DSAC Minutes 09/04/20241
MINUTES OF THE COLLIER COUNTY
DEVELOPMENT SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING
NAPLES, FL
September 4, 2024
LET IT BE REMEMBERED, the Collier County Development Services Advisory Committee,
in and for the County of Collier, having conducted business herein, met on this date at 3 P.M.
in REGULAR SESSION at the Collier County Growth Management Community Department
Building, Conference Room #609/610, 2800 Horseshoe Drive North, Naples, Florida, with the
following members present:
Chairman: William J. Varian
Vice Chairman: Blair Foley
James E. Boughton
Clay Brooker (excused)
Jeff Curl
David Dunnavant (excused)
John English
Marco Espinar (excused)
Norman Gentry
Mark McLean
Chris Mitchell
Robert Mulhere (excused)
Laura Spurgeon-DeJohn (excused)
Jeremy Sterk
Mario Valle
Hannah Roberts-AHAC non-voting
ALSO PRESENT:
Lisa Blacklidge, Manager - Planning, Development Review
Christopher Mason, Director, Community Planning & Resiliency Division, GMCD
Richard Long, Director, Building Review & Permitting Division, GMCD
Claudia Vargas, Project Manager I, PUD
Sarah Harrington, Manager - Planning, Housing Policy & Economic Development Division, GMCD
Captain Bryan Horbal, North Collier Fire Review
Michael Stark, Director, Operations & Regulatory Management, GMCD
Evelyn Trimino, Manager – Finance, GMCD
Marlene Serrano, Manager – Plans Review & Inspections, GMCD
Mike Bosi, Director – Zoning, GMCD
Eric Johnson, Manager – Planning, GMCD
Rey Torres Fuentes, Ops. Support Specialist I / Staff Liaison, GMCD
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Any persons needing the verbatim record of the meeting may request a copy of the audio recording from the
Collier County Growth Management Community Department.
1. Call to Order - Chairman
Chairman Mr. Varian called the meeting to order at 3:00 p.m.
A quorum of 10 was present in the boardroom
2. Approval of Agenda
The motion to approve the agenda passed unanimously, 10-0.
3. Approval of Minutes
a. DSAC Meeting August 7, 2024
The motion to approve the minutes passed unanimously, 10-0
b. DSAC - LDR MEETING - MAY 21, 2024
CHAIRMAN MR. VARIAN MOVED IT TO NEXT MONTH.
5. Staff Announcements/Updates
a. Development Review Division (Lisa Blacklidge, Manager)
● Fee schedule updates include a $1,000.00 preliminary plat application fee which covers plat
review through the subdivision process.
● There is a minor easement use agreement fee. In 2020 Board approval was removed. There is
a $100.00 administrative fee and we’ve done around 1500 of them since then.
● The construction plans project type currently doesn’t have an application fee and we don’t
have anything to apply the pre-application fee so there will be a $500.00 application fee
which will be a wash. The application fee will be just applied to that.
● Currently it just sits there.
● We have not had any comments on the preliminary process. It's going to the board and it
should be on the board the next meeting on the 24th.
Blair Foley asked Will that also be part of the board approval coming up and when will that be effective, do
you know?
Lisa Blacklidge, we're hoping it will be on the October 8 meeting and it will be effective as of October 8.
b. Code Enforcement Division (Thomas Iandimarino, Director not in attendance)
c. Community Planning & Resiliency Division (Chris Mason, Director)
● We are out there monitoring hurricane activity. We're really hoping that September does not turn out
to be an active one for southwest Florida. But in the event that it is, we are prepared to go out and do
damage assessment and do what we need to do for recovery processes.
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● Obviously here in the county, we do have certain drainage problems, what we would consider local
drainage problem areas. No flooding lately as of these storms that we've had here over the last week.
● There was water intrusion in homes from Tropical Storm Debbie, with our twelve inches of rain, but
not as of late.
d. Building Review & Permitting Division (Richard Long, Director)
● Just some numbers that aren't on the report. Residential runs about eight days after it's routed to them.
Structural is about 14 days. The trades are much quicker than that.
● And plumbing is doing really well now that we're fully staffed with plumbing. Mechanicals were
fully staffed. Zoning and FEMA reviews are 21, 23 days out.
● This last month we did 53 TCOs, 283 COs, and 3478 CC inspections. Average 930 a day. We average
right around 40 inspectors a day. It turns out to be about 24 inspections a piece.
● It’s running 4.6 days for a payment slip because there's a two-part process. So, the verify submittal,
they have 1207 permits in there. They're running around four and a half days before that part is
complete. And then the routing piece gets into 10-11 days, still within the statute requirements.
● They've had some staffing changes, but, I was on vacation last week, and when I left, they had 1600
and now we're down to 1200.
● The single-family home has been going down and the permit numbers are going down slightly.
e. Public Utilities Department (Claudia Vargas, Project Manager)
● We attempted to call a DSAC subcommittee meeting for the utility standard manual and
unfortunately we had to reschedule due to conflicts and we couldn't meet.
Quorum EMT staff suggested we come back to you and suggest that we ask for an extended
subcommittee of four to five members. If that's something you would consider, we would come back
out and schedule.
Mr. Blair said I think we do have a subcommittee with members on it. It's myself, Chris Mitchell, Mario
Valley, and John English will be an alternate.
f. Housing Policy & Economic Development (Sarah Harrington, Manager Housing Policy &
Economic Development
● Tuesday, September 17, there is an AHAC meeting, and Hannah will be able to bring information
from here to that meeting. If you guys need anything for affordable housing, please feel free to reach
out.
g. Transportation Management Services (not in attendance)
h. Collier County Fire Review (not in attendance)
i. North Collier Fire Review (Brian Horbal, Captain)
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● Last month we had 51 planning reviews with a three-day turnaround and 646 reviews of new
construction permits with a four day turnaround. We completed 1535 new construction
inspections. And those are our numbers, which you have, minus the inspections in front of
you.
