, and other fees, he's about at 532 showing revenue. So he thinks his budget, based on a lower number of reviews next year is still going to be $531,000 with costs. Which reflects adding another person on, plus the 15 percent proposed permit fee increase that would normally be tied into our fee schedules for Fire Code. MR. PEEK: I presume you're on the committee? MR. LONGO: Yes. If I can make a couple comments. We got our butts warmed a couple months ago -- last year, I can't remember -- for not presenting all the facts we could possibly gather. So my hat's off to Ed and Bob. He has met with the CBIA, a number of developers, fire alarm sprinkler contractors, myself, Donald Stisney, (phonetic) and a couple architects, and we identified a number of areas where we were lacking in fire plan review. Some was time frames of review. We got down to the nitty-gritty of why we were having problems with the time frames. It basically came down to too much work with not enough people. We asked Ed to go back and start identifying those areas and what it would cost to bring it up to par. He has done that in a lot of respects and at the same time he's moved his offices. He was hired on to, basically, be a manager and not a fire plan reviewer. We were frank with him. We told him, "If you go in for everything you're at right now, you're not going to get that because it's possibly going to be less next year." We're on a banner year for permits and construction activity, we can't go by the highest of what we projected. He has come to these averages and based a lot on fact finding. That's why you see two budgets here, that you see one for his budget right now and one projected as putting on additional staff. Page 20 September 6, 2000 ! think he's done a great job of breaking it down for you. The percentages of increases look pretty tough as far as what they are. But when you're looking at $25 fee versus a $50 fee, in the overall scheme of things, quite frankly, we found out a lot of contractors weren't submitting their plans good. When you've got a guy submitting a re-review six times and they weren't charging for it, we had to implement some things we thought would make the contractors do a better job submitting their plans. We also found out through the process that Development Services has two structural plan reviewers, as case in point, and the plans had to go to structural plan review before they went to fire. So now we do them simultaneously. We implemented that three or four weeks ago, so we have a simultaneous review because they are overlapping areas of responsibility on the review from structural to fire plan. And one of the things we found out was some things were being caught and marked on structural going over to the fire plan review. Other things were happening and they were two different types of reviews sort of going on at the same time, causing a lot of confusion out in the field, causing a lot of re-reviews, causing a lot of interpretation problems with the interlocals as far as the fire districts and things like that. Again, we're still working on the fire inspectors. That's a whole other issue as far as still try and streamline their inspections and going by the review process that comes out of the developmental services required plan review. So if these guys are inspecting it according to how they are reviewing it, we are open to comments. Right now the subcommittee, which consists of myself, Dalas~ and a lot of other people, if we were voting on this today, we would be recommending going ahead with it. The construction industry really doesn't have a problem with the fee increases as long as the level of service which they expect is up to par and they have the availability of reducing fees in the future. If we go through a maior slowdown just like we have development services structured, by statute they are entitled to two years' operating, which is much lower than, of courser our budget here in development services, but it helps them prepare Page 21 September 6, 2000 for the future. We think it's going to allow Ed to put in some programs for education, this type of thing, not only for employees but developers and contractors, as well. He spent about two and a half months on this. We've been meeting two or three times a week on this stuff. MR. SAVAGE: We can't make a motion to approve this, I assume you want us to approve this. Can we do the same polling as we did with our other matter to accomplish anything? MR. LONGO: Correct me if I'm wrong. This would have to be a fee amendment, correct, to the fee schedule, and this would have to go before the board. And I would not feel comfortable recommending it, even today, on an ad hoc type basis until we had full committee, everybody has had a chance to study this. I think the numbers are here and he's got good backup to it, but I think everybody really does need to take a look at it and be comfortable with it. There are a lot of people that have reviewed this besides myself and Dalas. Different walks of the industry, including fire sprinkler review people, fire alarm people, architects, some engineers, some big developers that do a lot of multifamily stuff that a lot of this affects, especially when it comes to sprinkler heads and this type of thing. We just got a lot of input, we have had meetings that have been packed with 30 and 40 people. It has not been lightheartedly discussed, and Ed has given a lot of time -- hopefully this committee and anybody else that reviews it, the backup that is easily readable so you understand it. MR. PEEK: One other comment. Ed, I thank you for your comments and your explanation. I iust want to tell you that that's one of the best presentations and written summaries that I've seen in a long time and it's very easy to follow; appreciate you doing that. MR. SAVAGE: I was going to say the same thing, compliments to what they have done. I would like to suggest that we somehow tell them we are in favor of this, but we'll not take any action until next month. MR. PEEPLES: I have a question. Is this something that needs to go before the board before our next meeting? What's the time table for adoption of this? Page 22 September 6, 2000 MR. RILEY: Actually, what I anticipated was today to be forwarded to your subcommittee for review next meeting, be voted upon and then take it to the board after that. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: This will have to take the form of an amendment, so it will probably come in our next Development Code subcommittee meeting. MR. LONGO: It will go to Construction Code. MR. SAVAGE: Do you know what it's talking about everybody having looked at it, different fire departments have looked at it? MR. RILEY: Most of the fire marshals were involved in this process. MR. SAVAGE: That's very important. MR. LONGO: Actually, the fire marshals were very involved. Not in the particular sheets that Ed has put forth to you, but in their input as to fee schedules and level of service and this type of thing. We have met with a number of fire chiefs nd inspectors and firemen and in our meetings to get their side of things, as well, and it's not always one-sided and it certainly wasn't. Contractors were -- they had a lot of faults that they had to clean up and a lot of it was in the review process and submittal of materials to that department correctly, at least the first or second time. But five time reviews on a sprinkler system and stuff is just -- a lot of it was cross-noted on the structural review. We may have someone in this department saying you have to have it this way because of a structure requirement by code then it conflicted with the fire codes. