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BCC Minutes 01/23/2024January 23, 2024 Page 1 TRANSCRIPT OF THE MEETING OF THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS Naples, Florida, January 23, 2024 LET IT BE REMEMBERED that the Board of County Commissioners, in and for the County of Collier, and also acting as the Board of Zoning Appeals and as the governing board(s) of such special districts as have been created according to law and having conducted business herein, met on this date at 9:00 a.m., in REGULAR SESSION in Building "F" of the Government Complex, East Naples, Florida, with the following Board members present: Chairman: Chris Hall Rick LoCastro Dan Kowal William L. McDaniel, Jr. Burt L. Saunders ALSO PRESENT: Amy Patterson, County Manager Daniel Rodriguez, Deputy County Manager Jeffrey A. Klatzkow, County Attorney Crystal K. Kinzel, Clerk Troy Miller, Communications & Customer Relations Page 1 January 23, 2024 COLLIER COUNTY Board Of County Commissioners Community Redevelopment Agency Board (CRAB) Airport Authority AGENDA Board Of County Commission Chambers Collier County Government Center 3299 Tamiami Trail East, 3rd Floor Naples, FL 34112 January 23, 2024 9:00 am Commissioner Chris Hall, District 2; – Chair Commissioner Burt Saunders, District 3; – Vice Chair Commissioner Rick LoCastro, District 1 Commissioner Dan Kowal, District 4; – Crab Co-Chair Commissioner William L. McDaniel, Jr., District 5; – Crab Co-Chair NOTICE: ALL PERSONS WISHING TO SPEAK ON AGENDA ITEMS MUST REGISTER PRIOR TO PRESENTATION OF THE AGENDA ITEM TO BE ADDRESSED. ALL REGISTERED SPEAKERS WILL RECEIVE UP TO THREE MINUTES UNLESS THE TIME IS ADJUSTED BY THE CHAIRMAN. ADDITIONAL MINUTES MAY BE CEDED TO AN IN-PERSON SPEAKER BY OTHER REGISTERED SPEAKERS WHO MUST BE PRESENT AT THE TIME THE SPEAKER IS HEARD. NO PUBLIC SPEAKERS WILL BE HEARD FOR PROCLAMATIONS, PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLIC PETITIONS. SPEAKERS ON PRESENTATIONS ARE LIMITED TO 10 MINUTES, UNLESS EXTENDED BY THE CHAIRMAN. ALL PERSONS WISHING TO SPEAK ON A CONSENT ITEM MUST REGISTER PRIOR TO THE BOARD’S APPROVAL OF THE DAY’S CONSENT AGENDA, WHICH IS HEARD AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MEETING FOLLOWING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE. Page 2 January 23, 2024 ANYONE WISHING TO ADDRESS THE BOARD ON PUBLIC PETITION MUST SUBMIT THE REQUEST IN WRITING TO THE COUNTY MANAGER AT LEAST 13 DAYS PRIOR TO THE DATE OF THE MEETING. THE REQUEST SHALL PROVIDE DETAILED INFORMATION AS TO THE NATURE OF THE PETITION. THE PUBLIC PETITION MAY NOT INVOLVE A MATTER ON A FUTURE BOARD AGENDA, AND MUST CONCERN A MATTER IN WHICH THE BOARD CAN TAKE ACTION. PUBLIC PETITIONS ARE LIMITED TO A SINGLE PRESENTER, WITH A MAXIMUM TIME OF TEN MINUTES, UNLESS EXTENDED BY THE CHAIRMAN. SHOULD THE PETITION BE GRANTED, THE ITEM WILL BE PLACED ON A FUTURE AGENDA FOR A PUBLIC HEARING. ANYONE WISHING TO ADDRESS THE BOARD ON GENERAL TOPICS NOT ON THIS AGENDA OR A FUTURE AGENDA MUST REGISTER TO SPEAK PRIOR TO THE PUBLIC COMMENT PORTION OF THE AGENDA BEING CALLED BY THE CHAIRMAN. SPEAKERS WILL BE LIMITED TO THREE MINUTES, AND NO ADDITIONAL MINUTES MAY BE CEDED TO THE SPEAKER. AT THE CHAIRMAN’S DISCRETION, THE NUMBER OF PUBLIC SPEAKERS MAY BE LIMITED TO 5 FOR THAT MEETING. ANY PERSON WHO DECIDES TO APPEAL A DECISION OF THIS BOARD WILL NEED A RECORD OF THE PROCEEDING PERTAINING THERETO, AND THEREFORE MAY NEED TO ENSURE THAT A VERBATIM RECORD OF THE PROCEEDINGS IS MADE, WHICH RECORD INCLUDES THE TESTIMONY AND EVIDENCE UPON WHICH THE APPEAL IS TO BE BASED. COLLIER COUNTY ORDINANCE NO. 2003-53 AS AMENDED BY ORDINANCE 2004-05 AND 2007-24, REQUIRES THAT ALL LOBBYISTS SHALL, BEFORE ENGAGING IN ANY LOBBYING ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ADDRESSING THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS), REGISTER WITH THE CLERK TO THE BOARD AT THE BOARD MINUTES AND RECORDS DEPARTMENT. IF YOU ARE A PERSON WITH A DISABILITY WHO NEEDS ANY ACCOMMODATION IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS PROCEEDING, YOU ARE ENTITLED, AT NO COST TO YOU, THE PROVISION OF CERTAIN ASSISTANCE. PLEASE CONTACT THE COLLIER COUNTY FACILITIES MANAGEMENT DIVISION LOCATED AT 3335 EAST TAMIAMI TRAIL, SUITE 1, NAPLES, FLORIDA, 34112-5356, (239) 252-8380; ASSISTED Page 3 January 23, 2024 LISTENING DEVICES FOR THE HEARING IMPAIRED ARE AVAILABLE IN THE FACILITIES MANAGEMENT DIVISION. LUNCH RECESS SCHEDULED FOR 12:00 NOON TO 1:00 P.M. 1. INVOCATION AND PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE A. Invocation by Pastor Randy Holdman – Parkway Life Church 2. AGENDA AND MINUTES A. Approval of today's regular, consent and summary agenda as amended (ex parte disclosure provided by commission members for consent agenda.) 3. AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS A. EMPLOYEE 1) 20 YEAR ATTENDEES a) 20 Years Javier Moreno- Parks & Recreation 2) 25 YEAR ATTENDEES 3) 30 YEAR ATTENDEES 4) 35 YEAR ATTENDEES a) 35 Years Danny Dominguez- Road Maintenance B. ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS C. RETIREES D. EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH 4. PROCLAMATIONS A. Proclamation designating January 25, 2024, as Naples Area Board of Page 4 January 23, 2024 Realtors Day in Collier County. To be accepted by PJ Smith, 2024 President, NABOR®. 5. PRESENTATIONS 6. PUBLIC PETITIONS 7. PUBLIC COMMENTS ON GENERAL TOPICS NOT ON THE CURRENT OR FUTURE AGENDA 8. BOARD OF ZONING APPEALS 9. ADVERTISED PUBLIC HEARINGS A. This Item requires the Commission members to provide Ex-parte disclosure. Should a hearing be held on this item, all participants are required to be sworn in. Recommendation to approve an ordinance for the property from a Rural Agricultural (A) Zoning District to a Residential Planned Unit Development (RPUD) Zoning District for the project to be known as Mattson at Vanderbilt RPUD, to allow construction of up to 150 multi-family rental units with affordable housing on property located on the north side of Vanderbilt Beach Road, approximately 828 feet from the intersection of Vanderbilt Beach Road and Livingston Road, in Section 31, Township 48 South, Range 26 East, consisting of 5.88± acres. [PL20220001011] (This is a companion to item 9B). (District 2) B. Recommendation to approve an Ordinance amending the Collier County Growth Management Plan to change the designation of property from Urban Designation, Mixed Use District, Urban Residential Subdistrict to Mattson at Vanderbilt Residential Subdistrict, to allow a maximum density of 150 multifamily rental units with affordable housing. The subject property is located on the north side of Vanderbilt Beach Road, approximately 825 feet from the intersection of Vanderbilt Beach Road and Livingston Road, in Section 31, Township 48 South, Range 26 East, Collier County, Florida, consisting of 5.88± acres. [PL20220001010] (This is a companion to item 9A) (District 2) 10. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS Page 5 January 23, 2024 A. This Item to be heard at 5 PM. Recommendation to direct the County Attorney to advertise and bring back to the Board an ordinance that will implement a twelve-month moratorium on privately-initiated Growth Management Plan amendment applications for properties located adjacent to (1) Immokalee Road from I-75 east to Oil Well Road, and (2) Vanderbilt Beach Road from I-75 east to its end, while Growth Management Plan amendments are vetted with the public and advisory boards. (All Districts) 11. COUNTY MANAGER'S REPORT A. Recommendation to direct staff to advertise an Ordinance amending Ordinance 2002-63, which established the Conservation Collier Program and bring back the Ordinance at an advertised public hearing. (Jeff Klatzkow, Collier County Attorney & Jaime Cook, Director, Environmental Services and Development Review) (All Districts) B. Recommendation to approve the McDowell Housing Partners - Ekos on Collier application for Workforce Housing Land Acquisition Surtax Funding. (Cormac Giblin, Director, Housing Policy & Economic Development) (All Districts) 12. COUNTY ATTORNEY'S REPORT 13. OTHER CONSTITUTIONAL OFFICERS 14. AIRPORT AUTHORITY AND/OR COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY A. AIRPORT B. COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY 15. STAFF AND COMMISSION GENERAL COMMUNICATIONS A. Public comments on general topics not on the current or future agenda by individuals not already heard during previous public comments in this meeting. B. Staff Project Updates Page 6 January 23, 2024 C. Staff and Commission General Communications ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 16. CONSENT AGENDA - All matters listed under this item are considered to be routine and action will be taken by one motion without separate discussion of each item. if discussion is desired by a member of the board, that item(s) will be removed from the consent agenda and considered separately. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A. GROWTH MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT 1) Recommendation to direct staff to advertise and bring back an Ordinance amending the Land Development Code to clarify the regulations pertaining to mobile homes located in the coastal high hazard area and to remove duplicative floodplain protection regulations that are codified in the Collier County Code of Laws of Ordinances or with the Florida Building Code. (All Districts) 2) Recommendation to direct staff to advertise and bring back for a public hearing an Ordinance amending the Land Development Code, to update citations and correct scrivener's errors. (All Districts) 3) Recommendation to approve the release of a code enforcement lien with an accrued value of $46,800 for a reduced payment of $1,704 in the code enforcement action titled Board of County Commissioners v. Leonel Garza, et al., in Code Enforcement Board Case No. CEPM20090017577, relating to property located at 111 S. 7th St., Collier County, Florida. (District 5) 4) Recommendation to approve final acceptance of the potable water and sewer utility facilities and accept the conveyance of a portion of the potable water and sewer utility facilities for Foxfire Clubhouse, PL20230015698. (District 4) 5) Recommendation to approve final acceptance and accept the conveyance of the potable water and sewer utility facilities for Groves at Orange Blossom Phase 2A, PL20230014003. (District 5) 6) Recommendation to approve a Resolution for final acceptance of the Page 7 January 23, 2024 private roadway and drainage improvements and acceptance of the plat dedications for the final plat of Willoughby Preserve, Application Number PL20150000872 (PPL), and PL20160003121 (PPLA), and authorize the release of the maintenance security in the amount of $142,023.82. (District 2) 7) Recommendation to waive the nighttime hearing requirement and hear a Land Development Code amendment regarding food trucks and food truck parks at two regularly scheduled daytime Board of County Commissioner meetings and approve a request to advertise the Land Development Code Amendment. (All Districts) 8) Recommendation to approve the Conservation Collier Camp Keais Preserve Interim Management Plan 2-year update under the Conservation Collier Program. (All Districts) B. TRANSPORTATION MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT 1) Recommendation to approve Amendment No. 1 to Agreement No. 20- 7818, “Design Services for Upper Gordon River Improvements,” with Johnson Engineering, Inc., to add design services for Section A of the Upper Gordon River project scope of services in the amount of $387,477.32, to extend the term of the agreement by 1,441 days, and authorize the Chairman to sign the attached amendment (Project 60102). (District 4) 2) Recommendation that the Board approve a proposed Ordinance Modification to Collier County Ordinance No. 2006-56, the Rock Road Improvement Municipal Service Taxing Unit (MSTU), to reestablish an advisory committee to provide input to the County on matters related to the MSTU. (District 3) 3) Recommendation to approve and authorize the