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DSAC Minutes 03/06/2002 RMarch 6, 2002 TRANSCRIPT OF THE MEETING OF THE DEVELOPMENT SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE Naples, Florida, March 6, 2002 LET IT BE REMEMBERED, that the Development Services Advisory Committee, in and for the County of Collier, having conducted business herein, met on this date at 3:30 p.m. In REGULAR SESSION, in Conference Room "E", 2800 North Horseshoe Drive, Naples, Florida, with the following members present: CHAIRPERSON: Dino J. Longo Tom Masters, P.E. Charles M. Abbott Dalas D. Disney, A.I.A. Robert L. Duane, A.I.C.P. Marco A. Espinar, P.E. Thomas R. Peek, P.E. Herbert R. Savage, A.I.A. C. Perry Peeples Bryan Milk Brian E. Jones Anthony Pires, Esquire Justin Martin, P.E. Page 1 March 6, 2002 ABSENT: Blair A. Foley, P.E. ALSO PRESENT: Patrick White, Assistant County Attorney Denny Baker, Community Development Business Manager Edward Perico, Building Review Permitting Director Tom Wides, Interim Administrator Public Utilities Joe Schmitt, Administrator Community Development Environmental Services Page 2 March 6, 2002 CHAIRMAN LONGO: Call the meeting to order, please. Meeting's called to order. Everybody calm down, chill out, whatever. First thing I need to do is approval of the agenda. MR. PEEK: I move for the approval of the agenda, and I presume that should include the e-mail and addition that we received? CHAIRMAN LONGO: I'm going to stick that under new business, if you don't mind, and I'd like to move bring it to the top to get these guys out of here. Under new business I'd like to put the business systems update and GIS update. We'll move that to the top of the agenda. Is that okay with you? MR. PEEK: So moved. MR. SAVAGE: Second. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. Any discussion? (No response.) CHAIRMAN LONGO: All in favor. (Unanimous response.) CHAIRMAN LONGO: All right. We'll do staff. Let's do the new business now, unless staff announcements is really short. Is staff announce who is doing staff announcements? Anybody here from transportation division or public utilities? MR. BATHON: Yeah, I'm representing Norm Feder. He's unavailable today due to public announcements on the 13th Street Bridge. Dale may have with Collier County transportation and zoning construction. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Dale, do you have a presentation or Dave? MR. BATHON: Transportation has no updates at this time. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. Thank you. Do we have anything with public utilities? MR. WIDES: Yeah, Dino. Tom Wides, for the record, public utilities. A couple items for you this afternoon. First off, I wanted to Page 3 March 6, 2002 get a sense from your group for a future presentation. We're doing a lot of work on the solid waste side, the landfill activities, commercial recycling activities, and I'd be interested in understanding if you have an interest in hearing about that in a future session. Just poll the group just generally. Again, landfill activities in terms of what we're doing for odor remediation, what we're doing to extend the life of the landfill, and also some commercial recycling ordinance activities. MR. ABBOTT: Would you be looking for an approval from this committee? MR. WIDES: At this point it would simply be informational. We are moving ahead under the guidance of the productivity committee at this point. MR. ABBOTT: Would you treat us better than impact fees? MR. WIDES: Treat you differently. MR. ABBOTT: Well, you can only help but treat us differently. Can't treat us worse. MR. WIDES: It's your pleasure, and it would be an informational type thing for you. MR. SAVAGE: May I ask a question? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Sure. MR. SAVAGE: Have you gotten Nancy Payton's approval? MR. WIDES: I'll treat her differently. MR. SAVAGE: I'd like to bring in short subjects, you know. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tom. MR. PEEK: I would think that a short informational presentation would be beneficial just to keep us abreast of what's going on generally in all areas of the county. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Pretty much everyone in that type of agreement? Tom, I would say by next DSAC meeting a short presentation. We'll put you on the agenda. MR. WIDES: We'll keep it slim. The other item today is I Page 4 March 6, 2002 asked Joe Cheatham, Wastewater Director, to join us here today. As you'll remember last month, we talked about more of the future activities of the planning activities. Joe's here really to kind of give us an update on what's currently happening in the wastewater area in terms of how are the flows going this year compared to last year just to kind of a status update. If I may, I'll turn it over to Joe. MR. CHEATHAM: Joe Cheatham, Wastewater Director for Collier County. We're trying to keep low key this year. We've been able to do that so far so we only have a month to go, so my boss said don't spike the ball at the two yard line. I'll take that advice. North County Plant Expansion went on line first of November. The plant right now is treating this past month around 9.05 million gallons per day. We saw some spikes during the first part of the month during the golf turnaround of 9.9 million gallons per day. The plant is in full compliance with its FDEP permit and shipping 100 percent of the flow to our reclaimed water system. We also have some permits that we're working on right now. We working on we received a permit to install two new injection wells at the North County Facility for the future growth and also for existing wet weather reject flows. And also right now we started testing the ASR well project at the Pelican Bay well field. That started this past month and that testing process will last about six months. South County Plant, a little bit different story. The plant we did have a difficult year. We had planned to install some additional aeration capacity at the plant, which we did. We had it installed on time, but the equipment that was installed; the brackets were not the right brackets. We had to go and retrofit some work, so the plant has been meeting secondary standards but for the most part have been going to the injection wells for the most part of the month. We treated last month 214 million gallons, and we had about 70 Page 5 March 6, 2002 million gallons go to the reclaimed water system. They are still on full compliance with this permit. We also have an interconnect between the North and South on the reclaimed water system, and we have one customer on the south end, the Windstar Development, that has no backup. So since the plant was not shipping a lot of water in February, we had to use that interconnect to ship that water from the North to Windstar Development, about a half million gallons per day. We also have a temporary interconnect between the two plants for raw sewage, and we're transferring right now about 250,000 gallons a day from the South to the North. We plan to increase that in the coming several days to about one million gallons per day from the South to the North to take the load off the south. That's the update of what we're doing. We're glad to answer any questions. MR. MASTERS: And, Joe, you said you're doing about 9.05 million gallons a day on the North County plant. What were you doing last year at this time; similar? MR. CHEATHAM: About the same thing, very similar to last year's flows. MR. PEEK: Joe, on your South plant, do you have a projection on when you're going to get your reclaimed water back up? MR. CHEATHAM: Yes, sir. We have 9 percent of the repair work completed on that. We expect to have it consistently up and going within the next two weeks. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Any other questions for Joe? MR. ABBOTT: Quick. So these interconnects are really thank goodness for them; right? MR. CHEATHAM: Thank goodness. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Thank you, Joe. MR. CHEATHAM: The capacitator you know, that system was Page 6 March 6, 2002 really what saved us. Without that we would have been in trouble again. COURT REPORTER: Could we identify him again. I wasn't able to hear his name. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Dale Bathon. MR. BATHON: B-a-t-h-o-n. COURT REPORTER: Thank you. CHAIRMAN LONGO: And I was a little remiss to recognize all our new board members this afternoon, Anthony MR. PIRES: Tony Pires. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tony Pires and Justin Martin, welcome. MR. MARTIN: Thank you. Good to be here. CHAIRMAN LONGO: We'll move to the new business. Thank you, Joe. Move new business up. Denny, who's going to run the show for you? MR. BAKER: Just as a matter of brief introduction, we've had a couple of conversations Denny Baker, Community Development Business Manager in our ad hoc committee meetings about the business system that we use here within community development business systems talking about the computer system which Ed uses every day and the planning uses every day to run the business. We had a situation there I think you should be updated on because we plan to budget to replace that system next year. Secondly, GIS, there's been some discussions about GIS. I asked Barry Axelrod, who's the director of IT, to come today and to have his he and his team give us an update on both of those topics. So, Barry. MR. AXELROD: I'm Barry Axelrod, IT director. We have a couple of staff members from IT specialist in these areas. We have some material to present. Right now I would like Richard Badge, who is the project manager for the CD Plus product, which is the Page 7 March 6, 2002 interdepartmental software that runs CDS, we want to give you an update on that system right now. MR. BADGE: Put a little helper up here. Word document's easier for you. My name is Richard Badge, B-a-d-g-e. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Would it help to turn the light out? MR. SAVAGE: Isn't that automatic? MR. ABBOTT: We don't have Johnson controls in here. MR. BADGE: We'll give a brief history of this application. September 1994 a request for proposal was advertised by Collier County for a one-stop process integrated computer system for community development. On March 19th, '96, the Board of County Commissioners entered into a contract with a company called Perconti Data Systems, and they are located in St. Pete. Development was for a modular integrated system to be called CD-Plus. The terms of this agreement included all the functionalities Perconti has already developed previously. It was a DOS-based system, and it was upgraded to operate on Windows NT server, Windows 95 client platform, and many of the features that the county specified were customized for the county at the time. Okay. The contract called for Perconti to be responsible for the design, development, testing, and installation of the program, data conversion, and interfacing with other county software applications at the time. Another important point is the county was a beta test site for Perconti to develop this program so they could market it to other counties. In return Collier County got a perpetual license agreement and unrestricted use of the software from Perconti. The modular pieces of this contract included the cash management, parcel addressing, code enforcement, contractor licensing, growth management, administration, and security developmental review, and vehicle for hire. The vehicle-for-hire module was never delivered, so they tested. They trained the Page 8 March 6, 2002 employees, and the acceptance of the application occurred on June 13th, 1997. And around this time there started to become issues with Perconti Data System over the maintenance agreement and some of the prices involved for their services with CD-Plus. By July 14th there was an executive summary issued to terminate the contract with Perconti, and by the 30th of that month your contract was officially terminated. I guess after a brief period of no support from the vendor, the county came back with an executive summary in June of '98 to provide the county to purchase or use purchase orders to acquire upgrades and services from Perconti which included maintenance and other modules that they added since then. That practice continued until the fall of last year. And during that period the information technology department pretty much struggled with Perconti to get them to repair a pretty large list of bugs that were developing in the modules in a timely manner. December 2000 before that end of 2001, they introduced the development of review module for CD-Plus. That went into production around the first of the year 2001. I can answer questions. MR. ABBOTT: Why are utilities going into business with them when it looks like we're not getting good service with them here? MR. BADGE: A good point. Yeah, I wasn't working here at the time. I worked this information strictly off contract information that we had. MR. BAKER: Utility started to, but as a result of this consternation with the vendor, they are not going forward to do business with this vendor. MR. WIDES: Denny Denny, let me add to that Tom Wides from Public Utilities. First off, that system was tied into the Perconti system was tied into a database that was useful for the billing system Page 9 March 6, 2002 for only special assessments. Okay. It gave folio property numbers, so it was a good link to us. So we said, okay, let's see if there's value here. I think what you'll find as we get down a little farther, we truncated that activity due to all these other lingering problems here. MR. ABBOTT: Okay. MR. BADGE: Okay. 2001 October community development entered into an agreement with Perconti to provide a product called the Lobby System. It was a tracking system for customers to alert departments that someone's out there to see them, track their time, make sure that people were taken care of in a timely manner. It was deemed unsuccessful and returned to the vendor at the end of the trial period. Where we are now that's kind of where, I guess, you were asking as an application CD-Plus is fairly stable, performs the job that we need to do day in and day out, but as an application itself since it was designed in the '90s based on an older system, it's basically reached the end of its life cycle. It's a you know, like I said before, it's a DOS-based system. The vendor has not decided to design this product or redesign the product to modern-day standards. Their tactic has been to incrementally add modules to this application rather than change the architecture of the entire product. Leading software vendors today use an open platform architecture. It enables them to easily integrate technology such as GIS bringing it on board, electronic document imaging, which we do now, and internet functionality in their applications such as permitting on-line, paying for permits with credit cards. None of these things can be done through CD-Plus, and Perconti does not offer most of those functions. They're a small company. They have less than ten people. They really cannot meet the demands of Collier County's current and future Page 10 March 6, 2002 needs for this software application. So at this point because of those issues our relationship with them has pretty much deteriorated to the point where we no longer have any vendor support from this company. MR. BAKER: I think that's a key point, Richard, if we did have a problem, we don't have vendor support. We're really hung out here. MR. BADGE: Right. So at this point there's a consensus between community development management and the IT department that we are not going to make any changes to the core functionality of this software or the hardware platform that it resides on, because it does run and it runs fairly well, but we don't want to make any changes that may cause problems to the software. MR. PIRES: IfI could ask you a question hopefully, it's not a dumb question. Core functionality pertains to MR. BADGE: Those modules that we listed off before and the daily functions that they perform, and I'll explain a little bit further. Some of the things that we decided that we needed to offer the citizens of this county. Some of the on-line permitting, which I don't know if you've been in the lobby to see, you can buy a limited amount of permits by computer with a credit card, you can track permits on line now, and there's some other functions that we're doing. Wireless handheld applications for the permit inspectors who'll be able to go out in the field rather than have a pile of paper will be able to through a handheld computer with internet wireless connectivity bring up their work orders for the day and key in any information they need and real-time update the database. Most of those things can't be done through CD-Plus, but we have been designing, testing, and implementing those type of functions outside of CD-Plus. They connect to the sequel server database, but they do not connect directly to the CD-Plus application. Page 11 March 6, 2002 Now, some of that information can be pulled up again through CD- Plus modules, like in permitting or cash management or code enforcement, whatever, but the data cannot be input through CD- Plus. MR. ABBOTT: Are you saying in here there is a potential of a major crisis like a collapse? You know, if you're scared to touch it MR. BADGE: I'm not saying there's a potential toward a major crash. It's operated pretty well without major problems; however, if there was a major crash, we would have no assistance from the vendor whatsoever to bring it back on line. MR. ABBOTT: What's what's the probability sounds like you're warning us that if you can't mess with it that's scary. MR. BADGE: I agree. MR. WIDES: How far away are you from going to the alternative? That might be one way to ask it. MR. BADGE: At this point we are MR. AXELROD: If I could, I'd like to address this question. Barry Axelrod, IT, Information Technology Director. The system the system is sound, but what we're getting now is requests for improvement from the system to keep up with the business of the community. Some of these things can be bolted on to the system to clean interfaces, like the wireless thing. It's it's going to have an interface to the system that's really outside of the system; however, there are other improvements that have to do with addressing, and addressing is a core function that's inside the database operations of the system, and we don't have the confidence to go to try to make that improvement right now. Because if we did and it caused a problem, we don't have the expertise, probably, to fix it, and we don't have the vendor support to fix it. So what's happening is we are in agreement with the CS Management here that we need lead time in order to procure a new Page 12 March 6, 2002 system because the business needs there are going to be business needs that are emerging now that are going to go wanting. We are not going to be able to implement that, and eventually they're going to you know, you're going to feel that from a business perspective. MR. ABBOTT: But, all right, how about the wireless system you're talking about adding on? I don't know that I'd reinforce a potential failure as opposed to CHAIRMAN LONGO: Charlie, let's let Richard do the presentation. MR. ABBOTT: No, I think this is a scad of money. MR. BAKER: The wireless system is not going to interface directly it's going to interface with CD-Plus through a portal. It's not going to be touching the CD-Plus database, which minimizes any change within the functionality of the system. MR. AXELROD: We understand the structure of the system pretty well. Certain types of things that we consider and we understand the interfaces, you know, through five years of experience with the system, and we say this is really low risk. We can do that. That's where the Mobile 1 falls into. There are other ones like this addressing change that was brought where we analyzed that, and we do not recommend to do things like that because of the situation we are in on the software so CHAIRMAN LONGO: Herb. MR. SAVAGE: With what, we have now and decided to get rid of it and get the most modem 2002 equipment. How long would it take you to buy it, install it, train all the people to use it, and what would happen? MR. AXELROD: Well, you know, reasonable time line, you know, would be for us to budget for the acquisition of a new system in the next fiscal year, and once we make that decision, there'll be a competition for that. Once we make a decision to do that, the Page 13 March 6, 2002 implementation time is usually one year. So somewhere about one year, so we'd be looking at using this system at least until the beginning of 2004 fiscal 2004. MR. SAVAGE: I think that's something we have to think about, you know, when we start going all the modem route is what's going to happen to all the people who are doing it now and to be able to meet the needs of new people. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Let's let them get through the presentation, and then we'll have discussion on it. Okay? MR. BADGE: We're essentially done. We've covered it all. The basic long and short of it is that regardless of whether we had a problem with the vendor or not, the application itself is on borrowed time as far as functionality and offering you folks what you need from us. The GIS program is going to give you a lot of powerful information, and we will not be able to integrate the CD-Plus and use it in a way that we're going to get the most bang for the buck. So we're looking at other vendors right now. That's where I'm at. I am researching vendors. Fortunately, there are a lot of them out there right now that are teamed up with companies like ESREA who we are using for GIS, and they have fully integrated those functions into their software. MR. AXELROD: This is another thing that's changed since this system was acquired. You notice early on we said there were custom changes made to the system for Collier County. The market has matured. There's at least a few competitors that are broadly on a national basis into the county government market for these software products right now, and they require a minimum of customization, so we can pretty much buy an off-the-shelf package that will do what we're doing now on a modem platform that should last a long time from a vendor that's got a bigger installed base and, of course, we are referencing them to the hilt right now. Page 14 March 6, 2002 CHAIRMAN LONGO: If I might make a comment. I think the biggest, scariest thing I see right in front of us is we did this three or four years ago, and now we have a system that you have no support for if it crashes. MR. BAKER: We did this in 1966. CHAIRMAN LONGO: '66? MR. BAKER: Excuse me, '96. It's old but not that old. CHAIRMAN LONGO: It was six years ago and, I guess, the bothersome thing that in your report right here you say, "Well, it's a small company. Perconti, it only had ten people. It didn't service the needs of the county." Why didn't we know that to start with, and let's not make that mistake again. MR. BAKER: That's what Barry is saying, that there are a number of well-known vendors. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I understand that, but my point being is that we have to have a lot of foresight before we go and spend a couple million dollars that we're going to turn around and change in five years, not just because of growing needs, but because of bad, bad management decisions, for lack of words, I guess. And we're spending millions and millions of dollars, and now we have a hodgepodge system, and it's the not the system that we originally wanted, was a centralized system that worked for everybody networked and had all the crossover to it. Now we're adding on modules, and we're doing all kinds of other things to piecemeal it, rather than come to us and say, "We just want to buy a complete new system, Herb, and revamp it to where everybody's on the same page again." Barry. MR. AXELROD: If I may, your characterization's a little harsh. Okay? CHAIRMAN LONGO: I know. MR. AXELROD: The state of the art in software in the middle Page 15 March 6, 2002 of the '90s when this thing was really architected there was really only two ways to go. It was to go through the Enterprise Software, which was much, more money than for first implementation. It was probably an imprudent thing to do, rather than get a smaller system and have the organization grow with it. The state of the art of computing platforms now has a solid mid-range application, and that's what we are. We're not the City of Los Angeles or the County of Los Angeles or the City of New York. So we're not looking at those systems. They do exist, but there's a strong mid tier with a very good vendor base and good customer base now that gives us options that we did not have then. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Allow you to grow with as times change and the community grows and as technology changes. That's what I guess we're asking you to take a hard look at, and what I guess we haven't gotten to the bottom of the pile of how much we're asking for looking at dollar-wise. MR. AXELROD: Yeah. I believe that the state of the art of the platforms now and the state of the art of the standards that have emerged for platforms will give us longer lives for the systems. The county's growth is still large in this area, and it's tough from a realistic image point of view to buy ahead of the curve too much. So but I do believe that the county has made some very good decisions in other departments with present-generation software, and I think that the vendors we're seeing out there are also of the category that would serve the county well for a good long time. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tony. MR. PIP, ES: When the contract was signed and the county has, I guess, perpetual and exclusive license for this product, did the county get the ability to get the source code to modify it to stay current with its needs? MR. BAKER: We have a legal issue, and we really can't and Page 16 March 6, 2002 should not go into that at this point. It's being addressed. MR. PIRES: Okay. MR. WHITE: I think you can probably assume what the answer is from that statement. MR. PIRES: Thank you. MR. AXELROD: I have just one other comment that Don brought up, and that's when they contracted with Perconti Data Systems, they were a larger company than they are now. They've actually shrunk, so they're about half the staff that they used to have, and that's become another issue for us. MR. ABBOTT: Did any other counties go in on this? MR. AXELROD: That's what each county said. They were going to use Collier County as the beta and sell it MR. BADGE: Yes. There were there were other counties that bought their software, and I can tell you now that there was quite a few counties that are switching back to other companies at this point. MR. ABBOTT: So we led the way into trouble? MR. BADGE: Well, Indian River, I believe, was first or Lakes County. There were some other ones that had their software, but we we were the first to have this version of their software, which is written in a program called Delphi instead of DOS. MR. ABBOTT: I'd be very interested in hearing what other counties did that started out with kind of the same like we did, you know, with Perconti Systems. Where are they going? MR. BAKER: I don't think we should go there, Charlie. We can't go there. MR. ABBOTT: No, wait a minute. We got in trouble by being the first. MR. BAKER: Charlie, we cannot go there because of what I said before. You can't stand up here and talk about what other people have done with Perconti. We can't do it today. Page 17 March 6, 2002 MR. SAVAGE: Mr. Chairman MR. ABBOTT: Amazing statement. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Yes, sir. MR. SAVAGE: You knoTM it's much better, much more important to get going from now on. Stop looking back to what we didn't do. There were darn few companies available then; isn't that correct? MR. BAKER: That's correct. MR. SAVAGE: And perhaps that might have been the better one of the ones that were available. Let's talk about what we're doing now so we can know what we didn't do before and stop worrying about what happened yesterday. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Dalas. MR. DISNEY: Aside from the software, which in my experience has been a relatively minor cost of the whole programs, what about our data security? What about conversion of our database? Is that all going to roll over into a new system that you're talking about? I'm sure that's something you would explore. MR. AXELROD: Any legacy system migration through the data conversion is the major component of the data of migration, and one of the things that we are doing is that we have talked to vendors who have successfully migrated Perconti databases to their systems. So we're dealing with people who have a track record of this specific migration that we're dealing with. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Denny, is there more presentation on this particular subject? MR. BAKER: No. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Are you be asking for an action today or just MR. BAKER: No, just information. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. Are you coming to this Page 18 March 6, 2002 committee in the future with a budget on this? MR. BAKER: When we get more refined, yes. Thank you, Richard. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Marco. MR. ESPINAR: One quick question: Are we basically talking about just software, or are we going to be required to buy additional hardware, a new mainframe or any new hardware components, or is this mainly software changes we're talking about? MR. AXELROD: It's it's likely that it would include hardware as well. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Any other questions on the previous? Well, move onto GIS. Could you identify yourself, please. MR. JETT: I'm Bob Jett. I'm the Technical Information GIS Manager. I have Don who works with me, and I work for Barry and actually directly for Barry. I've been here about six weeks. COURT REPORTER: Would you spell your last name, please. MR. JETT: J-e-t-t. I hope this is a little more pleasant before you throw vendors out. Okay. First of all, I hope here everybody can spell GIS right? It's not a big deal. Geographic Information Systems have been around for a while. The vendor we're using is a very solid vendor. They have they're in virtually every part of government that I know of; federal government, county government, state, cities, everywhere. This is the major vendor in the U.S. Of geographic information systems that's environmental research systems I think it is. Yes. All right. Environmental Systems Research Institute, they have roughly last count 150 to 200 people working for them. They have a big installation in Redlands, California. They just finished a major revamp of their entire product line. It's as up to date as they get. They don't make them much better than this one. There are others that claim they're better, but they don't have as broad a base. They Page 19 March 6, 2002 don't have the kind of programs that you can call on. They don't have the vendors to call on. So in my book this is the best you can do in the U.S. What's installed today is a CDS. It has a server. Sits over in one of the server closets over here. That server has some data on it that is not organized the way it will be organized in the end. It's just there, and it's accessible to anybody who wants to use it. What we have now is we have property appraiser data sitting out there, which consists of ortho photos and planametric work. Okay. That's what exists today. It's organized, but it's not in the way it will be in the future. In the future there is going to be that server is going to still be there. It will have more software on it. We're building a database that goes that will hold the system, and we have applications to add on top of it, several lots of applications, and they keep coming in every day. We use the server on a daily basis. I check it every morning. There are people who call in and ask me about information on the database and use it. Right now it's still being tested, so we know it works every day. And the data, I just said, there's ortho photos. Those came from property appraiser. Planametrics, that's property appraiser work, came directly from them. The environmental data, the census and political data came from Tiger maps, which Tiger is federal government format that is used by the census bureau to develop these. It's not extremely accurate data, but it's relatively accurate data, and it's fine for a lot of jobs, but not for surveying and things like that where you need accuracy. They have public schools, roads, shorelines, county boundaries, ZIP codes, lots of other kinds of boundaries that you manage to pick up along the way, and all that data is operated on by a product ARC GIS which is a SIR product. That's the new product line that they have. Page 20 March 6, 2002 Within the next two weeks, there's going to be high availability server IT server built. It's going in Building F. That building will serve as a central focus for all the GIS systems going and all GIS servers going in. It's a hub for all of them, and the other servers, like CDES server, any of the others, transportation, public utilities, all of them will draw against that main server. There are two of them there that actually are redundant, and they help they if one fails, they fail over to the other one. So they should be high availability all the time. The database work that has to be done is a product called SDE, and it's a ESRI product. A SDE is a it's a set of objects. It's the best I can explain it. Set of software that controls the way we access the relational database that your data will live in. And what it does, it understands how to operate on spatial objects. MR. ABBOTT: When you're using a lot of these the letters, like, SDE, would you tell me how you came about that and the reason I hate to be redundant, but I need to enter this in my head, and I'm having trouble. MR. JETT: The reason the reason the redundancy is there is because when in a situation where you have data that is accessible by many people and you have failures, it's not