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Doesn't that constitute a re-review if structural requires a change and it has to go back to your office? MR. RILEY: In some cases~ that was the problem. In other cases, the majority of the time, it wasn't that kind of issue. The majority of the time, it was an issue that was written up that did not conflict with the building code~ it just wasn't complied with, for whatever reason. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: In that instance would you waive the re-review fee? MR. RILEY: On an issue like that, what we would do, you get your one first review, so if the building department makes a comment and we make a comment and they conflict, what we Page 23 September 6, 2000 would do is get together. Bob and Jeff back there would get together and we would re-review it and it would be your one re-review, but then the issue would be resolved at that point. It goes to the most restrictive issue always. But, yes, we can look at issues like that and not have to be -- MR. LONGO: A case in example for that scenario is that if we sat there and required something and by doing that it caused another problem, you can sit there and say, okay, this was done or in that case, by the way we didn't see this, we would not charge that re-review. So there is some flexibility, but it's just not provided, no response. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: I understand. MR. SAVAGE: Mr. Chairman, it's now 20 to 5:00 and these young people here -- CHAIRMAN MASTERS: I understand. Thank you for your presentation. I agree that was very informative and we look forward to seeing the final version at the next meeting. MR. LONGO: We have to send this to subcommittee review. I have a conflict on the 13th, which is next Wednesday. Can we do it Tuesday if it's up to the subcommittee? MR. PEEPLES: Yes. If any problem with Tuesday, just make sure Charlie and Dalas are aware. MR. LONGO: We're going to move our Construction Code subcommittee up to the 12th and make it 3 o'clock on the 12th. Can we just double check, make sure that room's available on that day? MR. CAUTERO: Yes. MR. LONGO: And you'll send a memo out to the subcommittee members, and we'll meet you Tuesday. MR. RILEY: What room is that in? MR. CAUTERO: I'll get a room and I'll let you know tomorrow. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Thank you. MR. CAUTERO: I have to go. Let me introduce you to Will Walter and Adam Carnow. They are local hired consultants from Wilson, Miller who are working with our staff in the Property Appraiser's Office in the creation of a geographic information system for the county. It has been a project that had been on the county ledger, if you will, for about three years, but it did take a major stall about Page 24 September 6, 2000 a year and a half ago, and we had some issues under the previous administration that were not resolved under the Property Appraiser. Those issues have been resolved with the new administration. Property Appraiser's Office has been moving forward. They have Harvey Bender for their geographic information system. They have a lead agency. What Wilson, Miller has been hired to do is, basically, take the place of our GIS coordinator who resigned about a year and a half ago with the county. What they have done is put together a proposal for us through conducting analysis of our needs, to pick up where our coordinator left off. Basically, watch out for our interests, if you will, for the Property Appraiser and the vendor and make sure we have a system constructed that meets our needs, and they have been doing a fabulous job. And what they have done is put together -- at the request of the ad hoc subcommittee on this GIS initiative we're going to be talking about in great detail regarding funding, at their request put together a presentation for you. They have some booklets to hand out to you and we'll let you hear their presentation. Please feel free to ask any questions. At this point in the program, what we want to make clear is that the Property Appraiser is building a system with input from various agencies. The major agency that he is seeking input from is Collier County government. And Wilson, Miller is basically watching out for our interests and interviewing our staff members and relaying that to the Property Appraiser. I have been made the project coordinator for the county. It is not centrally located anymore That was one of the fundamental changes that the Property Appraiser had some difficulty with prior and now Community Development is the lead agency within the county and the County Manager has personally named me as the project manager. So, basically, Will and Adam spoonfeed me on GIS and they have done a great job. It was about three years ago when Mr. Peek and some representatives of Wilson, Miller had approached the county with a similar proposal. There were some offshoot projects they wanted us to look into, but I think the message is clear. We can help you and, fortunately, we are finally hooking up three years later. I will turn it over, gentleman. I apologize, I have to be at a Page 25 September 6, 2000 budget hearing. Tom is going to take notes and I'm sure you guys will do a great job. MR. WALTER: This booklet, if you want to follow along and take notes, it can give you something to write on. For those of you who don't know what GIS is, or what it can do for the county, that's what this presentation will hopefully answer. It's going to be in two parts. We're going to go in and describe what GIS is and kind of explain how the computer takes data and maps and combine them together. And then we're going to, in the second half, explain some of the potential applications the county will be able to use GIS for. Some of the things that we use it to, basically, improve services. So I'll let Adam start. He'll take care of the first half and I'll go ahead and do it. MR. CARNOW: Again, my name is Adam Carnow and I'm with Wilson, Miller. I'll take care of the first part of this presentation just describing basically what a GIS is. Feel free to stop me at any time and ask questions if I go too fast. Basically, a GIS stands for geographic information system, which basically means a computerized information system. But by using the term "geographic," we're talking about spatial or mappable information