● Pamela Demayo is leaving us. She's our fire alarm reviewer, so we're losing her to a fire
marshal position in Tampa. So if you see her, wish her well. I'm sure most of you have
worked with her or seen her name on your furnace.
● Also, the chief wanted me to let you know, try and use our website or get it out to people to
use our website for scheduling inspections. It's so much easier for just everything, ease of
operations, because a lot of times, people will call and be like, oh, I don't have my permit
number. We're trying to get that message out to contractors calling inspections for their
company.
j. Operations & Regulatory Management Division (Michael Stark, Division Director)
● In August the department received 4357 permit applications with a year to date. A total of
45,986 permit applications, only down about 1.3%.
● So from comparison, over last year, 228 of these permits were for Hurricane Ian. The average
turnaround time for staff is 1.9 days, so that's the average across. We welcome 1,222
customers to our business center and satellite offices, and staff have answered close to 5,844
calls and call centers. We have several new staff members and promotions within the
business center. That includes Danny and Daisy as our two new supervisors
● Michelle has left us as well as Tomm. So going through some transitions and training. Kirsten
Wilkie doing a great job with the training and really a lot of new faces to acclimate to the
business.
● Quick update for the texting function. I know Jason gave an update that hasn't been
successful at this point, just only because of the fact that we've done multiple reviews as far
as the testing and working through this with our vendor, and unfortunately just continue to
find some bugs in the process. So, we apologize for that. I know that Jason gave you another
update last month and we're running into more bugs with this functionality. His new timeline
is looking at mid October, and we're doing our very best to make sure that this rolls out
successfully without any other bugs.
k. Zoning Division (Mike Bosi, Planning Zoning Director)
● We are past the summer months, so we're allowed to start bringing many of these petitions
back to the board of county commissioners. It's good that we're able to start clearing out a
backlog. We also had the review with the county manager, the AYRCIE, and a couple of
modifications she suggested, but we're going to bring that to the October 17 Planning
Commission.
● The other day, two weeks ago, I was bragging about the consistency of my zoning staff
underneath Ray Bellows, my current planners. They've been steady for, since I've been back
since 2011, since I've made that comment, we've had two of our planner three s leaving, both
last day going to be September 20. We also have had our comp plan manager announce his
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retirement. He's transitioning to a part-time temporary position. And we've got a planner
three, that's on the way that we were able to identify who has passed.
● So we're happy that we're going to get somebody who's not going to need a ton of training.
But we also now have a medical lead from one of our LDC amendment teams. So, we've got
some triage, we've got some issues.
● And to let you know we also have another little backlog. We're going to try to, like I said,
we're going to arrange some landing petitions from the September meetings to October. And
then in November, we've got a backlog that's starting to pile up. And unfortunately, that's the
Fiddlers Creek one, where we expect a tremendous amount of time to be spent on it.
● So, we're going to push it forward. But it looks like we're going to have to create a backlog in
January and have to work through it. But the way that I look at it, if I don't have any planners
to be able to review and get these applications to hearing. Maybe we'll eventually catch up.
● We now have, through Mr. French's effort, a dedicated HR professional that's in the building.
I just signed off that we're advertising with APA, Florida Zoning Planning association and the
Florida APA. We find that when we target the trade industries, we get much better results
than just a posting on our county's website.
● And from what I hear from the Fed, they're pretty encouraged about the labor market being a
little bit less hot as it was a couple months ago. So they think that they're going to be able to
provide for interest rate cuts that could have some positive effect upon the economic issue.
But what that's telling me is hopefully there's a little bit more movement within the labor
market. And I'm hoping that we're going to get some good candidates that we're going to be
able to replace these folks in a relatively quick period of time, get it up and running.
● But as you know, to get productivity out of that employee, it takes a little bit of time, and it
takes time away from our existing employees. So we're going to juggle it. But we'll make sure
that we are going to try to meet the development industry's expectations for getting these
petitions to get into hearing.
6. New Business
A. LDCA (Eric Johnson, LDC Planning Manager)
● PowerPoint presentation on the Immokalee Urban Area District Overlay.
● Patrick VanNess and Rachel Hanson are via Zoom
● This was reviewed by the subcommittee last month. Thankfully, we got through the entire
amendment but the subcommittee actually didn't take a vote, but I think you guys were in
favor of it.
● We went back and looked at every issue that was brought up. The changes that we made
subsequent to those comments should be in your packet, highlighted in yellow.
Mark McLean made a motion to approve the LDC portion as it is written in today’s packet.
Jeff Curl seconded the motion
Motion passed 10-0
7. Old Business
r Mr. Varian addresses the Committee members.
o We're coming into the cycle again for renewals. I think there's going to be five ofus that are up for
that renewal.
. Just want to remind everybody at our November meeting we usually review and make a
recommendation to the BCC for them to consider in one oftheir December meetings for January
seating. lfyou are one ofthose five, hopefully you're coming back.
Blair Foley asked. Rey, do you have the five members that are up for renewal, do you know who those
ate?
Rey Torres Fuenles, I do bul I con send them emails individuolly.
8. Committee Member Comments
(none)
9. Adjourn
The meeting was adjourned by the order ofthe chairman at 3:36 p.m.
COLLIER COUNTY
DEVELOPMENT SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
TheseminuteswereapprovedbytheCorrmittee/Chairman * l0IZ{LI,
(choose one) as presented L/ . or as amended6