a good idea to let it drop off line. You want it to be available all the time. That's the reason the redundancy is there. SDE is the name the acronym means Spatial Data Engine. Okay? MSSQL is Microsoft Structured Query Language. Actually the data, that's what's going to control the database itself. SDE controls SQL. SQL controls the data. And the data layers are what really stand for SQL. MR. AXELROD: MR. JETT: Yes. MR. AXELROD: Bob? Let me let me just translate a little bit. If you're computer literate, you got all this. If you're not, let me just tell you that the GIS project is a countywide initiative. It's multi-agency Page 21 March 6, 2002 in the county, so it's working across the constitutional agencies, and what we've done in the past year is to just put a ton of infrastructure in place. You know, networks, computers, servers, and software so that we can start building applications. So this year has been the infrastructure year, and now we're getting to the point where we can do applications that would result in meaningful, you know, information going to you. But there's a lot of things that happened behind the scenes, and we're just about there. MR. JETT: I'm giving you some of the behind-the-scenes. MR. ABBOTT: No, my objection was to not speak in acronyms. Speak in English. MR. JETT: I'll try to keep out of the acronyms. I'm so used to talking like this. MR. ABBOTT: all. I understand, and it's a language unique to you- MR. JETT: It means nothing to other people, and I apologize. MR. ABBOTT: I've got Ebonics down so MR. JETT: I don't have that one. Applications development is coming up shortly. We're getting ready to implement several applications. We have about ten that are slated, and the first one that we're going after, the spatial data extraction tool, that takes let's the user sit down, rubber band, draw a box around a piece of a map on the screen and extract that data out and drop it into a file somewhere that's usable for CAD drawings so that the CAD people can use it. Actually, a lot of this data can be imported directly, but some of it can't be, so we have that tool for it. The next one we have in mind is incident reporting for code enforcement, planning, that sort of thing. People have problems; you want to be able to report where they are. We have identified large pieces of that code that we need to use, so that's one of the applications that will be there. Page 22 March 6, 2002 Building inspection routing. That one there is a little bit farther out in the future because it requires more layers of data that we don't have yet. So we're still working on that one. Planning review is another one that has to be out a little bit farther. The addressing is one that we're working on right now. And internet information access which is a Mapciti application actually is a product that has already been paid for, and what it does, is it allows us to present data to the public without exposing our machines to public access. And one way it does that is that it we load the data directly to their machine, and the public goes to their machines, and they never get to our machines, and there's a reason for that. People like to tinker, and they can make a big mess. We really don't want them in there like that. If they can see the data, they're just not on that machine we work on every day. We have other functions that are planned, and this is only a couple of them. Current plan review comprehensive planning, we're in the process of installing 100 gigabyte fiber connection between Building F and here. That's as fast as we can get right now. MR. ABBOTT: How big a cable is that? MR. JETT: That's just a piece of glass wire. MR. ABBOTT: Really? Really small so it fits into all your existing conduits? MR. JETT: It just delivers data in terms of data pipes, it's big. You know, it's a big one. So and we need that for the GIS because we cannot operate on what's here. My desktop right now, I can basically bring the whole system down from there. If I started loading data from the property appraiser's office to my desk is four and a half to five hours to bring the data over. If I did that every day, you wouldn't have a system. So that's a problem. Data layer building is our is in progress, and if you don't know Page 23 March 6, 2002 what data layers are, GIS works in terms of overlays where one layer might be roads, another layer might be hydro graphics, the next layer may be sewers, the next layer may be some environmental data, Needle Nest, whatever you have. There are roughly 63 separate layers that are built identified there that we need to build. The ones that are in yellow are the ones that I've identified that are directly attributable to CDES or planning, and the ones that are in green up there are the ones that are common to several different groups. So roughly you have about I think there is 11 there for CDS out of 63 that actually you actually belong to you. And the addressing layer is one of them that we're addressing. I can't remember. It's address identifiable for buildings. So we know what the addresses are, and they are being done right now. We have things out for them. The rest will come on line as we get them done. Some are already there, ZIP codes, county lines, things like that, boundaries. A couple of examples, basically so everybody knows, the data is the most expensive part of the system. It takes a long time to get the data in, and it takes a long time to get it right. It just doesn't happen overnight. It just doesn't. I have been working around this stuff for a long time. I've yet to see one completely finished. That's how it works. Everybody wants more data all the time, so that's the way it is. Okay. This is one of the projects that was we were working through was done by WilsonMiller. It's this map is a future land use map. On a live GIS where I could actually point and click on this, you can surround areas, drill down, see street names, identify houses, anything you want on there is there. This one happens to be for future use, and I really haven't looked at it that closely except to see it's a workable map, and it is. Most maps will come in that kind of format. They're not static maps at all. These things change constantly. Page 24 March 6, 2002 This is part of the data, which we got from the property appraiser's office. That's that is a very poor picture of very good photography that they've gotten. That's a picture of where the building we're sitting in is right underneath that sign that says, "You are here." And the airports right behind it. And, hopefully, we'll have this done shortly. MR. BAKER: Thank you very much. MR. MASTERS: What kind of time frame do you see before the citizen out in the street can access this kind of data? MR. JETT: I'm going to try to have them try to have this out and done by June. I have a project called Internet Information Access. Can't promise June, but I'm certainly trying. This is what Mapciti was. The object was to get the data out there so people can initially get to it from your own machine, not having to come in here. MR. AXELROD: Just remember that the amount of data we have includes things like infrastructure, water/sewer, things like that. With 9/11 we evaluate what we put out to the general public access. Okay. MR. JETT: Yeah, that isn't all the data that will be available. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tony. MR. PIRES: The question I have, Barry, you mentioned before that for the last year you've been working on the infrastructure, the hardware, the servers. Are any of those hardware type need to be upgraded or replaced since it's been a long time since you acquired it? MR. AXELROD: Oh, no. That's not a long time. The 100- gigabyte network stuff is just being purchased right now, so there's been a whole phase. And 100 gigabytes is 1,000 times faster than what they have right now and, you know, all these things are pretty much about the we're buying things that are going to give us a good long use out of it. It's been done well. Page 25 March 6, 2002 CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tom. MR. PEEK: In response to Tom Masters' question, right now you can get on line and look at photography. And that aerial photography isn't that part of this system what we're looking at when they're on line looking? MR. AXELROD: Absolutely, came from the same place. MR. PEEK: Some parts you can look at now? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Herb. MR. SAVAGE: Mr. Chairman, I think, how many years ago, Tom, that this was brought to us about showing us different things in the county. I was almost amazed, and I'm very impressed to see that we're having this capability, and wasn't it WilsonMiller that was doing all this with GIS? MR. PEEK: Yeah. MR. SAVAGE: It was fabulous, and I just hope that everybody has had a chance to look at what the pictures are and the information you can get on it. I'm very impressed. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I notice on the development services end of things that they're kind of last in line to get all their stuff done, and my question is, how soon would the development services end be up and running? MR. JETT: I don't think they're last in line. The way I prioritize things when I sat down and looked at the number of layers that had to be built, where I was looking for things that could give me immediate I can get out the door immediately so I could get those things done. And the things that required much more data with development services, okay, those had to be second priority at that point. Not that the data layer was second priority but that the applications were. MR. AXELROD: We don't set the priorities. Okay. We work with the CDS management, and we give them insight into the logical Page 26 March 6, 2002 progression from complexity point of view, and some of these things are more complex, and we need to do the simpler ones first, or you just wait longer for anything to come out of the bed or the chute, but we're working basically to CDS priorities. CHAIRMAN LONGO: When do we think that will be done? MR. AXELROD: Well, you have to ask a specific question. There is going to be a ton of applications to come out of this, so the way to do that, the way to effect that is define the applications, review the applications reviewed by CDS, understand what they are, and we schedule them. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Well, I MR. JETT: If you were looking at May if you were looking at the order in which those things were occurring on my list, there's no priority there. There's just no priority there. I didn't have a priority. I pick them off of the list of things that I had to do. Those are the things that need to be done. There's no it doesn't happen that way. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Dalas. MR. DISNEY: We've asked a couple of times about the GIS system, and I'm very happy with what I'm able to get off of the off the web site for the property appraiser at this point, but it's not real useful to me in looking at what is coming in the future. And I'm glad to see that you have things in there about planning and permits and all of those elements that will help us. The point that's been made a couple of times and I've heard different numbers and I could be wrong, but we have contributed, I believe, about $3 million towards the development of the GIS system, but at this point there's very little from a planning standpoint and from a systems-use standpoint that we can access. The question specifically is, what have we as a group in development services gotten for our $3 million right now today? MR. AXELROD: You've got a platform that we can build Page 27 March 6, 2002 applications on to your specifications. MR. DISNEY: But did should development services and the 113 Fund be paying for a platform? MR. AXELROD: It hasn't completely paid for the platform. This has been, in my I don't know the exact numbers, but this is the thing like I said earlier, an agency-wide system. There is a lot of different users outside of this department, this division that does this. So there are there's a lot of competition here for the development resources that we have in order to launch these things out. So there was I explained before there's a lot of infrastructure so, yes, I understand. There's a lot of investment that takes place where you don't see what's happened, but we're positioned well right now to get to a point where we can be very productive. We need to just work with you as customers to define and deliver these applications. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tom Masters. MR. MASTERS: Another just a specific kind of question, how far out do you see it before an engineer, say, could get on the system and find out what sewer line is running in front of an office building that he's about to design and pull that up on the GIS? Is that years away or MR. JETT: Well, it's not a couple months away. It's farther out. I would say possibly a year to 18 months is my best guess. There are other people working on that right now. I know they are working on it. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Tony and then Perry. MR. PIRES: I was just wondering I think you mentioned the number $3 million was mentioned. I apologize just being new to the committee. Is there an estimate or number estimate of where we thought we would be at the time that you-all went into this program to have the GIS as far as dollars? Are we in excess of that or below that? A few-million-dollar number sounds Page 28 March 6, 2002 MR. AXELROD: My understanding again, I'm not running this overall project. We're putting the infrastructure in as the IT department so we have an agency-wide view of that, but we sit on the committee, and I believe that the project is absolutely within its budget plan and its timing plan for what they had set forward, and there is a volume that describes the entire GIS initiative. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Perry. MR. PEEPLES: As these applications come on line, what's going to be the procedure for letting the general public or users potential users know what's available? MR. BAKER: I can't specifically answer that, but I through this venue or through the web sites, through a CBIA or all those channels. MR. AXELROD: One of the things, if it's going to be an internet accessible application, then that's going to flow within our e- government initiative, and that is going to have a publicity campaign behind it through the PIO here. And if the application is an application that serves the CBS community, we will use their methods for getting the word out. We will include e-mail subscriptions, flyers, you know, all the tools that we have available to us to get publicity to drive you know, drive traffic to those web applications. If as I'm anticipating, some of this would be network accessible, but we're going to want to not make it generally available to the public for the security reasons or there's other constraints going on that there'll be some sort of registration for application passwords and things like that to be made available to the business community. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Could you think of something offhand that's a public record that you would try to put behind security? MR. AXELROD: Yeah, like water distribution, for instance. You know, anything right now that could that would pose, you know, working with the nine county terrorism task force here. We're taking the guidelines about what kind of information that they are Page 29 March 6, 2002 suggesting we not put on the internet for making it easier to obtain that information for people who really might not want to do good things with it. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Well, because it is public information, you still could come and get your pipe layout or sewer layouts and MR. AXELROD: Well, that's what I'm saying. We would feel more comfortable to register each individual business entity so that we would have a relationship with them and a password out and make the information available like that. It's obviously public information. We're not going to not publish it, but we don't want to necessarily put it out as generally available. MR. JETT: Barry, the prototype we have now, doesn't that limit that right now? MR. AXELROD: It has limited amounts of information intentionally, and you have a user ID password to get into it. It's for that reason right there. CHAIRMAN LONGO: (No response.) CHAIRMAN LONGO: Any more questions on GIS? Thank you very much. We will move on. MR. SAVAGE: Mr. Chairman, before they all leave, let's say thank you for a great presentation. The information that you gave us is something that we always think about, we never hear about. Thank you very much. It was great. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. We'll move on to old business. Any old business? (No response.) CHAIRMAN LONGO: No? Moving right along to subcommittee reports, anything on Land Development Regulation, Mr. Duane? MR. DUANE: We didn't have a meeting. Page 30 March 6, 2002 CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. Skip construction code for a minute. Utility code. MR. MASTERS: I didn't attend the meeting, but we did get the handout. Justin might have some input on that. MR. MARTIN: There was a Justin Martin. There was a general presentation by Dr. Laren Pipe Research Association. There was a couple of follow-up items that were presented by Jim McGhee of Public Utilities. One dealt with an RPZ meter assembly for 2-inch and underwater service lines, and the other one was if you look here on the list on directional drilling. There was a handout including some text for directional drilling to be added into the utilities ordinance. And it was a pretty short meeting, not many attendees. That's about it. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Thank you, Justin. Real quick on construction code. We really haven't been meeting that much on the construction code at all. We are reviewing fire fire plan review fees right now with Ed Riley and his group. He's met with the CBIA to restructure his fees. I think he was looking at restructuring of the fees between commercial buildings and single-family residential to be a little bit more equitable based on the projected amount dollar amounts and number of permits being issued or thinking of being issued this coming year. We'll be seeing that in about two months. On the ad hoc committee on fees, we are at present still determining the levels of service on the planning side. Denny is getting back to us with some hard numbers on where they are on planning. Joe Schmitt has attended the meetings. He is determined to core out that side of the division to restructure somehow someway to get to our projected levels of service so that we can figure out how to get there and where we're going. So if that made a whole lot of sense then probably didn't, but that's where we are. We're they are they are understaffed. They are discombobulated on that side. Joe's Page 31 March 6, 2002 made a good effort. I think we'll see some answers when the next meeting comes around. It will not happen this month because on March 13th you have a DSAC meeting here starting at, I think, it's three o'clock that day to address the LDC amendments which you should have before you. You should have gotten in the mail. MR. ABBOTT: Some were handed out today. CHAIRMAN LONGO: It's about a half-inch thick or better. You need to read it and be on top of it. We're going to get through it in two hours or plus on the 13th. I was a little remiss. I think Patrick's still here just to ask how FEMA's doing on "old business." Where we are, Denny? MR. BAKER: Before you get off the fees for a moment, on the permitting side of Ed Perico's in the last ad hoc committee meeting, we committed to 12 days, and one of the major action we took was to put the plan and inspectors, plan reviewers on a 90 percent basis, hourly basis which would help them out if they have overtime periods. So in some periods of surges and they work and they have an incentive to work, have the plans reviewed and get them out. With that change it should get us close. Our goal is to get to that in a 12-day period. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Thank you for reminding me. The committee was concerned about that hiring freeze, overtime and all that. Well, they did go back and get that kind of wage, so if we have a fluctuation and which we probably did this month over budget at the end of February or March 1st. If you need to work some guys overtime, he's got it. I'm sure it came in February 28th, and we're trying to do similar things on the planning side. Just got to get a little more under control as to who's responsible for it, some accountabilities, some job tasking or MR. BAKER: Project managers. Page 32 March 6, 2002 CHAIRMAN LONGO: Or project managers that we're looking at to get through these things so it's not sitting on someone's desk and just not getting done for whatever the reason. That's about it on those two issues. Marco. MR. ESPINAR: Mr. Chairman, I heard you mention the Land Development Code thing was February 13th? CHAIRMAN LONGO: March 13. MR. ESPINAR: March 13th. I had it as the 27th. MR. DUANE: So did I on my calendar. MR. ABBOTT: These are the ones I got from Colin here the other day. We have one the 13th for LDC. On the 27th we have a special DSAC meeting for more LDC. MR. MARTIN: I didn't receive anything on the 13th. MR. ABBOTT: I know MR. MASTERS: Is the 13th a subcommittee meeting? MR. ABBOTT: I have today as a regular DSAC. The 13th as just LDC amendments and that's the brown packet we got today. And then on the 27th is quoted a special DSAC, and that one's at 9:30 in the morning. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I was telling Denny before or somebody was telling me before, I have three different dates for these LDC amendments. Does anybody really know which date they want us to meet? I have the 13th, the 27th, and I got another e-mail or fax the other day that said they moved it to April so. MR. ABBOTT: Anna gave me CHAIRMAN LONGO: COURT REPORTER: mail? MR. ABBOTT: Anna. CHAIRMAN LONGO: That's who sent me the e-mail. I'm sorry, who? Who sent you the e- the LDC amendments plus the meeting minutes of last month. Anna. This is on the LDC amendments. It's all So Page 33 March 6, 2002 could we have someone get back to us? Who is in charge of that? Joe's not here. MR. WHITE: I'll see if we can find somebody to answer that question. MR. ABBOTT: Denny, did you now, this is something I got on the phone with Anna, and now he's telling me something about April. CHAIRMAN LONGO: In the daytime I had two different MR. ESPINAR: I had it for 27th for 9:30 in the morning. MR. MARTIN: That's what I have. MR. PEEK: One special meeting on one day in the morning that is a briefing about the Sunshine Law with the Board of County Commissioners. CHAIRMAN LONGO: That's on the 19th. Method workshop on the 19th. MR. ABBOTT: Either the 19th of March is the Ethics and Sunshine stuff and Wednesday April 3rd at two o'clock. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Right. MR. ABBOTT: So you've got a choice of one or the other. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I have LDC amendments on for the 27th as well, and I got a packet here that says ad hoc on the 13th so ... MR. BAKER: Let me get those two dates sorted out for you. CHAIRMAN LONGO: And in the ad hoc packet I have it's a combination of LDC amendments and the meeting minutes from last month. I'm a little confused. MR. PIRES: I'm not sure who else got that packet. I know I didn't get one. MR. MASTERS: Neither did I. MR. ABBOTT: The packet? She came in today to give me that. I mean, she was here just before the meeting started, and that's where I got it. Page 34 March 6, 2002 CHAIRMAN LONGO: I got this packet this afternoon. Tony MR. ABBOTT: That's what it is. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Is there a particular committee that you want to be involved in with, both you and Justin? MR. MARTIN: I'm currently Justin Martin I'm currently involved with the utilities subcommittee, but I would like to find out more about the Land Development Regulation Committee to see if I could I'd like to be involved with that also. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. And how about you, Tony? MR. PIRES: I was thinking Land Development if there aren't too many people on that right now. I'm not sure. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Who's all on Land Development at the moment? (Many hands indicating.) CHAIRMAN LONGO: Everybody. (Laughter.) MR. PIRES: I drive public works crazy. How about utilities code? CHAIRMAN LONGO: That's fine. When does utilities meet? MR. MARTIN: Utilities meets on the help me out here, Tom. Is it the fourth Thursday of every month? MR. MASTERS: That's right. MR. MARTIN: I think it's the fourth or the last Thursday. I think it's the fourth Thursday of every month. MR. MASTERS: Actually, they've been pretty productive. They have a set schedule now with an agenda, whether it be water or wastewater who's going to be on the agenda for that. MR. PIRES: Who should I contact for that then, Tom? MR. MARTIN:' You can e-mail staff or e-mail me. CHAIRMAN LONGO: In front of you guys is your e-mail addresses and then basically a cheat sheet on the members of this Page 35 March 6, 2002 committee. Check out your e-mails, your addresses, phone numbers, all that stuff. If there's any corrections, just get them on the record now. I have a correction on mine which I'll give everybody in a second. My e-mail is wrong. Actually, I have two e-mails, but the e- mail to go to personally is to go to proudbuilder~AOL.com. MR. ABBOTT: Anna also told me at my request I said, "Could I have this on an e-mail," and she's going to e-mail it to me so I could have it electronically. So those that want it might ask for it. MR. BAKER: Are we going to collect those to get a library of e-mail addresses? CHAIRMAN LONGO: I changed mine with Anna a little while ago. MR. BAKER: Does anybody else have changes to their e-mail address? MR. SAVAGE: Did you want to give us yours individually? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Proudbuilder, one word, at AOL dot com. See, do we have Justin's on here yet? MR. MARTIN: Mr. Chairman? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Yes. MR. MARTIN: Just to add to mine category, I guess, would be professional engineer since it's not on there, and if we're adding abbreviations after that I'm P.E. CHAIRMAN LONGO: P.E. Okay. MR. ABBOTT: Are you going to take these to Anna? CHAIRMAN LONGO: I'll leave them with whoever collects this stuff today. Tony is yours all correct? Your category is MR. PIRES: Attorney, I guess for category. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I'll leave this with the packet today. MR. ABBOTT: Okay. Who's going to make the master list today? I think that's what Denny was asking. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I'll leave it with whoever does the Page 36 March 6, 2002 meeting list, so I'll leave it with you. MR. BAKER: Give it to me, and I will get it updated. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Then while we're waiting for Patrick to get back to tell us when the next meeting is, let's go around the table for any member comments starting with you, Charlie. MR. ABBOTT: No. Other than I think that we I just like the bad news we kind of got on that computer stuff, but I guess that's the way it goes. It's a lot of money. By the way, if we have 50 percent of the money in the GIS, we ought to have a little bit of the priority as to which module or whichever they attack first. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. Tom. MR. PEEK: No comments other than; did we approve the minutes that are on here, or did we skip that item? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Oh, I think we skipped that. We'll go back to that. You're right. We approved the agenda, but we didn't approve the minutes. MR. PEEK: I move approval of the minutes of February 2nd. MR. SAVAGE: Second. CHAIRMAN LONGO: All in favor. (Unanimous response.) CHAIRMAN LONGO: Thank you, Tom. Marco. MR. ESPINAR: No comment other than welcome, Tony, and welcome, Justin. MR. PIRES: Thank you. No comment. MR. SAVAGE: You know I'm going to have a comment. I want to tell you something that when I read that article in the newspaper, I felt like getting my rebel flag and marching up and down Collier Boulevard and U.S. 41 because I was very proud of what Dino said in that newspaper article about this board. I was very upset with this woman who said she's been to several meetings. I think she's been here once, maybe twice in eight years. She seemed Page 37 March 6, 2002 to know all about what this board was doing if you read that article, and I'm very proud of Dino's remarks, and you were also quoted, I believe, in reference to utilities. I've forgotten now MR. WIDES: I think we were referenced. MR. SAVAGE: And also Mr. Schmitt. And I want to tell Mr. Schmitt, I want to tell the county commission, and I hope you put it all down and they all read it, that they ought to thank God they have a dedicated group of people in this county looking out for the citizens of Collier County, not just developers, not just whomever else. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Thank you, Herb. MR. SAVAGE: I make it big and loud, and I hope they all get mad at me and call me as the newspaper did about my eight years on this board and how come I am going to be appointed again. I said, I don't know. I asked for it. It's up to the county commission. So I just want to let you know, thank you for the comments you made on that. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Brian. MR. JONES: Just kind of a question for Ed. What kind of how many did we get last week, and what's the backlog going to be like? MR. PERICO: Ed Perico for the record. We got we figured out and still sorting it out, took in probably 3,600 permits this past month. We took over a 1,000 permits in two days, so needless to say, we got a backlog. And we will be picking away staff's going to be working overtime to do whatever it takes to get the job done. MR. JONES: Might I suggest, the ones that are there just to beat the deadline, which is probably, do those last. Can you find out from is there a way of finding out? MR. PERICO: What we did, we asked the contractors to put them in the order they were as they needed them, and what we're doing now is the punch list coming up looking for a permit, and we'll try to sort through them. People in the department, people just tried Page 38 March 6, 2002 to beat the system and go in the record probably with the other is 100 we got that people haven't picked up yet. MR. ABBOTT: 1,500. MR. PERICO: 1,500 permits. MR. ABBOTT: Before this press? MR. PERICO: Stacked up in files and people just not picking up. What happens is they take away priority from the people that need the permits. We have no way of knowing. MR. ABBOTT: But that's why you enacted that fee like a deposit fee for that very reason, and it still has even with that fee 1,500. Wow! CHAIRMAN LONGO: Justin. MR. MARTIN: I just have a general question for the committee on concerning the resources provided to the subcommittees, and I wanted to find out I know what utility subcommittee has, but I wanted to find out on the other subcommittees if they have anyone there that takes meeting minutes or any administrative assistant type of support for follow up with items to be distributed between meetings. How does that work on the other committees, because I know the utility subcommittee currently there is no support? MR. ABBOTT: We've done our own in the past. Somebody in each subcommittee takes some notes, and we have been very lax on reporting. MR. MASTERS: Pretty similar to utilities a lot of times we have a staff person for the LDC. Previously it was Ron Nino would be there. He'd take some notes and kind of lead us through that, so hopefully we'll be able to keep a staff person available. MR. MARTIN: Then the next question would be is, would it be warranted to have some sort of support for the subcommittees for our meeting minutes and distribution of materials between meetings? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Absolutely. I know at the ad hoc Page 39 March 6, 2002 meeting and even at our construction code meetings and I don't know when it happened, but it recently popped up we have a court reporter now in our meetings, and I don't know if that's been required or in the utility subcommittee meetings. Tom, are you involved in those meetings? MR. WIDES: Not directly, but my representation is as part of the engineering one of his for example, there we mentioned I had Jim as an active participant in the meeting. I don't know that we want to bog one person down with just sitting there taking notes. Just from prior things that are done in prior meetings, I don't know if this will fit your bill, rather than notes, basically follow-ups, agreements made, which can be a lot less onerous on anyone as opposed to having nothing or having just a lot of verbage in there. I offer that as another way. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Typically, Justin, on those committees amongst the committee members themselves, one way is the chair of that committee and a vice chair can run that meeting instead if the committee chair cannot get there. So I suggest you-all on utilities get together at next utilities meeting to come up with chair and a vice chair for that subcommittee. Tony. MR. PIRES: Mr. Chairman, do you know how many of those meetings are noticed or advertised? CHAIRMAN LONGO: They are noticed through this Development Services and as you're on the committee as to setting your meetings for the next one. We do sometimes hear if there is an issue. If utilities is before us today, if they want to talk about having a utility subcommittee meeting, Tom would ask for a meeting or Roy would ask for a meeting, and we'd set it. I think it's a good practice monthly to have a meeting and just, if nothing else, review what you have. But if there's nothing there to be done, then you don't have a meeting that month. Page 40 March 6, 2002 MR. MASTERS: Typically you'll get a package in the mail for utility code. Generally Sue has been e-mailing everybody with an agenda prior to the meeting. MR. PIRES: The public's knowledge of finding out about that, is that posted anywhere such as advertised or MR. SAVAGE: In the office, the secretary. MR. MASTERS: They have a set meeting date to be at the first Wednesday of the month. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Does that answer your question? MR. MARTIN: Yeah, I think what I heard is that on the on the construction code committee you now have a court reporter. On these other committees, you MR. ABBOTT: We have the ad hoc committee has the court reporter. We just happen to be virtually the same committee, so it's like this (indicating). MR. MARTIN: Right. And then the other committees are on their own. They don't do anything else as far as having a member take meeting minutes. CHAIRMAN LONGO: They have members usually take the meeting minutes, but it's not recorded. In other words, it's not an official public recording like what we have here today. MR. ABBOTT: This is a briefing sheet. That's the way I would look at this, what they did, and that's fine. That's what we did for years and but there was no requirement that we do it. It was kind of like a courtesy, you put it in here. MR. MARTIN: Okay. I was just trying to see if there was any way of getting some administrative support for these upgraded. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I don't know who you would actually ask besides the only person in the room to ask is Denny as to have someone there from staff to actually take the meeting minutes. You might want to I'll ask for you. Okay. Bryan. Page 41 March 6, 2002 MR. MILK: Point of clarification for the packets. Were they mailed out, or were we supposed to get those today at this meeting? CHAIRMAN LONGO: I got mine in the mail last week. MR. MILK: That LDC packet? MR. PEEPLES: No, a different packet for today's meeting was mailed. MR. MILK: It was mailed. I'm talking about that cover there. CHAIRMAN LONGO: This ad hoc advisory subcommittee ad hoc meeting I got today. My agenda for today with the meeting minutes came last week in the mail. MR. MILK: As did mine. I was wondering about the two meetings coming up. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Patrick. MR. WHITE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As you've mentioned, the cover for this does say subcommittee, and then it says ad hoc. You'll note that it says 3 p.m. March 13th and it appears, though, that we may have a, quote, conflict for members who are on both the ad hoc and possibly the DSAC subcommittee that does Land Development Code review, because the DSAC subcommittee for Land Development Code review for the schedule that's been out for a month now says that Thursday, March 13th oops, maybe it's really Wednesday. I don't know. We're going to have to figure that out. Maybe it's actually Thursday, March 14th. Maybe it's actually Wednesday, March 13th. Not sure, but generally isn't the subcommittee for Land Development Code meeting on Thursday? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Yes. MR. WHITE: That may be the glitch here, but as you obviously notice, the ad hoc committee meeting is also tentatively being scheduled for the 13th at 3 p.m. Which is its traditional date and time. And regardless if you're on the LDC subcommittee, I would suggest that you review the provisions that are attached for the LDC Page 42 March 6, 2002 amendments and be prepared for either the 13th or 14th. We're going to have to advise you by e-mail and phone or otherwise as to whether that time is correct or not. If you're on the ad hoc subcommittee and you care to look at the LDC amendments, that's fine, but your minutes attached from the last meeting and the transcript thereof, and that's what's important for the subcommittee for ad hoc. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. MR. WHITE: If I've thoroughly confused you, that's because I am too. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Okay. There is for clarification there is no ad hoc meeting next week. Okay. So on the 13th there is no ad hoc meeting. There may be an LDC subcommittee meeting on the 14th. MR. WHITE: I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, that if you have the members here that are present of that subcommittee, that you poll them as to whether being an overlap into the ad hoc have no objection to going with what was originally projected as Thursday the 13th. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Right. MR. ABBOTT: Thursday the 14th. CHAIRMAN LONGO: My question, though, is on the 27th, are we still supposed to be here for the LDC amendments? MR. WHITE: Yes, sir. DSAC, March 27th, 9:30 a.m. CHAIRMAN LONGO: There you go. That now I will poll the committee members on the LDC committee subcommittee as to, do you have any meetings scheduled next Thursday, and do you want one? MR. MASTERS: Yes and yes. I think we need to make a recommendation to bring to the full committee on LDC amendments, so we need to have a meeting that day, but we do need a package. MR. ABBOTT: You want mine? I'm not on that one. Page 43 March 6, 2002 MR. WHITE: I'm going to ask (Multiple speakers.) COURT REPORTER: Wait, gentlemen. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Everybody MR. MASTERS: I would hope that meeting is Thursday the 14th. I'll wait for clarification. MR. WHITE: I'm going to ask staff to provide all subcommittee members for Land Development Code review with a package that has the agenda cover or the cover sheet saying meeting is March 14th, Thursday, 3 p.m. Is that going to be adequate time? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Yes, thank you. Now, that answer your question? MR. MILK: What happened to the mailout? CHAIRMAN LONGO: Which one? MR. MILK: That packet there. That one there. CHAIRMAN LONGO: This packet is a combination of the LDC amendments plus the meeting minutes from the ad hoc committee meeting from last month, and it's just wrong. It's the wrong packet. You're going to get a new packet altogether with the LDC amendment for the LDC subcommittee t° review for next Thursday. Okay. Tom, have any comments? MR. MASTERS: No comments. MR. DUANE: I'll save it until after Robert Duane, for the record. I'll save my comments until we get our performance standards next month. MR. SAVAGE: Mr. Chairman, I see we have Mr. Colonel Schmitt in here today right now, and I want to let him know my opinion of this woman who was talking about this board and that news article, and I want to let him know that she doesn't know Page 44 March 6, 2002 anything about this group of people in this board, Colonel. She doesn't know anything about what this board has been doing. She's been maybe twice in eight years she's been here. Whether she's told you other things or not, I don't know, but I'm very upset about that article, and I appreciated so much what our chairman had said, and I just want to let everybody know, you particularly, that this woman doesn't know this group at all. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Thank you, Herb. I did spend 40 minutes on the phone with the Naples Daily News almost two weeks ago, and I thought that this article would not come out because I thought it was very I thought it was bad press. I thought it was wrong. We were basically being accused of being greedy developers sitting around a table making all the rules for the county commission. I just so happen to have the charge of our charter with us, but I thank you, Patrick, for giving it out to me that Wednesday before, and I read it verbatim to her. I laud this committee as the most professional, morally of good character people in this community who do look out for the community, and they are professionals, and they are experts at what they do. And without this committee we would be in a lot worse shape than we are. It got down to about a half a second quote, but I think the gist of it is that we are who we are. We are charged by the county commission to do a job. We do that job. I think we do it well. The bottom line is the county commission makes those decisions on their own. We advise the county commission. That's all we do. They take that advice, and they do what they want with it. Staff is at our pleasure sometimes to answer questions and give us information that we don't have or we need when we need it to logically go through the progression of following through of a problem or something that we're working on and get an answer for it. So I Page 45 March 6, 2002 appreciate the kind words. MR. SCHMITT: For the record, Joe Schmitt, Administrator, Community Development Environmental Services. Denny and I spent probably an hour with her one-week prior to her doing the story. So, Denny, I believe, that was Wednesday when they ran the story. The story ran on Sunday. It was a Wednesday or Thursday of last week when we sat and well, two things. One is, it was not what it was what I got out of this was not her interest in doing the story; it was the editor in search of a story. So you-all know how papers work, and I don't need to explain that to you. When the editor tells folks to go out and do the story but the gist of the story was, again, to look into the accusations that the DSAC was nothing more than a shadow board of directors for the Community Development and Environmental Services. But, frankly, for the planning services piece and the building review portions of our business, and both Denny and I assured her that such was not the case. That your charter was certainly, No. 1, voluntary, but, two, that this was the professional organization that provided feedback to me as the administrator on how I can best provide services to your basically to your the business side of the operation that we support. And this got into the issue of about being developer dollars and developer dollars that pay for the service and we batted that all around as far as that process, but we spent time with her. The story was an interesting story. There were a few quotes from other people that I don't even know how they got into the story because it was irrelevant. I won't go into that record. I'll talk about that off line if you'd like to talk, but from that standpoint I can't I didn't have anything to say as far as how the story was written or what was written, other than the fact that I think we tried our best to at least educate her as to what the DSAC was and to dispel any rumors as the issues that this board being a quasi board of directors Page 46 March 6, 2002 and being an approval process. And I said, just as Dino just said, it's an advisory council principally advising me on turnaround times, services. And I explained to her I have an obligation to you-all to explain to you on the processes of where the money is going and the services that you actually pay for when you come in and pay permitting fees or application fees. So it was left at that. Denny, I don't know if you have anything left to add to what I just explained. MR. BAKER: Other than she was regurgitating a lot of history, which I thought, was irrelevant to the way we conduct business today. MR. SCHMITT: But it was really to be put honestly, it was a search. I think she spoke to Dino certainly before she came over here, but it was a search for a story that I don't think she found a story that she wanted so. MR. SAVAGE: She was looking for it. MR. SCHMITT: You could be upset, but having dealt with this in my past life, it's you know, you just I have a saying that you know as far as press. It's just, you just deal with it. It's and I can't let that burn any bridges that I'm going to have with the Naples Daily News SO. MR. ABBOTT: MR. SAVAGE: MR. ABBOTT: nothing. She called me, and then she called you. Yes, she did. She didn't tell us we were illegally appointed or CHAIRMAN LONGO: Real quick, Bob. MR. ABBOTT: Dwight Brock told her that the county can change that at will and did. MR. SCHMITT: I got to tell you from a standpoint, she's been fairly I'd say balanced in the reporting that she has given us, so the Page 47 March 6, 2002 county, so I didn't want to it's not that I'm going to burn any bridges with her. So I just left it alone. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Bob Duane. MR. DUANE: I was going to reserve my comments to make because I don't like to listen to myself whine, but do you think we're going to see some real improvements in the level of service of processing STPs and zoning petitions? Are we months away from that, or are we a year away from that? Do you have any sense? Because I've done business with the department for 16 years, and this is the worst I've ever seen it before. It ran well 12 to 18 months ago. It ran well, but I'm taking more than two weeks to get a pre-application conference, and some of them have been 30 days, and I've got to call two, three times just to get a project planner assigned to the case. I mean, when can we see some improvement? You're hiring some more people, I know, but did you have give me a general indication. MR. SCHMITT: That's a whole presentation in itself. I have been here just over two months. My assessment frankly, my biggest concern and I'll tell you I focused on three things: People, processing, communications, and I think I told you-all that. My biggest concern right now is the morale of the people in this organization, because it, frankly, is in the toilet. And I'm trying to implement systems to try and improve that. How do you do that? Well, through leadership. And I don't want to go through all that. The second piece is processes. I'm looking at processes. We're in terrible shape with planners. I'm three principal planners down plus my director. So I'm hiring people. I have interviews tomorrow for a director. You're asking me when. I can't put a mark on the wall, but I am thoroughly frustrated with the number of in-house projects that are competing against projects coming in from the customer, meaning either the citizens of Collier County or you know, Page 48 March 6, 2002 you're citizens of Collier County. You're the customer as well, but from the from when you walk in the door with either a site development plan or a PUD review or a building review or whatever, we're doing okay, I think, from the standpoint of residential when we're looking at building on that aspect. Commercial side, probably a little bit worse. We're about 21 days, if I'm not mistaken, is about what we're averaging now. Targets really should be between about 14 and 19. I've got some planning PUDs that have been around for almost a year. MR. DUANE: I've got one for 14 months. MR. SCHMITT: That's unacceptable, and I know that, but at the same time I have no systems in this organization to tell me what I'm doing in-house, when is it due, how many competing demands I have for staffs time because I have limited resources, dollars, and people. And the dollars frankly, if it's General Fund, it's limited, but under 113 Funds it's not. And I also have some uncomfortable when we talked about the rational nexus about some of the 113 dollars are paying for some of the things I think are strictly county responsibility. When I'm talking about General Growth Plans, the Comp Plan, those are things that define the box you live in and not the other way around. And there's some legal nexus there on the dollars. But probably the most frustrating thing I found in this place, I want to run it like a business, and I don't even have the finance systems to tell me how much I'm spending per review and time and people. It just doesn't exist, and you're asking me how long will that be? I honestly, if I sat back and looked at the assessment right now, I'd probably say it'll be a year before I can even have a system in place to figure out what I'm what I'm costing. And when I'm talking about direct cost, indirect cost, administrative overhead in general, G&A, general administrative overhead. What is the total labor Page 49 March 6, 2002 multiplier for the services provided? I have no finance system in here that even can tell me. Project comes in the door, and it's given to if it's given to Ray Bellows, how many hours he's put on that project, whether it's a review, either in house meaning, if I'm looking at the Vanderbilt Beach study or East Naples Overlay Master Plan for the Golden Gate, no systems to do that. I am I had my first project management review board yesterday, and this is the only thing about crawl, walk, run. We're not we're not even in the embryonic stage. So we're not even at the crawl stage. I had a briefing yesterday on project management and project management business process. We're talking about taking vertical management and creating horizontal multi-disciplinary teams. This is all new language to this staff, and it's going to be a tough process, but I my initial assessment is I can't tell you the time because I just don't know, because I don't even know what I have in-house. And the competing demands when I look at my planning staff, I have at least seven projects from the board to look at specific overlay and zoning issues within this county, and that coupled with what the requirement to support the demands from both well, from the Environmental Advisory Council, from the Planning Commission, and then the board. So, frankly, all I'm doing right now is handling the fire fight, and the flames are burning the door down, and that's really what's going on right now with handling the requirements that are coming in-house strictly with whether it's a PUD amendment or other activities. And I owe my boss a pretty good rundown on where we are with competing demands. So to tell you the truth, I can't tell you. MR. DUANE: I liked your sincerity, particularly of your answer and the fact you're trying to MR. SCHMITT: But I'm saying the most frustrating thing and Page 50 March 6, 2002 Denny and I talked about this is the cost of doing business. I have no systems to tell me what it costs to measure the matrix about performance, performance oriented as far as when I look at overhead and dollars devoted to the running of the business. I don't even have that system to tell me that. So I have to build those building blocks first before I can even assess where we are from an organization. MR. SAVAGE: Colonel Schmitt, Mr. Chairman, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? You know, you're in a situation, and we all have to sympathize with him. This county, whether we admit it or not, is growing so damn fast. MR. SCHMITT: That's the most significant issue when we talk about what services. Two years ago the fact of the matter is we probably doubled the size of the number of work we're doing, and this county staff is probably not anywhere has increased at the requirement to support the demand. MR. SAVAGE: Absolutely. MR. SCHMITT: I heard a figure the other day and I can't tell you the numbers now because I just don't remember when we talk about the ratio of county employees per resident. When you looked at the growth over this county and Tom mentioned that. I can't remember the numbers right now, but it was nowhere has the county government grown to match the growth in the population, and that's where the degradation in your services are coming from. MR. SAVAGE: The other problem is there's nobody to hire. You see, there are very few people willing to MR. SCHMITT: And we're having a very difficult time in hiring planners. MR. SAVAGE: MR. ABBOTT: MR. SCHMITT: Right. I see your ads in the paper. I mean, I'm advertising for planners but, frankly, the biggest dissuader of people coming down here is the cost Page 51 March 6, 2002 of housing, and if you want to go back you want to go back to the board in fact, I'll tell every reporter that. You can complain all you want to get the pay for employees in this county, but you're not going to get decent help if you don't pay the wage that's competitive with the outside industry. And, frankly, that's the we can't get people to come down here to interview because of the cost of living down here. So, yeah, do I have pent-up anger? (Laughter.) MR. SAVAGE: No wonder you're getting so thin. MR. SCHMITT: I run every morning, and it's great therapy, but no, I am truly I have no measures of effectiveness to measure the business, and I look at Ed and I say to Ed, "What are we looking at the demands for the future?" And I have great systems to tell me where I've been. I call that rearview mirror management. I know where I've been, but I have no idea where I'm going because we don't have any systems to project the demands for the future, and that's being proactive instead of being reactive. Will we get there? Yeah, we'll get here if I last long enough, but that's to answer your story, I appreciate your frustration and then, in fact, that's exactly what I told the reporter. "Your time is money in your business, and if I'm not providing the service, it costs you money" and I said to her, "Guess what, you don't bear the cost of that. It goes back to the consumer." So I said, "What we do is provide a service to the customer in Collier County by providing you the service that you need so that you can keep the cost of your business down." And I went through that whole thing with her. Was that in the paper? No. CHAIRMAN LONGO: I did the same thing. MR. SCHMITT: I said that is my that and I use this board to tell me where the frustrations are. So but that was go back to that, that was in search of a story, and the story was written based on a request Page 52 March 6, 2002 to the editor. MR. ABBOTT: MR. SCHMITT: MR. ABBOTT: Okay. Are you free to talk to the press and such? Yeah. CHAIRMAN LONGO: You had a final comment? MR. BERRINGER: Yes, the last time I was at this meeting, and most of you recognize me. I'm here every month. I've been coming here for three years, so this lady buttonholed me as I left here. She said to me, "What do you think about this committee?" I said, "I've been coming here for three years. I expected to find a bunch of guys who were self-serving." I said, "I didn't find that. I don't find that." I said, "These guys are as open, as fair as they can possibly be." So that's my comment as an individual, and I represent The Conservancy. So, therefore, if anything, I guess maybe I'm an enemy, but I'm here anyway. COURT REPORTER: Could I have your name, sir. MR. BERRINGER: Len Berringer, B-e-r-r-i-n-g-e-r. CHAIRMAN LONGO: Do I have a motion or any more comments? Motion to adjourn. MR. SAVAGE: I just want to thank you for your comment. That was great for you to tell us that. I don't need that, you see. MR. PEEK: Move to adjourn. CHAIRMAN LONGO: We will adjourn. There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of the Chair at 5:10 p.m. Page 53 March 6, 2002 DEVELOPMENTAL SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE DINO J. LONGO, CHAIRMAN TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF DONOVAN COURT REPORTING, INC., BY CAROLYN J. FORD, NOTARY PUBLIC Page 54