rather than just the standard data base which is used for records and tabular. We're talking about graphics. It's more than just software. GIS has five major components, those components being people, the people that operate the GIS and work with the data; software, the software that runs it; the data itself; the procedures -- There are certain geographic spatial analysis procedures the we can apply to the data -- and the computer hardware, as well. All of these -- when I talk about a GIS, I'm not just talking about a computer program you bought, I'm talking about these five components together make the information. It is also more than just a map making tool. GIS can do that, but that's not the reason to use the GIS, because a lot of other different types of programs can make maps, such as graphic design programs or CAD. The reason we use a GIS is to take it to the next level and to make your static maps dynamic and be able to use the spatial data to do some analysis. It can be used for things such as land Page 26 September 6, 2000 management, utilities inventory, demographic analysis, and showing multiple different information sets or layers on top of each other. The way GIS works is you link your attributes or your tabular data to some graphic features. So, whereas, in a CAD system, you would be looking at these symbols, they would be what we call "dumb graphics." That point would represent some sort of species, but it would have no associated tabular data. When you talk about a database, you're just talking about this part, where you have just records or tables. What a GIS does is link the two. So I have the graphics representing the locations and I have the tabular attributes here and you have the link. So you have your data plus the graphics gives you visual information. So I can see these points and these locations and these species, I can click on it and instantly see the data. The other thing that GIS does is by allowing us to interact with the graphics and the attributes, we're able to understand the different spatial relationships, so we can do things such as classify data. We can take a partial layer that's attributing with zoning. We can say show me all the partial zoned, general commercial in red and it will highlight all that. So you're able to see your data and classify it. You can compare data. You can compare appraised value based on the size of the parcel, and so forth. We can intersect graphic features. I can take all of my wetlands layers and intersect that with future land use code and figure out how many of my wetlands fall into areas that are zoned commercial. So we might possibly use things like that. We can buffer graph a feature. I can take a location such as a water well and buffer it to get a well protection zone. You can say no building within t,000 feet of the water well. So we can buffer. We can also do an overlay where I can say, show me all parcels that are zoned residential but are future land use commercial. So you can take two separate layers, one of future land use, one of zoning and overlay the two. And then we can also do spatial modeling. You can do some "what if" scenarios on growth patterns and future development patterns and so forth. The GIS gives us the ability to do all these type of things. Page 27 September 6, 2000 A lot of reasons it can do that is it's a converging of different technologies. We can use digital imagery, we can use aerial photos, we can use multimedia. We can use sound and movies and animation. We've got desktop software that no longer needs -- GIS used to require very high-end computers and very expensive software, which now can be run on desktop or laptop. GPS, or global positioning systems, are the surveying equipment. You can take it out in the field now with the satellites that triangulates. You can get very accurate data. The explosion in GPS is really helping the accuracy and proliferation of available data to use. Because GIS isn't useful unless you've got a lot of very good data to use with it. So GPS is helping out with that. GIS is helping business automation tools that are available to us now. Scanning and other things, image processing using satellite imagery to delineate where the weapons are. The Internet is allowing a lot of data access that are now web sites that have GIS in there where you can type in an address -- talk about the floodplain issue, there's a web site where you can type in an address, it brings a screen up, shows you where that address is, and then you can instantly see if it's in a flood zone. All these things are coming together when you use GIS. Again, so it organizes the desktop geographically. We can access database, texts, business graphics and graphs, multimedia sound, music, video, and so forth. So why do we need it? Basically, almost ever single decision we make has some sort of spatial component or influence, whether it be an address or latitude/longitude or parcel. Over 80 percent of the data we use in our day-to-day lives has that spatial component, and GIS lets us exploit that data spatial component. Rather than having lines on a table that lists all the addresses and all the parcel names and parcel numbers and telling me the zoning and the existing and the future land use, I can see them in that context. I can say I want to see which parcels are appraised from over half a million dollars, and instead of seeing a line and string of addresses, I can see on the map see where they are. So that's the real power. Page 28 September 6, 2000 So potential applications: Redistricting for elections and other things, and schools; a very good tool for that. For allocating resources, schematic mapping is nothing more than just symbolizing your data based on attributes. Take a parcel layer and let's make each different zoning code a different color. That's what a schematics map is. Just use the attributes behind the graphics and colorize it. You can do impact analysis and environmental impact analysis. Things like drainage modeling, risk analysis, facilities management, find the areas that are growing the fastest where we need to prioritize the utilities. Site selection, the best site for a new school or other type of feature. Transportation impacts, basic planning tools and natural resource management. All these are well defined applications of GIS. Some of the benefits: We get more efficient storage and updating of data having it digitally rather than having it in hard copy and having to do red lines and draw -- basically, because it's a computerized database, once you update the data, all your maps are automatically updated. The next time you print that map it will show the new data. Faster information access. Having it in a digital database, being able to see it, query it, rather than having to do it through plans and so forth. And by having all these better and faster information access, hopefully, we can use it to make some better decisions and better data management. And, obviously, with all this, you also get operational efficiencies. It allows you to do new applications such as doing some floodplain analysis and some proactive things to prevent problems that you're going to see down the road. Then that would, hopefully, also lead to some possibilities. And the way it works, there are different pieces of software -- these are the names of different GIS software. They can all work off the same data so you don't get duplicate data sets which increase the amount -- every time something's changed you don't have to have your CAD data here and then duplicate it in your GIS and then duplicate it again in your database. So if you had a change you had to do it multiple places. You can have one central database that works with a specialized piece of software and can serve it to all different users and all the different departments. Page 29 September 6, 2000 MR. WALTER: I think the way the county is going to set it up, they are not going to use the central database. They'll have it distributed so each department would maintain their own layers and that. That helps to take care of some of that centralized GIS issues. MR. CARNOW: It helps with data ownership because the people that use and make their data are going to make sure it's done right and kept up-to-date. If it's left up to someone else, lot of times it wouldn't get done. So the utilities people, the public works people will keep their data, transportation will keep their data, planning will keep their data, environmental, and so forth. But they will serve it out -- MR. PEEBLES: If it's decentralized will it be networked so that -- MR. CARNOW: Yes. It will be virtually the same database. MR. WALTER: Right. The other departments won't have write access to the data. They will be able to see it and read it and use it. But it will be available to everybody. MR. PEEBLES: But if they wanted that particular information to overlay with other information, their own information, they would be able to do that? MR. CARNOW: Yes. UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Spark SDE? MR. WALTER: Yes. That's the piece of software that interacts with the database to serve the data out. UNKNOWN SPEAKER: it doesn't have some cute acronym? MR. CARNOW: It stands for spatial database engine. MR. WALTER: It's just one piece of software. MR. CARNOW: So GIS can become -- talk about ideas in visual language, you can see it, you can use it to educate people. It can be used on a laptop within meetings, and allow cooperation between the different departments because they can all see the same data and talk about it. So what would it do for you? It can provide a common base map because all these layers will overlap. Everybody will be talking from the same type of maps. It brings some standardization there. It promotes data sharing. Like we said, everybody will be sharing data with each other. You won't have to call up and say, "Hey, I'm working on a parcel in this township and range, would you tell me what the maps are." That will be Page 30 September 6, 2000 online. You will be able to bring it up. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Is the intent to make this available to the public then? MR. CARNOW: That's secondary. One obvious benefit is that you can publish it to the Internet and people, instead of having to call the front desk or come down here and do a query on a parcel and see what's going on with it, you will be able to 24/7, every day of the year, lock into the web page and do it. That is a secondary, lower down the priority than for just getting the county up. But yes, it's a definite benefit. So it would enhance communication, and like I talked about, all these things would hopefully facilitate better decision-making. MR. PEEPLES: -- any information of a confidential nature or proprietary information within the system? MR. CARNOW.' Definitely not. And there are definite ways around it. We're not going to give access to the public to every single thing. And certain departments that need to keep things confidential, it's very easy to pull out permissions on a user-by-user basis. MR. PEEPLES: So information posted to the web for general consumption would have certain exclusions? MR. CARNOW-' Exactly. MR. WALTER: For public access, you would control what it was you wanted the public to be able to access. It wouldn't just be open to everyone. MR. CARNOW: You wouldn't take the whole data and put it out on the Internet, you take a subset of whatever you want and only show that. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: So theoretically, from the tax collector's office, what now is public record could be on the web page, but other things behind the scenes wouldn't be on the web page? MR. CARNOW: Exactly. Like in Hillsborough County, their Property Appraiser is online. You can type in anybody's name or address or parcel number and see all the appraisal data. But certain people, for certain reasons, don't want their address on there, whether it be a celebrity or certain elected official or security people. If you do type in their name or whatever, the address is blacked out but all the rest of the data is there. So you can do certain things like that. Different types of Page 31 September 6, 2000 data that a GIS works with. It works with what we call "vector data" which are points, lines, or polygons. So in this example here, you've got the real world and if you want to represent that in the GIS with vector, you would have a polygon here showing this is grassland, polygon here showing this is a marsh, this is a lake, this is a forest, and these lines are the streams. Then there is raster data which is like cells or pixels. You have the entire surface divided up into rows or columns of cells and each one is tagged wherever it represents the marsh with the marsh code. These are the two basic types of data that GIS will work with. There is also, again, the associating tabular data that is descriptive about these features. GIS tends to work with what we call "map themes" or layers. So you would have all of these different layers set up for the county: The roads, parcels, zoning, land use, schools, conservation lands, infrastructure, water treatment, public lands, anything you can think of that the county would need. And you simply can turn them on and off, query across them, do all kinds of overlay analysis. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: When will this all be available? MR. WALTER: Currently, the Property Appraiser is in the process of developing the photo base layer and the parcel layer. So a lot of people have heard that the Property Appraiser is developing the county's GIS. Well, that's really not true. You're developing the base for it which would be the photos and the parcels, which just about everything is based off of. But all these other layers, the county will be doing. MR. CARNOW: Each department will be responsible for developing their own specific layers. MR. SAVAGE: I want to push out something. I want to find out about the sewer lines in the area. You will have that information on all this? Where do you get all that information? MR. CARNOW: Yes. The Public Utilities Department right now is currently developing those data layers. They're pulling them from existing plans. Right now, if you go to the Public Utilities Department, they have all these sticks with all the maps and they are taking those off and digitizing those on by hand or pinning or getting submittals from contractors who submitted plans that's digitally taking the -- extracting the information off those. Page 32 September 6, 2000 And then they have some GPS field units out and the water crews are going around inspecting the different valves and the different facilities. They're taking GPS locations and they're going to update the master so they have very accurate maps. MR. SAVAGE: That in itself is a fabulous project, is it not? MR. WALTERS: Yes, it is. MR. SAVAGE: Who's paying for that? MR. WALTERS: I believe it's coming out of public works fund. I don't know exactly where they are getting it. MR. SAVAGE: Not only that, I'm talking about every building, every building permit. MR. PEEK: Development Services instituted a data conversion fee that every one of us that applies for a new land development, quote, like a subdivision, we have to pay a data conversion fee so it gets into the proper electronic form so that it can be plugged into the system. The new stuff coming in is being paid for by the developers that are generating it. MR. SAVAGE: I reflect four, five, or six years ago, that we paid out so many dollars for computer system in this complex and that's all going to be tied into this, I presume. MR. PEEK: I think so. MR. WALTER: Yes, we are going to use existing infrastructure. MR. CARNOW: Yes, the existing infrastructure is there. MR. WALTER: This will sit on top of it, because the network connections that tie from here all the way down to the county buildings and even over to the water services building, way back in the Glades back there. MR. SAVAGE: We really don't need cars anymore, do we? They just push a button. MR. WALTER: Put on your visual goggles and you're off. MR. CARNOW: The big price tag is not for your hardware and not for your software and not even for the people. It's building your database because that's -- normally with any GIS project that can be 80, 90 percent of your total dollar is getting that data in there. You've got to do it right and it's got to be correct. But once it's in there you are really up and going and you'll really see the results. So it's going to take a several year process before we get all the data in there. But once we do and we start getting Page 33 September 6, 2000 submittals in a digital format and having standards that says contractors must submit in this format, it will come right in and make things easier. MR, WALTER: When he says "we," he's talking about the county. MR, CARNOW: Just an example, some of the things you can do, you'll be able to bring up an aerial photo with a CAD file. This is so you don't have to convert into a GIS format. This is a GIS program you're looking at, but it's reading an aerial photograph with CAD utility lines right on top. It really makes life easier, if you've got it, to go out here and deal with one of these values and see it in real world context rather than sticks and lines and dots. MR. WALTER: And you can deal with land use data. Here's an example of looking at a land use map. MR. CARNOW: Zoning data, soils. The great thing about GIS, too, is they can integrate data from many different sources into a single software program. Like I showed you with the aerial photo and the CAD, you can bring your land plan drainage, property data, all in one context, all overlaying to see their relationship. I'll hand it over to Will. He's been talking about specific examples of applying this to Collier County. UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I have a question about what the Property Appraiser's doing. It's based upon an experience I had with Lee County and their system where the P.A.'s office tracks parcel IDs or strap numbers for the parcels that are to be appraised and then taxed. You indicated the Property Appraiser is building that database using the photo metrics and the parcels. Is there going to be tracking and history under those parcels? Because what happens is anybody comes in and they want to, quote, unquote, split it for tax purposes, you have now lost, if you will, the ability to identify, quote, unquote, the lot. You now have two new parcel ID numbers, but what happened to your pre-existing approved lot? What seems to me the solution is you have to be able to have some tracking over time. I noticed there was some of that in some of the other analysis part of this, you called "change detection." So it's the same concept except it applies to the data. Page 34 September 6, 2000 MR. WALTER: Right. What you're talking about is an application that I -- back when I had some guy in earlier this year talking to us about that, and his company that he had out in Texas had done something similar for the appraisers, the local appraisers. And it tracked the parcels all the way back to when they were first established in the 1800's in Texas. So they could go through and see, you know, it started out as a large piece of land that showed all the splits all the way down through. I don't know if the Property Appraiser is developing those capabilities in his system or not. That's something that can be done, but whether he's doing it, I don't know. MR. CARNOW: I've seen some appraisers here in Florida that are doing that. They'll have family history, if you will, for a certain parcel. If it used to be part of another one, it has that old number with that one, and so forth. So you can track it. It is up to the Property Appraiser. If they haven't tracked that information up until now, trying to rebuild that is going to be difficult. MR. WALTER: But with this software he's brought in, it does provide versioning so from today on, I would think that would be possible. MR. CARNOW: You can go back in time and look at the parcel a year ago or whatever. MR. WALTER: But I can't speak for what he's doing, so -- UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I'll bet you know the fellow in who's office or gal that I can talk to about it. MR. WALTER: Doug Gorham. UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Thank you. MR. WALTER: Some basic questions when you are doing GIS analysis is like what exists at this location, what's near my location, what areas meet my certain criteria that I have. I want to have a Iot~ so many acres. I want it to have so many acres of wetlands and so many acres of roughlands on it. You can put these type of queries into the GIS and pull results out of it. It's a lot of different analyses, general families of analyses, that GIS has. GIS has geometric analyses. What that basically means is you take the layers, you stick them all together, and you can find out how things intersect. How much land use I have within a certain parcel, how many species I have Page 35 September 6, 2000 within a certain area, things like that. You have a raster or grid analysis. With that, you can overlay cells and basically do drill downs and say, okay, under here, how many of these are the same, where are my changes. You can model flowways. A drop of water lands here, where is it going to go according to elevations, your drainage calculations and things. There is also your modeling interfaces where you have the ability of providing programs to ask "what if" scenarios. What if we add so many more miles to our sewer system, what type of backup are we going to expect. How much more facilities are we going to have to build on the treatment side. How much more water can we expect to come in; how much more water can we expect to send out. You can do things like network analysis, which also ties in to the utilities. It also ties in to streets to find out where your streets are now going to be clogged based on how many trip origins to destinations you have. And you can run them along different street networks where you are going to run into your road blocks and you're going to have problems. There's many utility applications. The Utilities Department is definitely going to be using the GIS. They can do everything from the billing, setting up their automated work order system. You could set it up so you could ask it, "Show me all the valves that need to be inspected in the next two months," and every morning the guys could go in and have their work orders automatically generated for them, stating this is where you need to go today and check these valves. Then when they come back in, they fill it out electronically in the computer and it goes in and updates information and automatically generates things for the next day. So it keeps things updated and the records organized real quick. It's good for your planning by "what if" scenarios again. Looking at the as-builts, you have a line break. How do I turn it off real quick? You can pull up the area and isolate it and find out which valves you need to go turn off without having to go out and hunt for them or pulling the paper maps out trying to find out how to do that. Data visualization -- and we've touched on this quite a bit. This is a made-up representation of traffic volumes to find out Page 36 September 6, 2000 where your traffic is heaviest. You can do some spatial analysis, try to find some spatial patterns. Again, we've made up some dummy data here just to demonstrate some of the applications. Here we want to analyze where we've had cjusters of accidents and maybe find some places where we need to put up stop lights, say in Marco Island. You take the police reports and using the addresses in the police reports, you can geo code those incidents back to a certain place on the street. And we'll discuss what geo coding is a little bit later. You can find where there are cjusters of accidents, pull them all together using the grid analysis, bring them together, and you'll have a nice map there. And you can see in the red areas, maybe you put a stop sign, or maybe the traffic lights aren't timed right. Another nice feature and another nice application is like hearing notifications. You have a zoning change with a specific parcel, and you want to identify all the owners within a quarter of a mile of this and send out letters automatically. You can generate a buffer around that parcel, query for all the parcels that fall within that buffer, and you can see them highlighted here in the red. And then the GIS will automatically pull up all the address records, stick it into a mail merge program and generate your mailings automatically. That saves a lot of time rather than having a secretary pull up all the records and find out what address needs to be mailed to. Again, change detection, I know we mentioned this. Here is just an example of looking at Tigertail Beach down in Marco. From 1994 to 1998 you see the channel closed and opens and actually, if you've down there lately, it's closed back up again. You can look at aerials and compare growth over time, as well. From 1995, '96 to 2000 and so on. Geo coding again. We'll touch on that real quick. In the (;IS, the street center lines would be coded up with what the address ranges are on the right and left side of the street. Then when you type in a certain address, it generalizes where that would be along that street. If you start at 100 to 199, it splits that street segment up into 99 segments and says this has to go in the 50s, so it puts a little dot here. You can pull up any information that might have an address on it and stick it on a map. MR. CARNOW: It will even put the point on the correct side Page 37 September 6, 2000 of the road. It knows if it's an even address, 150, it's supposed to be on this side. It can even offset the point, show you the correct side of the road. MR. WALTER: Of course, this all depends on the accuracy of your data. I know right now with a lot of the commercial data sets for Collier County, you are lucky if you can get a 40 to 50 percent hit rate where you don't have to go in and actually, physically, find out where that address was. So that's something that the county and the MPOs and some of the other groups get together, and maybe chip in, and create a nice digitally -- nice address street database. Some points of overlay analysis where you take the A and B and C and D and stick them together. And what you end up with is a map and a database where you have data records from A and C and A and D and they all mesh together. You can do reports based on these. Here we took the zoning for Marco Island with the flood zones and laid them together and did a percentage of how much commercial land use code or how much recreational or residential was this side of the flood zone. You can see 91 percent of Marco is within the A, which, I guess, is within the high flood zone. Facilities management operations is made a lot easier with the GIS. For example, here is a street sign inventory where you have every street sign that you have inventoried with its location. You can find patterns where if you had to replace them in the last six months. Certain stop signs there maybe had to be replaced six times in six months, you go out and find out why. Maybe it's too close to the intersection, maybe covered up by a tree. You never know. It helps you manage and take care of your data a lot better and take care of your actual physical facilities. This is an example of using the GIS for utilities. This is a sample of data from the water utilities people. Shows all the valves, the force mains, the water lines, and your gravity sewers. And you can touch any of those lines with the GIS and it will return back what the size of the pipe is, when it was last installed, when it was last inspected, and the same with the valves. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: When you say they are out doing actual locations on these valves, they're just what, scale Page 38 September 6, 2000 rectifying these drawings then or just verifying them? MR. WALTERS: Right now they are going out and actually GPSing in all the valves. And then they will tie the lines back in that way. You are always going to have an offset in the GIS, just so you know which side of the street it's on, you've got to be able to see it. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Are they actually scanning in construction drawings or recreating this entire drawing from scratch? MR. WALTER: Right now they are using the parcel base map which was prepared by the community development graphics section. They have a very nice map they have used for their zoning applications. When the Property Appraiser's parcel map comes along it will replace that as the background layer. Everything will be rectified to the Property Appraiser's parcel base. It will be a lot easier, then you can query certain parcels by who the owner is right near here and then tell them, "Your water main is broken," and you can identify everybody in that area. There are a lot of applications once the Property Appraiser's data comes along, they will be able to take their line work and put it on top of theirs and have a lot of applications. UNKNOWN SPEAKER: What are you saying the GPS accuracy is? MR. WALTER: The GPS accuracy that utilities folks are using is a subcentimeter, so it's plus or minus three feet. Now that they have taken out some of the interference in the satellites, it's even better. I'd put it probably about a foot. UNKNOWN SPEAKER: The director in Charlotte has their GIS down to 5 inches. MR. CARNOW: The more you spend on your equipment and the more time you spend on putting in your points, you can get within a couple inches. It all depends on your budget and what you've got do, and the action you need. The equipment, the training the people have and how long they are going to take to serve it. And GPS data is dangerous in the fact that it can offset all the rest of your data. Let's say the Property Appraiser develops his parcel database at plus or minus 10 feet. Then you go out with subcentimeter GPS, you get valves showing up on the wrong side Page 39 September 6, 2000 of the street because they are so accurate and your parcels aren't. So you say, Okay, let's go out and GPS all the parcels. Then your roads won't line up, then your streets won't line up. So it's this never ending thing. So it doesn't matter if you get one thing very accurate. If it's not accurate in relation to everything else, if it blows them out of the water, then you got troubles. MR. WALTER: I think the Property Appraiser is getting tighter and will be closer than 10 feet. Plus or minus three feet for valves. MR. SAVAGE: Is it important that you know exactly five inches from where you want when you're out there in the ground? MR. CARNOW: I'll tell you one reason -- I worked with the airports out west and they were dealing with the same thing. They had a real problem because -- it was out in North Dakota -- and that is when a valve broke in the middle of winter, you've got three feet of snow and you can't find it. They're out there for hours trying to dig out. With the GPS unit and if they get within three feet they clear the snow away. You don't have to worry about that too much. MR. JONES: I have a question. This committee, the Development Services Committee or Development Services Department, is being asked to put half of the cost of this system -- which is a wonderful and good system. However, the equitability of the financial burden for half of this to this department, many of the members have questioned, is that really fair, based on -- I can see benefits for the different utilities departments and sign management and all these type of things, and they are getting a free ride. MR. WALTER: Well, I think right now, the way it's been set up just -- the way the first initial phase of it is supposed to be split between Community Development and the Public Works, is what I believe the 50 percent is. After that, part of the plan that we're putting together is going to involve how to split costs out. Maybe Community Development is only going to have four layers, Utilities is going to six or seven. It depends on how much data and how much use each department is going to get out of it. How much applications are going to be used, how the fees are going to be allocated and Page 40 September 6, 2000 shared across the different arms of the county. Again, this is something we are going to have to work out, obviously, is the planned development. MR. JONES: Where other people have been the guinea pig, how have they done it? MR. CARNOW: The lowest cost of the whole implementation is actually the planning and implementing, buying the software, doing the training and so forth, and that, yes, they are splitting. But the big cost is going to be developing the data layers. So, if Public Works needs t0 data layers, they are going to be footing most of the bill. It's going to be based on their data needs. So each department will, I think, pay their equitable share of that part of it. MR. SAVAGE: And prorate it. MR. CARNOW: Yes. If they say, I want all these 10 layers, it would be, like, great. You come up with the money and go ahead and develop them. That would be great. So I think that's the way to go, is again, the data development is the largest part of the cost. MR. JONES: So we're looking at the wrong picture. We're looking at the initial inexpensive part of it, sharing half of that, not the whole database. MR, CARNOW: Exactly. I don't see Community Development paying to develop sewer and waterways. MR, WALTER: No, we wouldn't recommend you do that. MR. CARNOW: You don't want somebody else in charge of your project. MR. JONES: My perception was we were paying half of the whole shebang. MR, CARNOW: Before you do, you have to do a user needs assessment. Which you go in, you sit with the people and you say, "What kind of data do you use, what do you do day-to-day, how can we apply the GIS to you?" And you make, from those responses, you make recommendations on hardware, software, and training. That is the first part that I think they are picking up half of, and that's a small part. MR. WALTER: We are going to bring in as many of the constitutional officers, as well as the governmental departments, into the GIS and find out what it is they would be able to Page 41 September 6, 2000 contribute and benefit from the GIS. So we can spread the cost and make it truly an enterprise wide system that everyone in the county is going to be able to use. MR. SAVAGE: When will this be complete? MR. WALTER: There, you've got me. MR. CARNOW: Actually, never, because your data is changing every day. But being useable, a lot of that is up to the progress that we make with the county. But I would say they'd be able to have something up and running about the same time the Property Appraiser's data comes online and usable. They are looking at June to have their data ready to deliver to the county or at least the Property Appraiser. When the county is going to get access to that is still going to remain in the hands of the Property Appraiser. But it should be in June. MR. SAVAGE: 20017 MR. WALTER: Yes. At that time we plan to have at least a few of the departments be able to start putting their layers on top of the Property Appraiser's. We don't really want to start developing a lot of data without having the Property Appraiser's photo base and parcel base down because there are a lot of layers that tie back to at least the parcel base. MR. SAVAGE: Then when it gets a little bit further and the $heriff's Department gets into it, they can immediately pick out where a crime is taking place and they can follow it. MR. WALTER: The sheriff is already doing a lot of that. They've got career criminals' addresses, last known address down. And then they are able to take patterns of where they have seen crimes that match the MO of the career criminals. They can see if it's almost within two miles of his house and they can keep a tail on him. MR. SAVAGE: I'm an architect, I want to subscribe to this. By the way, I tried to send e-mail the other day at the post office, they wouldn't take it. So that's what I know about computers. But if I were to subscribe to this, I would pay who a fee for this? MR. WALTER: So if you wanted to get the parcel maps from the Property Appraiser? MR. SAVAGE: Anything that's on record here in this system, GIS, we were talking about that a little while ago. I want to know what's up there in Immokalee, you know, or out there in Page 42 September 6, 2000 Immokalee. MR. LONGO: Anything that's public record you're going to be able to access. MR. SAVAGE: If you went to the county public records area. Right now, I do it on my own time. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: You should be able to go to the county's web page and get to that site. MR. WALTER: There is the ability to go to the county's web page and pull up any information the county wants to make available or you can call in, do a data -- there are several different ways to do it. You can call in and do a data request, and they'll send you a CD with the information on it. Depending on how the county wants to structure it, they can either charge a fee for you to get that disk. Usually it's time and materials like $50 an hour or whatever to put the data onto a disk. MR. SAVAGE: $50 a month to the county for the capability of using this facility, I couldn't -- CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Right now, I think the county's tax maps are already on the web page. Right now, for free, you can go into the county's web page and pull up the tax maps. MR. WALTER: And the zoning, too. Theoretically, this would follow right behind it. You go in for free, no fee. It's like any public record. MR. LONGO: We discussed that, too, because it was the reserve funds that are initially funding this and are going to be funding some uses of it in the future. But one of the concerns we had was at some point in time, it's going to be publicly accessible, and how does the public pay for it. Those things haven't quite been worked out yet. The pro rata share of developmental services and what it does for the industry is going to be looked at. I think Will is 100 percent correct when he says the different departments will pay their pro rata share, what it's going to cost to build up those databases and maintain those databases. I'm sure at some point in time, either with ad valorem or a subscription fee of some sort, you will be able to access certain parts of GIS that are not typically public records. So for land use attorneys or developers or whatever, that need that information, they won't need to come down here and spend time with it. They Page 43 September 6, 2000 will be able to go right to their own computer and do that. MR. WALTER: There's a lot of revenue generation, not revenue generation, but cost recoupment. There's a lot of counties that have a lot of different cost recovery programs in effect and some of them -- especially when you're publishing data on the Internet, you're providing a service to the public, so you're able to charge a fee for it. Because you are providing them with an extra service, even though it's public record information, and they normally have to drive down here to get it, now they can get it from their desktop. MR. LONGO: Right now we pay $35 a year to the Building Department, or Development Services, for building blocks. Just update us on any new changes to the Building Code, whatever. I would assume that you would probably have something like that in the future. MR. CARNOW.' The Internet is a wonderful tool for that because you don't have a carry the cost of having someone staff a room, making CDs, and answering questions. If you just put your data on the Internet, it's available there, you don't have to have anybody. For Pasco County, for instance, you can go to their Property Appraiser, you can bring up a parcel of data, click on a button and say show me a map and it brings up an aerial photo and it brings up the parcels. And you can turn on floodplain, you can turn on land use. You can turn on all these things and then there's a button that says "download." If you have GIS, you can hit "download" and you can actually download that section on your computer then you can use it any way you want. It's free, and that way it gets all the people off their back. You know, people call in and say, "1 need so and so." You say, "Go to www. pascopropertyappraiser.com," you know. And that's it. MR. LONGO: Another thing that happens is consultants themselves use the, quote, unquote, free data and perform services for developers and builders, if you will, that otherwise can be more costly and expensive. MR. CARNOW: It's going to bring in more revenue and more development. MR. SAVAGE: And smaller fees. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: So we're looking at a year out for the Page 44 September 6, 2000 Tax Collector's maps to be online? MR. WALTER: That was according to the Property Appraiser's consultant, that it was to be June. And that's when we are going to start creating the other layers from the other departments. That would go on then. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: So theoretically, a year from then we would have a fairly useable database, in your mind? MR. WALTER: Sure. MR. CARNOW: Another priority would be used in-house. So it might be another year after that when you're going to be able to publish to the Internet. CHAIRMAN MASTERS: Anybody else have any other questions? Final comments. Then we'll adjourn the meeting. There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of the Chair at 5:45 p.m. DEVELOPMENT SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE THOMAS MASTERS, CHAIRMAN TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF GREGORY COURT REPORTING SERVICE, INC. BY KAYE GRAY, RPR, NOTARY PUBLIC Page 45