Chairman to execute Amendment No. 2 to Agreement 20CO3 with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection Bureau of Beaches and Coastal Systems, Beach Management Funding Assistance Program, for Dredging of Wiggins Pass and make a finding that this item promotes tourism. (All Districts) Page 8 January 23, 2024 C. PUBLIC UTILITIES DEPARTMENT 1) Recommendation that the Board of County Commissioners, as ex- officio the Governing Board of the Collier County Water-Sewer District, approve a Work Order to Haskins, Inc., pursuant to a Request for Quotation (“RFQ”) under Agreement No. 20-7800 for the “Glades IQ Pump Station and Tank Improvements” project, in the amount of $680,145.56, and authorize the Chairman to sign the Work Order. (Project No. 70166.12) (District 1) 2) Recommendation that the Board of County Commissioners, as the ex- officio Governing Board of the Collier County Water-Sewer District, award Request for Quotation (“RFQ”) under Agreement No. 20-7800, the “Annual Agreement for Underground Utilities” to the lowest bidder, Kyle Construction, Inc., and authorize the issuance of a Work Order in the amount of $746,000.00 for the Pump Station 308.09 Rehabilitation project. (Project Number 70240.4.11) (District 4) 3) Recommendation to approve Change Order No. 2, providing for a time extension of 30 days under Construction Agreement No. 23- 8058, with Accurate Drilling Systems, Inc., for the “Golden Gate City Transmission Water Main Improvements – Phase 1A – Golf Course” project, and authorize the Chairman to sign the attached Change Order. (Project No. 70253) (District 3) 4) Recommendation to 1) approve an after-the-fact payment of Pay Application 1 in the amount of $16,636.00 for bond work completed, 2) approve the Master Pump Station Generator Replacement Projects for MPS 112.00 and 121.00 for purchase and installation of two (2) generators damaged from Hurricane Ian which erroneously did not have proper Board approval, as required under Agreement 19-7527 Electrical Contractors with Public Utilities Specialization, 3) approve Purchase Order 4500228495 to Simmonds Electrical, Inc. in the amount of $475,324.56, and 4) deem the expenditures have a valid public purpose (50280.6.5/50280.6.6). (All Districts) D. PUBLIC SERVICES DEPARTMENT 1) Recommendation to accept two (2) non-restricted library grant Page 9 January 23, 2024 donations in the amount of $200 to provide operational support for the Collier County South Library, from the Kirsch McLaughlin Trust through the Fidelity Charitable Grant Program in the amount of $100, and from the Eileen and Cono Fusco Fund through the Fidelity Charitable Grant Program in the amount of $100, and authorize the necessary Budget Amendments. (Public Services Grant Fund 1839) (All Districts) 2) Recommendation to authorize the Domestic Animal Services Division to participate in fee-waived adoption program partnerships and authorize the County Manager or designee to execute any and all documents to effectuate participation in fee-waived adoption program partnerships. (All Districts) 3) Recommendation to approve and authorize the removal of uncollectable accounts receivables in the amount of $45,711 from the financial records of the Collier County Domestic Animal Services Division in accordance with Resolution No. 2006-252, make a determination this adjustment is in the best interest of the County, and authorize the Chairman to execute the attached Resolution. (All Districts) 4) Recommendation that the Board approves the current Collier County Sheriff’s Inmate Program at Domestic Animal Services that includes the Inmate Program, Court Ordered Weekend Worker’s Program, and Court Ordered Community Service Program. (All Districts) 5) Recommendation to approve a resolution authorizing the temporary closing of a portion of State Road 29 and determining that the closure is necessary for the Collier County Museums’ annual Immokalee Cattle Drive & Jamboree on March 9, 2024, to fulfill a Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) temporary road closure permit application requirement. (District 5) 6) Recommendation to approve and authorize the submittal of three (3) Electronic Lien and Title Satisfactions with the State of Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles for the State Housing Initiatives Partnership Demolition and Replacement of Manufactured Home program (SHIP Grant Fund 1053). (All Districts) Page 10 January 23, 2024 7) Recommendation to approve and authorize the Chairman to sign one (1) mortgage satisfaction following full principal payment of $320,000 and waive any unpaid interest owed. (All Districts) 8) Recommendation to approve and authorize the Chairman to sign two (2) Rapid Re-Housing and Homelessness Prevention Program Landlord Payment Agreements between Collier County and (1) Sameer Poddar and (2) Springhurst Properties, LLC, to provide grant- funded rental assistance to individuals and families who may be impacted by Hurricane Ian and who may also be homeless or at risk of homelessness in Collier County. (All Districts) 9) Recommendation to provide after-the-fact approval for the adoption fees waived by the Division Director of Domestic Animal Services for the period of August 30, 2021 through December 31, 2023, in the amount of $57,730, that were not in compliance with the procedures set forth in Resolution No. 2018-106. (All Districts) E. CORPORATE BUSINESS OPERATIONS F. COUNTY MANAGER OPERATIONS 1) Recommendation to authorize the Chair to execute twenty-one (21) Deed Certificates for purchased burial rights at Lake Trafford Memorial Gardens Cemetery and authorize the County Manager or designee to take all actions necessary to record the Deed Certificates with the Clerk of the Court’s Recording Department. (District 5) 2) Recommendation to authorize the Chairman to sign the revised Memorandum of Agreement between the Florida Division of Emergency Management offered to the County to accept and house a 250-kilowatt towable generator for shared use. (All Districts) 3) Recommendation to adopt a Resolution approving amendment (appropriating grants, donations, contributions, or insurance proceeds) to the Fiscal Year 2023-24 Adopted Budget. (The Budget Amendments in the attached Resolution have been reviewed and approved by the Board of County Commissioners via separate Page 11 January 23, 2024 Executive Summaries.) (All Districts) 4) Recommendation to approve administratively approved Change Order No. 1, adding 16 days and utilizing $47,484 of the owner’s allowance for Purchase Order No. 4500223994 under Agreement No. 19-7539 with Advanced Roofing, Inc., the “CCSO Jail (Building J2) Roof Replacement” project, for roofing replacement at the Collier County Sheriff’s Office Jail (Building J2), and authorize the Chairman to sign the attached change order. (Project No. 50229) (District 4) G. AIRPORT AUTHORITY H. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS 1) Request the Board to appeal the Hearing Examiner’s decision in Hearing Examiner Decision No. 2024-05, granting a variance from LDC 5.05.09.G.2, which requires the base of a communications tower to be set back from the property line by a distance of two and one-half times the height of the tower, to reduce the setbacks from 375 feet to 72 feet on the northern and southern property lines and 375 feet to 220.7 feet on the eastern property line, for property located at 2560 39th St. SW, also known as Golden Gate Estates Unit 28 North 150 Feet of Tract 144, in Section 26, Township 49 South, Range 26 East, Collier County, Florida. (Petition No. PL20220003012) (All Districts) I. MISCELLANEOUS CORRESPONDENCE J. OTHER CONSTITUTIONAL OFFICERS 1) To record in the minutes of the Board of County Commissioners, the check number (or other payment method), amount, payee, and purpose for which the referenced disbursements in the amount of $84,002,773.75 were drawn for the periods between December 28, 2023 and January 10, 2024 pursuant to Florida Statute 136.06. (All Districts) 2) Request that the Board approve and determine valid public purpose for invoices payable and purchasing card transactions as of January 17, 2024. (All Districts) Page 12 January 23, 2024 K. COUNTY ATTORNEY 1) Recommendation to reappoint two (2) members to the Collier County Code Enforcement Board. (All Districts) 2) Recommendation to reappoint two (2) members to the Land Acquisition Advisory Committee. (All Districts) 3) Recommendation to appoint three (3) members to the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. (All Districts) 4) Recommendation to approve an insurance settlement whereby the County will receive $10,000 to settle and release its claim against James Fortunato for costs incurred to repair bridge damage, and to authorize the County Manager or designee to execute the release. (All Districts) L. COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY 1) Recommendation to terminate for convenience Agreement No. 23- 8144 for “Holiday Lights and Decoration Rental and Installation Services” with Light ‘Er Up LLC. (All Districts) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 17. SUMMARY AGENDA - This section is for advertised public hearings and must meet the following criteria: 1) a recommendation for approval from staff; 2) unanimous recommendation for approval by the collier county planning commission or other authorizing agencies of all members present and voting; 3) no written or oral objections to the item received by staff, the collier county planning commission, other authorizing agencies or the board, prior to the commencement of the bcc meeting on which the items are scheduled to be heard; and 4) no individuals are registered to speak in opposition to the item. for those items which are quasi-judicial in nature, all participants must be sworn in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A. Recommendation to adopt a Resolution approving amendment (appropriating carry forward, transfers, and supplemental revenue) to the Page 13 January 23, 2024 FY23-24 Adopted Budget. (The budget amendments in the attached Resolution have been reviewed and approved by the Board of County Commissioners via separate Executive Summaries.) (All Districts) B. Recommendation to adopt an Ordinance amending the Collier County Land Development Code, to update the provisions related to wireless communication facilities. [PL20230013966] (First of two hearings) (All Districts) 18. ADJOURN INQUIRIES CONCERNING CHANGES TO THE BOARD’S AGENDA SHOULD BE MADE TO THE COUNTY MANAGER’S OFFICE AT 252-8383. January 23, 2024 Page 2 MS. PATTERSON: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Ms. Patterson. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Phase 1 of today's commissioner meeting. I just want to say thank you for coming. Looking forward to today's -- what we have to do. Just as a reminder, please turn your cell phones off so that that doesn't go off when Randy's talking to God. And public comments, if you have any comments to make, I want to remind you we have a system here that we're going to follow, three minutes. We're most interested to hear what you have to say, but we're most interested in three minutes. So there's a yellow light that will go off, and it will give you 30 seconds, and the red light's when you land the plane. So just as a reminder of that. We look forward to hearing what you have to say. Item #1A INVOCATION BY PASTOR RANDY HOLDMAN – PARKWAY LIFE CHURCH - INVOCATION GIVEN So with that, Pastor Holdman. PASTOR HOLDMAN: Good morning, Commissioners, and thank you for the privilege to lead us in our opening prayer. If we can bow our heads. Father, this morning we thank you for this day. We thank you, Lord, for the opportunity that we have to come to serve our community and to serve you in our gifts and talents that you've given us, Lord. Lord, I thank you for this community, and I thank you for the, incredibly, 100 years that you have blessed this city and this January 23, 2024 Page 3 community with the resources and the leadership that we've been able to experience. God, as we continue to move forward, we set this agenda before you today, and we ask, God, that every decision and every conversation and the hearts of those that's involved in this meeting and planning today, God, would be led by you, that you would give a spirit of wisdom, a spirit of discernment, counsel, and, most importantly, the fear of you, Lord, in our hearts in all decisions that we make. Guide the conversations and guide the spirit and keep this meeting and keep this community in a spirit of unity that you have set before us. We thank you for this day, and we give you the glory and the honor in knowing that at the end of this day, that everything that is said and done is done by your leading and your guiding. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen. CHAIRMAN HALL: And I have asked Wayne Smith to do our Pledge. And, Wayne, in 30 seconds, before you say the Pledge, could you tell us what America means to you. MR. SMITH: Oh, my. Can you hear? You have about two or three hours? Can you hear me all right? Well, of course, I think most of the people know -- well, I know all of you, of course, but I did have a little bit of a time in my life where I spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five-and-a-half years. There were others that were there almost eight years, by the way. But we came out of it. There were actually 550 of us -- over, you know, 1,200 or so that were killed in that environment. But in any event, we -- you know, we came out at our 50th reunion this year of coming out, and there were 125 of us at this time. Anyway, I'll -- I'm here to do the Pledge. Sorry that I spent some time. Can you hear it? Okay. (The Pledge of Allegiance was recited in unison.) January 23, 2024 Page 4 CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, sir. MR. SMITH: And for you, keep that veterans thing going. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes, sir. MR. SMITH: Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: Ms. Patterson. Item #2A APPROVAL OF TODAY'S REGULAR, CONSENT AND SUMMARY AGENDA AS AMENDED (EX PARTE DISCLOSURE PROVIDED BY COMMISSION MEMBERS FOR CONSENT AGENDA.) - MOTION TO APPROVE BY COMMISSIONER MCDANIEL; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER LOCASTRO - APPROVED AND/OR ADOPTED W/CHANGES MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, agenda changes for January 23rd, 2024. First we need to correct the placement of Item 16B2. It actually needs to be Item 17C. This is a recommendation that the Board approve a proposed ordinance modification to Collier County Ordinance No. 2006-56, the Rock Road Improvement Multiple Service Taxing Unit, to re-establish an advisory committee to provide input to the county on matters related to the MSTU. That is, again, just an agenda placement issue. Next, move Item 16A7 to Item 11C. This is a recommendation to waive the nighttime hearing requirement and hear a Land Development Code amendment regarding food trucks and food truck parks at two regularly scheduled daytime Board of County Commissioners meetings and approve a request to advertise Land Development Code amendment. This is being moved at Commissioner Saunders' request. January 23, 2024 Page 5 Add-on Item 10B, to be heard immediately following 4A. This is a presentation from the Productivity Committee regarding outsources -- outsourcing versus insourcing of transportation engineering construction and engineering inspection services. This is being brought to the agenda at Commissioner Saunders' request. Add-on Item 10C is a recommendation to approve acceptance of 80 to 100 donated air purifiers from Carrier Air and direct staff to implement a program for distribution to Collier County non-profit organizations by application with priority given to healthcare facilities and organizations that offer short-term or long-term residential services. This item is brought to the agenda at Commissioner Saunders' request. We have a request to continue Items 9A and 9B to the February 27th, 2024, BCC meeting. This is the Mattson at Vanderbilt GMPA and PUDZ, and this is being made by the applicant's request. We also have a staff communication item related to the boil water notice in North Collier County and community communication. This is being brought to the agenda at Commissioner Saunders' request, and we may talk about that a little bit earlier in the meeting today. We do have the two time-certain items, that is Item 10B, which I had mentioned previously, to be heard immediately following 4A, that is the Productivity Committee's presentation, and our nighttime-event item, 10A, to be heard at 5 p.m. This is related to the moratorium ordinance on privately initiated Growth Management Plan amendment applications. With that, County Attorney? MR. KLATZKOW: No changes. Thank you. MS. PATTERSON: I should also mention court reporter breaks scheduled for 10:30 and 2:50, if we're still here before our January 23, 2024 Page 6 5:00. Commissioners, ex parte on the consent and summary and any further changes. CHAIRMAN HALL: Ex parte, Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: No ex parte and no changes, sir. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Same here, no ex parte, no changes. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I have no ex parte and no changes. I would like to -- just a quick comment on Item 10C. I don't like bringing things to the Board without prior notice, but this came up rather suddenly. It's a good-news issue, and so I made the assumption that no one would object to it being placed on the agenda with little notice. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Kowal. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: No ex partes and no changes. CHAIRMAN HALL: I have no ex partes. How long is the productivity thing going to -- MS. PATTERSON: The presentation is quite short. If you -- it will be the discussion portion of it that -- CHAIRMAN HALL: I want to get to the discussion on the water immediately, so I'm good with that. No changes. MS. PATTERSON: Okay. CHAIRMAN HALL: Motion to approve the -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I'll make a motion to approve. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Second. CHAIRMAN HALL: Seconded. All in favor? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. January 23, 2024 Page 7 CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: All opposed? (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: Motion passes. SEE REVERSE SIDE Proposed Agenda Changes Board of County Commissioners Meeting January 23, 2024 Correct placement of move Item 16B2 to Item 17C: Recommendation that the Board approve a proposed Ordinance Modification to Collier County Ordinance No. 2006‐56, the Rock Road Improvement Municipal Service Taxing Unit (MSTU), to reestablish an advisory committee to provide input to the County on matters related to the MSTU. (Staff’s Request) Move Item 16a7 to Item 11C: Recommendation to waive the nighttime hearing requirement and hear a Land Development Code amendment regarding food trucks and food truck parks at two regularly scheduled daytime Board of County Commissioner meetings and approve a request to advertise the Land Development Code Amendment. (Commissioner Saunders’ Request) Add-on Item 10B to be heard immediately following 4A: Presentation from the Productivity Committee regarding Outsourcing vs Insourcing of Transportation Engineering Construction Engineering Inspection Services (CEI) (Commissioner Saunders’ Request) Add-on Item 10C: Recommendation to approve acceptance of 80 to 100 donated air purifiers from Carrier Air and direct staff to implement a program for distribution to Collier County non‐profit organizations, by application, with priority given to healthcare facilities and organizations that offer short‐term or long‐term residential services. (Commissioner Saunders’ Request) Continue Items 9A & 9B to the February 27, 2024 BCC Meeting: Mattson at Vanderbilt GMPA (PL20220001010) and PUDZ (PL20220001011) (Applicant’s Request) Notes: Staff Communication item: Update related to the recent Boil Water notice in North Collier and community communication. (Commissioner Saunders’ Request) TIME CERTAIN ITEMS: Item 10B to be heard immediately following 4A: Productivity Committee Presentation. Item 10A to be heard at 5PM: Moratorium ordinance on privately-initiated Growth Management Plan amendment applications. 2/15/2024 4:03 PM January 23, 2024 Page 8 Item #3 AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, that brings us to awards and recognitions. We were going to have two today, but we -- one of our -- one of our employees was unable to attend. So our only service award today is a 20-year attendee, Javier Moreno, from Parks and Recreation. Congratulations. CHAIRMAN HALL: Too cool for school. (Applause.) MS. PATTERSON: Item 3A4 was going to be a 35-year attendee. We will catch up with him on a future -- at a future board meeting. Thirty-five years is definitely something to celebrate. Item #4A PROCLAMATION DESIGNATING JANUARY 25, 2024, AS NAPLES AREA BOARD OF REALTORS DAY IN COLLIER COUNTY. ACCEPTED BY PJ SMITH, 2024 PRESIDENT, NABOR®. - MOTION TO APPROVE BY COMMISSIONER KOWAL; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS - ADOPTED That brings us to Item 4, proclamations. Item 4A is a proclamation designating January 25th, 2024, as Naples Area Board of Realtors Day in Collier County. To be accepted by PJ Smith, 2024 president, NABOR. (Applause.) MS. SMITH: I promise mine will be, like, one minute. It is my great honor to receive this important proclamation January 23, 2024 Page 9 designating January 25th as the Naples Area Board of Realtors Day in Collier County. On behalf of the Naples Area Board of Realtors and about 8,400 members, plus or minus 100 every day, I would like to sincerely thank the county commissioners for your acknowledgment, NABOR members for their support and leadership, and the community for your continued support. This recognition truly commemorates NABOR's important impact and key achievements in the Naples area on the advent of our 75th anniversary. We look forward to celebrating this year with you as we honor the past, celebrate the present, and embrace the collective future. Thank you so much. (Applause.) MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, if we could get a motion to accept the proclamation. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: So moved. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Second. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Second. CHAIRMAN HALL: Moved by Commissioner Kowal, second by Commissioner Saunders. All in favor? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: All opposed? (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: Motion passes. MS. PATTERSON: Thank you. Added Item #10B January 23, 2024 Page 10 PRESENTATION FROM THE PRODUCTIVITY COMMITTEE REGARDING OUTSOURCING VS INSOURCING OF TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERING CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING INSPECTION SERVICES (CEI) (COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS’S REQUEST) PRESENTED; MOTION DIRECTING STAFF TO RECRUIT A TEAM BY OCTOBER 2024 APPROVED BY COMMISSIONER MCDANIEL; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS - APPROVED This brings us to our add-on item, which is Item 10B, a presentation from the Productivity Committee regarding outsourcing versus insourcing of transportation engineering construction and engineering inspection services, CEI, and we do have our representative from the Productivity here to make a presentation. Mr. Godshaw, welcome. DR. GODSHAW: Thank you. Be there in a minute. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: As Jerry's approaching the podium, I wanted to tell the Board and the audience that I'm very proud of the Productivity Committee meetings -- Productivity Committee. I attend their meetings. I do miss one every now and then. And I can tell you, it's one of the hardest working committees that I've participated in over the years. A lot of very experienced individuals, and they really dig into county budgets and processes. And this was one of the issues that the Productivity Committee took a look at, and that was the outsourcing of engineering. And I asked them to go ahead and make a presentation for two reasons: One, to talk about the issue, but also to just let this board know that the Productivity Committee is alive and well and doing a lot of good work. January 23, 2024 Page 11 DR. GODSHAW: Thank you, Commissioner. My name is Jerry Godshaw. My background is actually in economics. And I've been part of this committee for close to five years now in various forms. And I want to say, first of all, it's been a pleasure to work with most of the county staff. They're very professional, they've been very cooperative, and they've been unbelievably helpful in every way we could possibly imagine. And the commissioner, I applaud him for his attendance at most of our meetings, so that's been great. But just to give you -- do I switch the slides here? MR. MILLER: Slide out the keyboard. DR. GODSHAW: Oh. Thanks, Amy. As the commissioner said, the committee's looked at a lot of issues over the last few years, and I just wanted to highlight three of them that we've done recently. We did a great examination of Parks and Rec. This has resulted in increased signage, easier to contact, and more rapid addressment of several issues that citizens may bring to the fore, in front of Parks and Rec, the 311 number, and I think we've helped in that regard. But, again, it's been the county staff that's implemented this stuff, and they've done a wonderful job. We're currently looking at some of the issues on the sports complex that were a problem in the construction, and hopefully address those so they're not a problem in the future. And I want to get to the last one, which I'm going to address now, the transportation management services and engineering. This was a project that was brought to us because we've looked at the management of transportation engineering, and they've presented to us many -- in many instances, and the Productivity produced a report that analyzed whether we should contract out some of these services or source them in-house and specifically with respect to construction engineering and inspection services. January 23, 2024 Page 12 Just by way of background, the transportation engineering division is responsible for a lot in our county that we have to be thankful for. We have wonderful roads. They're responsible for the maintenance and safe traffic operations on our roads, implementing all the capital improvement projects, including many of those that were part of the sales tax initiative, acquiring the needed property for those improvements, which is, as you know, not always easy. And the county, in terms of building roads and maintaining them, uses both contracted outsource personnel and employee services of the county for construction engineering. Now, for reasons related to some issues, particularly the availability of qualified personnel and liability in the design phase, the design engineering is primarily outsourced to third parties, as it would not be very beneficial for us to do that in-house. But -- and this is where the big but comes -- the road construction projects require a certain amount of regular oversight and inspections by construction engineering and inspection teams; CEI, we refer to them as. Currently, the county has 10 full-time equivalents. Basically, one supervisor, a couple managers, and field inspectors. This headcount is clearly not sufficient to maintain the current roads or to do the required inspection and engineering that's required for the future construction, and we'll get to that in a minute. As part of the sales tax initiative, there's a lot of construction going on, Vanderbilt Road and others, and they require constant investigation. Now, typically, a third party would do this for 12 to 15 percent of the construction costs, which is a lot of money. The county's Productivity reviewed the cost of outsourcing these services as opposed to using in-house staff. When we looked at just two projects that they had proposed that they could take in-house rather January 23, 2024 Page 13 easily with one additional team -- a team consists of five individuals -- the cost of that additional team for outsourcing for just these two projects, the two projects as seen on the screen here, are the 16th Street bridge northeast. It's a surtax project. Construction is to begin this year, and it will last 18 months. Following that, there's the Airport Road widening. Again, a surtax product, which was to follow 18 months later in 2026. Those construction budgets for each of those are 2.2 and 2.4 million respectively. So, roughly, a little over 4-and-a-half million dollars to outsource that, which is in the budget. To do this in-house would cost around $2 million. We could hire the people. We've talked to the staff. The staff believes they can find the people. This is not a requirement that requires specific advanced engineering training. They can hire inspectors. They can train them within a short period of time. And if we hired them internally, the project costs are expected to be about 2 million, a little under maybe, and that includes both the first-year cost of about 700,000 that would include acquiring vehicles, training, and everything, and then about a 550-, $560,000 annual cost of the personnel, including fringe benefits and everything. So our recommendation is quite simple, that we proceed with giving the engineering department the approval that you accept this report and consider proceeding with one additional in-house CEI team to establish as proof of concept that this is the right direction for the county to go in at a savings of over 2 million, probably close to 2-and-a-half million. So that's the recommendation of the Productivity Committee. CHAIRMAN HALL: Go ahead. Yes, sir. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Oh, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the report. And I don't know if staff has any comments on the potential for January 23, 2024 Page 14 recruiting a team like that, but it seems to me we're talking about two projects where there's a $2 million savings on two projects. Obviously, a team would be available for other projects going forward. So the savings would be substantial, and, of course, Commissioner Hall, this is one of your favorite topics on how to do things more efficiently. CHAIRMAN HALL: I'm loving this. DR. GODSHAW: Well, Commissioner, may I add that there's a pipeline of projects that the county has that's going to keep these guys employed for a long period of time. And even if not, turnover is likely to be such that I'm sure it's not going to be an issue. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: So I guess the question for staff is, can you recruit these folks and -- if the Commission gives you that authority and get them onboard and start saving some taxpayer dollars? MS. SCOTT: Good morning. For the record, Trinity Scott, Transportation Management Services department head. Absolutely, we'll do our best job to be able to recruit. In our particular CEI group right now, we do not have any vacancies. So we are at our full employment capacity in that specific group. I can tell you that we've been working very closely with HR to look at different opportunities as far as recruiting other than just putting our positions out. In fact, today I have a group in Immokalee at a hiring fair for some of our inspector positions and some of our maintenance worker positions. So we're working very closely with HR to try to think outside the box about how we have typically recruited. CHAIRMAN HALL: What would be the timeline that we need to get this team on board? MS. SCOTT: So it's going to take some time to, obviously, have folks apply, get in through all of our background checks, et January 23, 2024 Page 15 cetera. It's going to take a couple months to bring them on board. The first project was in '24 on that group. So we would want to have them on board fully trained up by the beginning of our fiscal year, which would be October; that would also include -- we would need to order equipment for them. So that takes some time as well. So, typically, what we've done in the past is we've ordered the equipment to determine what the lead time of that is and then started bringing those folks on a couple months after that so we can get them fully trained and out in the field. CHAIRMAN HALL: Okay. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Mr. Chairman -- CHAIRMAN HALL: Yes, sir. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: -- we've had a lot of discussion about staffing, and I think you just indicated that you're at full employment, but that's a number that we've set for you. MS. SCOTT: For that specific group. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Right. But that's a number we set for you. We can change that number to accommodate, obviously, hiring another team. And even if one of the projects is completed before we bring on another team, we still have a flow of projects. So the point is, Mr. Chairman and members, I think we should direct our staff to do exactly what Dr. Godshaw has suggested, and that is to investigate, explore, bring on some teams, at least one, to go forward with Dr. Godshaw's presentation. So, I mean -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: So moved. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: All right. Then I'll second that motion. CHAIRMAN HALL: All right. We've got a motion and a second. All in favor, say aye. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. January 23, 2024 Page 16 COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Carries. Good job, Dr. Bradshaw [sic]. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you for the presentation, and look forward to the next meeting and the next topic. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: And, Dr. Godshaw, I just wanted to thank you, too. You and I sat on a recent board over at David Lawrence Center. He's doing an awful lot of things all over the community, and in this particular case, he and I were sitting at the same table talking about mental health and a lot of really important issues. So, you know, you're doing a lot to give back to the community and come up with great ideas. So, you know, we all up here applaud you and, really, thank you for your service, sir. DR. GODSHAW: Thank you. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yes, sir. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: It will be interesting to see what the committee comes up with, the lessons learned on the Paradise Coast contracting issue. That's -- that's their next assignment. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Dr. Godshaw was saying he thought it would be a good casino, and we're like no, no, no. I'm just kidding. Wrong avenue. DR. GODSHAW: Yeah. MS. PATTERSON: Chair, would you like to talk about the -- CHAIRMAN HALL: I would love -- MS. PATTERSON: -- situation this weekend with the water? CHAIRMAN HALL: Yes. MS. PATTERSON: All right. So we do have staff here in the January 23, 2024 Page 17 room and if the commissioners, if you want to -- Chair, if you'd like, you have some opening comments, and then we can -- we can bring the staff up and have a conversation. CHAIRMAN HALL: Sure. So what we had on Sunday, we had a low-pressure incident in North Collier that affected three different districts, mainly District 2, some of District 3, and some of District 5. I learned about it from some emails that I got early Sunday morning from constituents saying we have low pressure. Can you -- you know, can you advise? So I said, stay tuned. I immediately got on the text message and found out that we did have a low-pressure incident due to some valves and some automation, and that's -- and then we found out that on Sunday later that afternoon that there was a precautionary boil-water notice issued by the county that said, you know, while we're taking samples, you know, we advise you to boil your water, and that was Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning, we didn't have any update publicly, and about 1 p.m. on Monday on the county Facebook page there was a notice given that said the boil-water notice is lifted. And I didn't see that, and so I had no notice to me -- actually, I didn't get any notice at all personally. I learned about it through emails and then me contacting people. And then this morning, Arthrex emailed saying, hey, can you let us know about this boil-water notice because, you know, we haven't heard anything. So I got with -- I got with staff and learned that the major boil-water notice -- the generic boil-water notice was lifted with the exceptions of Arthrex and the Pewter Mug area because there were breaks in the line. There, again, I found out because people were asking me. As of this morning, I mean, around 8 o'clock, we noticed that on the county Facebook page that the boil-water notice was taken away, January 23, 2024 Page 18 or that the lifted notice was taken away. Now we've got WINK News saying that the county doesn't have any official thing. So here's the point. I'm not -- I'm not upset that we had an issue. Issues happen. I do not -- I think that the way that we communicated with each other and the way that -- especially the way that we did not communicate with the public needs to be changed, and that's the discussion that I would love to have. MS. PATTERSON: Thank you, sir. So I see Dr. Yilmaz ready to come up, and perhaps he has some insight as to where a few of these anomalies occurred, and then we can diagnose where we can smooth out these communications for future events. Dr. Yilmaz. DR. YILMAZ: Thank you. Commissioners, thank you very much for the opportunity, and, Chair, you're right on, and I think there are a number of communique -- and communications improvements, enhancements, and lessons learned. Actually, told -- and I'll share with you how we can do not just better, probably better than any other utility. We make best out of these experiences. So very briefly. It's going to take about three minutes. This whole thing started with Sunday 11:39, we experienced low pressures in our north part of the service area, and those low-pressure readings were due to a search [sic] valve at one of our pump stations, and we have isolated, diagnosed within 59 minutes and, thereafter, we went into a restoration of 40,000 connections, half of the county water/sewer district being restored for pressures not only for public safety hydrants, high-rises, but also hydrants. So we were back and operational within 60 minutes. And when you look at close to 80 square miles, we're trying to figure out what happened, where the low pressure is. We're trying to figure out if January 23, 2024 Page 19 there are water main breaks. We're checking our five different substations, and we're checking our SCADA, all hands on deck. So I want to thank our water director, Howard, and our distribution manager, both of them best of the best we can find in the state. Their team did tremendously well diagnosing/identifying the root cause, and getting the system up and running in 69 minutes. So I just want to make sure that, as our governing board, your team is on it, getting it fixed, and with benchmarks created for the utilities elsewhere how we can go after it and fix it. Having said that, we had to issue a precautionary boil-water notice because of the fact that most customers experienced low pressure. Some customers on the high-rises, second floor, third floor, because of the pressure drop, they experienced no water, so we got the reports, and we get our SCADA readings. Based on that, we made the judgment call conservatively. What traditionally what would be boil-water notice being much more targeted area, we made it broader, and that's being conservative on our part making sure that public health and safety and water is safe. In the process, we were collecting hundred QAQC samples, and hundred QAQC samples were analyzed overnight, and every single one of them passed that drinking is safe. So we issued press release and social media notifications that the first incident started at 11:39 a.m. Sunday, ended 12:26 Sunday, resulted in no compromise in public health safety, including our fire response. Now, what happened thereafter, we had two water main breaks. This is -- after all this happening, we're restoring the system. We had two water main breaks, and one was on Creekside water main break on Sunday night, and our crews were there, stabilized it, isolated, and fixed the water main break Sunday night and issued typical boil-water notice. That has its own cycle because of the fact that when you do January 23, 2024 Page 20 laboratory analysis, incubation period for bacterial analysis [sic] is about, like, close to 24 hours. You have to wait 24 hours to get it. And we do it in-house so that it's as fast as we can get it so that customers are knowledgeable. Then second force main break happened on U.S. 41, and that water main break happened on Monday morning, early morning. So we have crews, all hands on deck, fixing second water main break. And the general thought is that we had a dry season, thanks to El Nino, now we have the dry winter season turned into wet season, which is one of the root causes for water main breaks due to groundwater levels. Having said that -- so that kind of paints the picture in terms of in the field, our operations. Let's move to communication. Commissioner, you're right on, when you have a close proximity on events, big part of customers, 40,000 connections, over 120,000 customers base being notified that they are on boil-water notice and we're lifting boil-water notice but then we got these two isolated areas driven by water main break, continues to have boil-water notice. So there's overlap, and there are lessons learned. And I think that moving forward, if we have this incident, we will make sure that our communication in all areas, press releases, social media -- and one other thing that I learned personally, that we need to -- oh, by the way, I want to compliment our County Manager, Ms. Patterson. She has been 24/7 in communication with me as much as up to speed. She's -- I am, but I think that given the time compression gives us such a limited time to clarify things. So we have one thing posted, something else is happening, we're posting it, close proximity. No excuses. We'll do better. But what I want to share with you is what I got from Commissioner Hall's -- I mean, that was impressive to me, frankly, January 23, 2024 Page 21 and I think it's a learning point for staff for us to be able to help your assistants because of the fact that what I have seen Commissioner Hall did is just exceptional. He just sent update on his newsletter, and his update included clarification as soon as he got the information from our County Manager, including the map. And then reference from that map updates link in terms of when boil-water notice is going to lift. So I want to include that in our, frankly, lessons learned. We didn't think about it. But I think that we can do that for any district. When we have boil-water notice, we'll be -- we'll be reaching out to you through our County Manager so that you have all the information you need to communicate specifically with your districts in addition to our means and methods communicating to the public through press releases. So that's my brief summary. And if there are any other questions, I would be more than happy to answer them. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Dr. Yilmaz. DR. YILMAZ: Yes, sir. CHAIRMAN HALL: I think, there again -- I think we're extremely pleased with how the county responded to the actual problem and fixed it as fast -- I mean, that's impressive. But what's not impressive is how we communicated to the public. Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think there are two elements of communicating with the public. Obviously, what Commissioner Hall did with the newsletter certainly got the word out to an awful lot of people. And so keeping people informed on what has happened and what the processes are, that's incredibly important. And I know that's a lesson learned. And this is not a criticism. I think staff did a wonderful job in responding to all of these problems. January 23, 2024 Page 22 But there's two elements to communication: The first is, when people have the problem and they start calling to let us know that there's a problem, and I think that's where there may have been a breakdown. I got a phone call from Sue Filson saying that people are calling her because they're dialing some numbers for the county, and there's no response. They're dialing cell phones, and there's no response. And so I got ahold of a couple folks, including Dr. Yilmaz and Amy Patterson, to say there's a problem. People can't get through. What's going on? Now, by that time, everybody knew -- you guys were on it. But I think we need to find a way to improve the communications potential for people that have the problem and they call in. There should be an answer. And our 311 system isn't operative, I think, over the weekends, but something like that where people can call in. They know there's a number to call in. Maybe it's part of 311 where they know to call in, and there'll be an answer. I think that was really the most frustrating thing for people. And I got a bunch of letters -- I'm sure everybody did -- that they called different numbers -- a variety of different numbers and could not get any response, and that was what was really frustrating for a lot of folks. So I don't know what the answer is, but there has to be some better way for people to report an emergency, even if it's a whole lot of people calling in to report that. DR. YILMAZ: Commissioner, absolutely, and we concur, we agree. One of the things that we need to work on from an infrastructure standpoint in communications. It's not unique to our county, but there are limitations in terms of simultaneous calls coming in. If we have anything more than 100 phone calls come in within time frame January 23, 2024 Page 23 and simultaneous, they get kicked out. So that -- we're doing deep dive, and I think we have solutions sets that already we're working on. So there are some communication infrastructure limitations that we will overcome, and I think that our 311, as well as our utility customer service, and -- along with what we call -- when we have emergencies, we create pool of people, more than usual, answering phone calls. So this incident indicated that we need to be better ready and overcome infrastructure and communication and obstacles we have in phone tree line. We received about over 3,000 phone calls within 60 minutes. It kind of tells you, when you have critical infrastructure failures, it is alerted, and we're silenteures [sic], and even 60 minutes of low pressure created over 3,000 phone calls. That's how important, what we do, and that's what we need to do 24/7/365 to sustain it. So having said that, are we ready for another 3-, 4,000 phone calls coming in within one hour? My answer is no. Are we going to be ready? Working with our County Manager, Ms. Patterson, we will overcome those obstacles. Once we overcome technology and infrastructure communication obstacles and routing, I think that next time around, it will be much smoother, and then we'll include routing to our individual commissioner aides so that they are, at the same time, up to speed. Lessons learned from our Commissioner Hall. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, George. Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes. You mentioned something, Dr. George, and I really appreciate -- I spoke to you personally on Sunday. Even my phone started ringing when people's water pressure dropped off or didn't have any. During your presentation, you talked -- and it's something that I'd like to ask about. Critical infrastructure issues due to our good January 23, 2024 Page 24 Lord sending more water -- surface water than we typically have. Do we have critical infrastructure issues that are that liable to natural events? You know, we happen to -- we happen to have a rainier than usual dry season going on right now, and I'm -- are there other things that we need to be looking at with regard to our critical infrastructure based upon that? DR. YILMAZ: Absolutely, and we are. Our County Manager, Ms. Patterson, during the weekend made all the resources available from EOC, and I've been in communication with Mr. Dan Summers, and we do have some means and methods and tools available there for mass notification that can be driven by a polygon in GIS so that we can have a targeted mass notification that includes phone calls and text messages to the customers registered on Collier Alert. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yeah. You were on over on -- you're over on communication. I'm talking about the infrastructure that we have in the ground right now that's impacted by a higher-than-normal subsurface groundwater issue. DR. YILMAZ: I got it. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: That was -- that was part of your presentation as to why the breaks were happening. Are we that susceptible to higher-than-normal or higher-at-all groundwater -- subsurface groundwater levels? DR. YILMAZ: Got it. The vulnerability is very limited -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. DR. YILMAZ: -- and usually it is where our water main pipe's placed on the rocks. As you know, private development builds our infrastructure, and they convey to us. And we cannot go and inspect every foot of pipe being put underground. So some of them happen to be sitting on the rocks. Quarry is a good example. We have a lot of breaks there when we have water events because of the fact that when you have a water main moving January 23, 2024 Page 25 on the rock, there's going to be a chance that it's going to break. So -- but it's limited. We know where they are, and we're ready to respond. So short answer is, vulnerability is there, we know the locations, and it's very limited. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And then with regard to the communications, you have been working with Dan Summers and a better methodology for communication on a greater basis? DR. YILMAZ: Absolutely. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Is that what I heard? Okay. And, Mr. Chair, I do have a third item that's not related to this, but it has to do with this department, so I'll bring that up after we're done talking about this circumstance. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Dr. George, we're talking -- you brought up the Alert Collier system. Even though this didn't affect my district, my phone was ringing as well as citizens were trying to get ahold of anybody. DR. YILMAZ: Yes. We communicated with you over the weekend. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yeah. And my executive assistant lives in District 3, so she was affected. And I guess she had talked with Ms. Patterson and a few others, and to just get back to your comment about the Alert Collier system, she had mentioned it as well. We use that for hurricanes and everything. And although we don't want to blast it out countywide, I don't need people in Goodland to know that there's a water main break in District 2 or 3, but -- and maybe we don't know this answer. Do we have the ability to -- maybe Ms. Patterson know this, or I see Dan Summers in the back. Do we have the ability to target certain ZIP codes -- DR. YILMAZ: Yeah. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: -- to send out? So, I mean, January 23, 2024 Page 26 that would have been awesome, you know. I mean, we can't use Alert Collier every time somebody gets a flat tire on Collier Boulevard, but for something that affects, you know, water, or maybe a controlled burn that's out of -- you know, it's out of control or a major car accident on I-75, I mean, we don't want to water down Alert Collier. We want it to be for emergencies. But, you know, this crossed over to three districts, and even in my district citizens were hearing it from friends who were saying nobody's talking to us. You know, Commissioner, can you tell us anything? So if Alert Collier, you know, we have the ability to go these seven ZIP codes, send, you know, that's just another, you know, redundant system, and it's a system that already works. When we have storms and hurricanes, you know, we have how many people signed up for Alert Collier? Lots. And so it's not going to -- you know, it's going to be one of the pieces of the puzzle. But to me, when I had heard my assistant talking about that -- and you just brought it up as well -- I would think that would be something to pursue really, really quickly, but make sure it doesn't overinundate, you know, the county because then people start to ignore it. Oh, there's a water main break, you know, 75 miles from me. Who cares? But I don't know, I see Mr. Summers, you know, came up, so I was just curious. DR. YILMAZ: Commissioner, right on. I mean, what you're saying is right on. I think that there's a balance how fast and how often we need to use that notification system. So Mr. Summers is meeting with all my directors this Friday. And he and I talked. We can establish polygons. Not going to be 100 percent accurate, but we will be able to -- above and have beyond ZIP code, we will be able to identify by neighborhoods what we need to send. If there's a boil-water notice, we'll send it out. If boil-water notice rescinded, then we'll send the notes out, and we'll January 23, 2024 Page 27 give a full-scale demonstration project next two or three events and fine-tune it as we go along. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Okay. DR. YILMAZ: I hope that answers your question. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: It does. I mean -- and Mr. Summers is standing behind you. Maybe he has something he wants to add, because, I mean, this is a system that he uses quite a bit. And so could we piggyback on it for these unique instances where we want to get the word out, sir? MR. SUMMERS: Commissioners, good morning. Dan Summer, Bureau of Emergency Services director. The answer is absolutely yes. And we did -- I happened to be working in the office, and I got a call from -- it was not my weekend to do laundry, so I got the call from my residents and followed up accordingly and was monitoring that traffic and did check in with them. I did partially activate my staff on -- which is well within my purview to do that, and we had our notification team ready. We go through a two-step process. Just to refresh just a couple of comments. This is a -- this is a great opportunity for improvement. I've worked with Dr. George's team for 20 years, and they're awesome, and this is a good indication of how we can, again, leverage that power. We focus typically on things like weather and wildfire and hurricane. We absolutely can use this tool in a very discretionary manner to do that. We can draw polygons. It obviously took a little time for Dr. Yilmaz's team to identify that polygon. When I say "the polygon," those areas impacted by service. We can make that notification by text, by cell phone. Presently, right now, the State of Florida has funded and purchased for us all landlines. That is a year-to-year legislative funding. So right now I have 100 percent saturation in Collier County as January 23, 2024 Page 28 long as the legislature continues to buy the white pages, if you will. It's what we refer to it. So number one, we encourage people to subscribe to Alert Collier. We can send the text. The areas that we can notify, we draw that on a map. And, generally, it's accurate plus or minus 2,000 feet. That's pretty good, because we're relying on cellular technology and some of those other things that are outside of our control. So we have a number -- we have a large library of pre-scripted messages. We will get with Dr. George's team, build those templates. And, typically, once we have the area identified, we work with the fire chief or the incident commander, unless the EOC's activated. If you're under a local state of emergency, it's my discretion to pull the trigger. Dr. George in this case is the incident commander. That's his area of authority. Then it takes us about 15 minutes to build that quality, assure it. And, honestly, we have to throttle that notification or else we'd swamp the phone system too, but we can get that message out. And in some cases, through Google Translate, we can even get second-language notifications. I would just -- one more plug. We have learned from the wildfire event, it's important to make the notification of the event, but it's also important to make a second notification to terminate the event. So all clear. So, yes, there are those situations where you want to do more than one notification to bring termination or closure to the emergency so folks aren't calling. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Mr. Summers. Commissioner Kowal. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Thank you, Chairman. And I guess I was lucky that, you know, District 4 was not affected by this, but also I got the same amount of phone calls and January 23, 2024 Page 29 questions asked of me throughout the -- from Sunday on. And it makes more sense now that -- some clarity here, after listening to Dr. George, that these were actually three separate events that happened, and -- because I was questioning myself. I'm like, why do we have a boil-water notice? Now it's not a boil water, and it's back to a boil-water notice. Now it's a different section boil-water notice. So it was kind of confusing to me, myself. And, you know, that -- and to the citizens, that makes it really, really confusing when we're getting this information out in that way. But now it makes a little bit more sense with the three separate events, because he's just following protocol, you know, that once we have an incident, we've got to put the boil-water notice out until we know it is safe to drink. And it sounds like that, pretty much, the water was always safe to drink. It's just the precautionary actions to put the boil-water notice out in three different ways; you know, it was a result of the three different incidents. But I do know -- I think the 252 number did get overwhelmed, and there was a lot of people that was not getting through. And, you know, in public safety, and myself with a background in public safety, when people don't know what to call, they call 911. So our 911 center was actually getting some calls in reference to this, even though it was just a low water pressure incident and not an actual water -- you know, like, they didn't witness a water main break that was actually causing some sort of safety along a roadway or something, which, if that happens, yeah, call 911, let's get it out, and let's get it out quickly. But, you know, if there's some way -- I mean, I'm not that technical savvy or something, but if there's some way that when these people do call into the 252, you know, or the 311 and they're not getting through directly that -- is there some sort of way the call gets switched over to an automated message saying, listen, we understand January 23, 2024 Page 30 because we're getting inundated, we know there's a problem in such and such area, just a message that gives them some relief that then they don't have to keep calling back in and keep clogging up, because they got an answer, or going to call 911 because they didn't get an answer. So I don't know if that's possible or not, but that might be an idea. DR. YILMAZ: Sir, it's possible, and it's call tree, as you know, from your -- so we can always enhance and beef up our phone tree all the way down to five layers. So we've got two if not three layers. So we do have on call, but they were overwhelmed as well. So we need to have multiple tiers. This is one of those events, gives us ability. As our County Manager indicated, there's a lot to learn from this. And moving forward, if we have true emergency -- I mean, this is one that needed to be communicated, but if there was a true emergency and our 311 is overwhelmed, our phone calls on the county system is overwhelmed, and our backup systems is not gone, the ultimate call trees, as you indicated, 911. And our goal is not to move it to 911, handle it within. So you're right on, and we're going to work on it. And there are visibilities, and we can overcome the technical and/or communication infrastructure barriers so that we don't overwhelm and overburden 911 for anything other than true life and safety. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Thank you, Dr. George. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: So just to reiterate, you know, this is by no means a finger pointing session at anybody. I thought the problem was handled amazing. We do want to learn to communicate better. So just to sum it up, you know, no one knows staff. They only -- the buck stops with each one of us up here. We're the ones that it's our fault. And so when we can't respond or January 23, 2024 Page 31 we don't have the information to respond, it looks weak on our part. So I just want the public to know that it is our -- I think I can speak for all of us, we want to solve the problem. It's our desire to be informed and to let them know what they can expect. So just to sum it up, the breakdown in communication to us, we can learn from. The 311 system being overwhelmed, we can learn from. We can do something about that, especially on a weekend. You know, I love the fact, what Commissioner LoCastro said, we don't want to water down the Alert Collier, but we want to be able to utilize it, and I think that's wise. I think another thing that we can learn is to update as we go along. Even though we don't have any information for the solution, we could update that information letting the public know we're well aware, we're working on it. This is what's -- we've taken water samples; it takes 24 hours. Just some form of updating the public. You know, we handled the problem in 60 minutes, but when you're at home and you don't have any water pressure, you have no idea how long that's going to last. And when you can't get through, when every phone call you call is not operating, you can't get an answer, you call a commissioner, they don't know what's going on, that -- that's alarming to the public. So we can learn by updating on a regular basis. Even though we don't have updated solution information, we can still update them on the process. I think that's important to the public. I think that's one of the main frustrations that they had. And then I love the fact that we can utilize the Alert Collier. That the polygon -- you know, we can isolate the areas with a polygon, send out messages to communicate. So I think it was a great conversation. I think we -- everyone has the desire to learn from this and get better, and if anybody else -- Commissioner McDaniel. January 23, 2024 Page 32 COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And this is off subject, but it has to do with communication with customers. We have a system in place that monitors water consumption by individual customers, but it's lagging. It's sometimes two and three weeks or a month old before a customer gets a bill. And I have a circumstance specifically with a friend who has a home who experienced a leaky valve and were consuming close to 100,000 gallons an hour, and then -- and then we're -- they didn't know until their bill came, and then they were a month and a half behind, had consumed well in excess of a million gallons of water. So my question is, while we're looking at how we communicate with our customer base, please, let's shorten up that time frame to trigger the system to tell us to get in contact with a particular customer. We have a system in place that monitors excess water consumption, but alert somebody to alert that customer to allow them to be able to make adjustments interimly and not wait for their bill and then, in turn, put them in a litigious circumstance with a contractor. These particular folks had a new pool installed, and there was a -- there was a valve that was malfunctioning, and they weren't aware of it for close to -- in excess of 30 days. So if you would, please, I'll give you specifics off-line as to where that actually occurred. But if you would, please, add that into the repertoire of communication with a customer base. That's as important, I think, as a mass -- as a mass communication. DR. YILMAZ: Thank you, Commissioner. And you're right. The current system we have is smart meters, and by hour, we know our customers, what they consume. We have the historian that we compare to, and if there's a significant delta, we do give credit back to our customers in three different ways. There are three tiers. Board has authorized me as department head up to certain amount so January 23, 2024 Page 33 you don't see those reimbursements to our customers. And there's an upped amount my County Manager approves. You don't see those because they are empowered and delegated adjustments, but they are lagging indicators, and we're dealing with that probably two, three times a month, routinely. Now, what I did hear from you, Commissioner, just for the governing boards and Board's information, we have three full-scale demonstration pilot projects designed to be more leading indicator as a smart meter and be able to see the consumption and alert our customer service. And we go back to our customer and saying something is going on there and let's look at it. So we're doing that on a limited basis, but there are so many technologies out there. Before we standardize it, we're going through that process. But right on, and appreciate the feedback. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Thank you, sir. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thanks. County Manager. MS. PATTERSON: Thank you, Commissioners. We'll definitely work with you both as the Board and individually on ways to continue to improve these communications. This was a weird and evolving situation. Even my mom called me saying that she didn't have any water and -- yeah. So anyway -- CHAIRMAN HALL: That's not good. MS. PATTERSON: We endeavor to do better. And when my mom doesn't have water, obviously, that's a serious emergency. She's 88, so -- I'm surprised she wasn't one of the ones calling 911. Just kidding, Mom. With that, we're ready to move along to the next agenda item. Item #7 January 23, 2024 Page 34 PUBLIC COMMENTS ON GENERAL TOPICS NOT ON THE CURRENT OR FUTURE AGENDA Okay. Troy, that brings us to public comment. MR. MILLER: Public comment on general topic. We have one registered speaker at this time, Robert Thurston. MR. THURSTON: Good morning, Commissioners. Hello, my name is Robert Thurston. Today marks my eighth appearance before the Collier County Board of County Commissioners on Collier TV. As always, these presentations are meant to be polite and informative. I'm highlighting the deep state's Targeted Individual Program. I'm not here today to talk about wetland conservation or about building a new parking garage. I'm here to talk about freedom from government tyranny. Without freedom, these other things don't really matter as much. There's corruption going on here right under our nose. I'm here to tell you about something that went on that should have never gone on. This room we're in is a place where people come to solve problems. Some problems seem unsolvable. What would you do if a Navy SEAL sniper who you once knew was using the Targeted Individual Program in his connections to the highest U.S. offices in the land to try to destroy your life as well other innocent American lives on a daily basis? In fact, what if this same Navy SEAL had actually made several attempts on your life and you told the police, politicians, lawyers, the Department of Justice, the FBI, activists, civil rights group, and local and national reporters, and next to no one did anything to help? No single person you know had the clout or will to stop this Navy SEAL. Faced with that situation, what would you do to try to save your own life and end the targeting? Would you organize your notes and January 23, 2024 Page 35 write up many speeches to go on community TV? Would you hope someone hears your story and releases the secret government files to the public that details and explains your targeting? Would you use community TV to have your name removed from phony terrorist watch lists you know you're on? My solution to this problem has been to try to create new laws. Where the system is corrupt, We the People have the chance to correct it. To create the new law, I need to give examples of what happened. I've identified Collier Sheriff Kevin Rambosk as deep state, a designation that should lead to his removal from office. In past meetings here, I've spoken of the crimes Rambosk has been committing against me since 2010. In 2022, Rambosk sent another deputy to my home. The deputy had opened a postal package of mine and was hand delivering it to me. He opened it without a warrant, without probable cause, without explanation. And what did Rambosk find in my package? It was a box of good-quality coronavirus masks I had bought to protect myself and others. You have to understand that this is spiritual warfare, all ultimately designed to provoke the target into lashing out so the Navy SEAL or Rambosk can rush in and quickly arrest or worse. It's a setup. Rambosk hacks into my cell phones and computers often and harasses me when I go out based on his findings. Rambosk makes no apologies and offers no remorse, instead hoping to sweep it under the rug. How can Naples hold itself up as a fair and honest place to do business when your head law enforcement official is wrapped up in this illegal torture program involving spying and unlawful harassment against law abiding citizens? CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Mr. Thurston. MR. MILLER: That's all the speakers we have on this item, sir. January 23, 2024 Page 36 Added Item #10C ACCEPTANCE OF 80 TO 100 DONATED AIR PURIFIERS FROM CARRIER AIR AND DIRECT STAFF TO IMPLEMENT A PROGRAM FOR DISTRIBUTION TO COLLIER COUNTY NON- PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS, BY APPLICATION, WITH PRIORITY GIVEN TO HEALTHCARE FACILITIES AND ORGANIZATIONS THAT OFFER SHORT-TERM OR LONG- TERM RESIDENTIAL SERVICES. (COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS’S REQUEST) - MOTION TO APPROVE BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER LOCASTRO - APPROVED MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, with the Items 9A and 9B being continued to the second meeting in February, that brings us to our add-on Item 10C. This is the recommendation to approve acceptance of approximately 80 to 100 donated air purifiers from Carrier Air and direct staff to implement a program for distribution to Collier County non-profit organizations by application with priority given to healthcare facilities and organizations that offer short-term or long-term residential services. This was brought to the agenda at Commissioner Saunders' request, and I will hand it over to him for the background. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you. As I said earlier, I don't really like adding things without some notice in advance, but this came up rather suddenly. A gentleman that I've known for a long time is a representative working -- doing some work with Carrier Air Conditioning, and Carrier has a partnership with another company that produces air purification equipment. They install these in hospitals and other January 23, 2024 Page 37 institutions. They have very large units that connect with the air conditioning and all of those types of things, but they also have a very small portable unit, it's about 3 feet tall, maybe 2 feet wide, and it is very effective in purifying area in, say, a room of -- maybe a little smaller than this room. And they have a -- they're donating a large number of those to the state of Florida, and they're sending 80 to 100 of those to Collier County if we're willing to accept them. The Salvation Army will take probably about half of those, maybe a little bit more, and then my thought was that we have a lot of not-for-profits that do a lot of good community work that involve a lot of people. For example, St. Matthew's House, the Shelter for Abused Women. And if there's a way to assist those types of not-for-profits to make sure that people coming to their facilities are safe from viruses and other bacteria that circulate in the air, that this would be a good thing to do. And so what I'm asking the Board to do is simply accept the donation and then assist in the distribution of those to the Salvation Army and then also to other not-for-profits, as County Manager Patterson has indicated staff could work some sort of a program out. So I think this is a good-news item, and I'm just asking the Board to accept the donation. CHAIRMAN HALL: Make a motion. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I'll make that as a motion, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Second. CHAIRMAN HALL: Second. So we have a motion and a second to accept these items and distribute them. All in favor, say aye. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. January 23, 2024 Page 38 CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: All opposed? (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: None. MS. PATTERSON: Thank you. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you. Item #11A STAFF TO ADVERTISE AN ORDINANCE AMENDING ORDINANCE 2002-63, WHICH ESTABLISHED THE CONSERVATION COLLIER PROGRAM AND BRING BACK THE ORDINANCE AT AN ADVERTISED PUBLIC HEARING. (JEFF KLATZKOW, COLLIER COUNTY ATTORNEY & JAIME COOK, DIRECTOR, ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW) (ALL DISTRICTS) - MOTION TO APPROVE BY COMMISSIONER MCDANIEL; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER HALL - APPROVED MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, that brings us to Item 11A. That is a recommendation to direct staff to advertise an ordinance amending Ordinance 2002-63, which established the current -- I'm sorry -- which established the Conservation Collier program and bring back the ordinance at an advertised public hearing. Ms. Jaime Cook is here to start the presentation. She does have some recommendations that were, as I advised in our meetings yesterday, from the Conservation Collier Land Acquisition Committee that we're going to put on the record for the Board's consideration. January 23, 2024 Page 39 Ms. Cook. MS. COOK: Good morning, Commissioners. Jaime Cook, your director of Development Review at Growth Management/Community Development. Back in the fall, you had directed staff to amend the Conservation Collier ordinance in part to make the acquisition process faster. Back in December, we had -- so the County Attorney's Office had drafted much of the language that was in the backup material for today. We presented that to the full CLACC at their December 6th meeting. They did have some concerns, wanted to be able to take a look at some of the language and provide any recommendations. So we did have a subcommittee meeting with their ordinance policy and rules subcommittee right before Christmas, and then their recommendations were presented to the full CCLAC at the January 3rd meeting. So today -- we are here today to provide some of those updates to you as well as get some recommendations from you, including the staff and CCLAC input on those changes. So the major -- there are several cleanup and minor changes throughout the ordinance, but we wanted to highlight the major changes that would affect the program moving forward, especially in terms of acquisition. So the major ordinance changes are within the funding of the Conservation Collier Program section. There are two major changes in the properties that are eligible section. One in the nomination of acquisition proposal section and, finally, three major changes in the procedures for selection and purchase. And all of these changes were done at the direction of the Board from last fall. So the first major ordinance change combines the Acquisition Fund and Maintenance Fund sections of the ordinance, but the -- so January 23, 2024 Page 40 the Board would essentially be codifying that each year through Fiscal Year 2031 the Board will set the millage rate, which you already have in your purview to do. Additionally, instead of the set percentage rates that are in the current ordinance of 75 to Acquisition and 25 to the Maintenance Fund, the Board would have the authority to set the split each year during the budget. Traditionally, the interest from the Maintenance Fund has been paying for all of the maintenance activities within the preserves each year, and with the changes this year, any maintenance activities will actually be drawing from the principal within the account. So by allowing the maintenance activities to be paid for solely by the interest every year, if and when the program does eventually sunset, there would be -- still be money in that Maintenance Fund that if there are any acquisition purchases or interest in purchasing land, the principal in that Maintenance Fund would be able to acquire that acquisition. CCLAC did have concerns with this policy, but staff would recommend that we would work with the budget office each year to provide a recommendation to you to set those percentages based on any potential acquisitions that we know may be coming forward as well as proposed maintenance activities. In the properties eligible for acquisition and maintenance section, the first of the major changes is that the Board had directed us to look at alternative options for acquiring land including through conservation easements as well as the TDR program. At this moment, staff would recommend leaving this item out of the ordinance, as it's not consistent with our Growth Management Plan which currently states the county is not eligible to participate in TDR programs. We've kind of discussed this internally with staff, and we estimate that it would probably cost somewhere around January 23, 2024 Page 41 250- or $300,000 to hire a consultant to update the Growth Management Plan, which is a year-long process with the state, with state involvement, then have the consultant write the policy, go through the -- go through the contracts to acquire that consultant, as well as legal review. If you wanted to give us direction to approach -- to take this approach and amend the Growth Management Plan, staff would recommend at that time that the ordinance or the companion purchasing policies be updated to include things for -- to include processes for conservation easements as well as TDR programs. Additionally, CCLAC did have some concerns -- COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Can I ask a question about that? CHAIRMAN HALL: Go ahead. MS. COOK: Sure. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Is it not possible, then, to have the acquisition of property can be in a -- in fee or by a conversation easement in the form approved by the Board? If we stopped there, would that be permissible? MS. COOK: It would be. Staff would still request time before implementing this to develop that conservation easement policy, as that's not something that we currently have, and there would be some logistics that would need to be worked out. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: That would not require a Comp Plan change or anything of that nature? MS. COOK: Correct. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: And the reason I wanted to interrupt at this point, Mr. Chairman, there were two issues in this draft that I had some problems with, and this was one of them. I think we should be able to acquire conservation easements in the form approved by the Board. Where I felt that there was a January 23, 2024 Page 42 problem here was keeping the development rights on that property, and that's the part that is raising some concern. So if we are to eliminate all of that, I'd like to still keep the portion in there about acquisition of property can be in fee or by conservation easement in a form approved by the Board. I think that's an important policy. The issue of whether we retain the development rights on that property, I think, we could save that for a future conversation. But I'd like to still have the ability to have a conservation easement. MS. COOK: Understood. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: So I'll just make that point. And I'm sure we're going to get to a point of voting on this, and I'll raise it again. MS. COOK: Okay. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And I completely concur with the ability to acquire by conservation easement. It's just -- always been my want to have those property rights inured to the benefit of the county and not be extinguished. The current language -- the current language was pretty easy. Conservation Collier buys a piece of property in whatever form or format, and the development rights were extinguished. I would like for that to not happen. If, in fact, that requires a Comp Plan amendment at some particular point in time in the future, then we need to address that as is -- as we go forward. But I don't want the development rights to be extinguished. MS. COOK: Okay. And depending on where this goes, if that's something that the Commission would want, we could bring back that policy. The second major change in this section is that the Board may sell Conservation Collier lands provided that the proceeds of the sale January 23, 2024 Page 43 are put back into the program and may only be used for additional Conservation Collier acquisition purchases or maintenance. CCLAC did not agree with the -- with the addition of this language as they did not feel that the characteristics of the land or quality of the land would change such that the lands would no longer qualify for the program; however, it's important to note that very similar language is already elsewhere in the ordinance that the Board has the authority to sell land. So staff doesn't necessarily have an opinion either way if this is included in a second section of the ordinance. CHAIRMAN HALL: I have a question right there. So if we have -- I'm just -- I don't know if -- on the Veterans Memorial Phase 2 extension, is there some Conservation Collier property that's in that -- in that plan? MS. COOK: Yes, where the road is going through. The road right-of-way was already excluded from the Conservation Collier property, but there is some stormwater considerations that Roads will need to utilize Conservation Collier lands for. CHAIRMAN HALL: I guess my question would be, if it wasn't excluded and that would be the case where we had some Conservation Collier property that we needed to sell -- I understand wanting the money to go back into the program, but in that case it could be used for that road -- that infrastructure that's for the public -- for the public good instead of just being used however we want to. That would just be a comment that I would raise. Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yeah. And my comment has to do with the -- you know, I did read that there were opportunities for dispositions by this board. I just want a point of clarification that minimum equivalency is provided for what we paid for it in the first place. I don't want it to just be deemed excess property and dumped off at a loss. January 23, 2024 Page 44 MS. COOK: Understood, and I believe staff would feel the same way. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: It doesn't say that in here, though, so -- it just says we have the right to sell it, which is nice, but I would like a provision of a minimum equivalency before it's even considered. MS. COOK: Okay. CHAIRMAN HALL: Viva appreciation. Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Thank you, Chair. Yeah, when it comes to that, I would just like to see a lot of specificity and have it be the exception, not the rule. I think, you know, people that are supporters of Conservation Collier, the expectation is when Conservation Collier buys land -- we've even said it up here before, "Oh, we buy it in perpetuity, we buy it in perpetuity." So this would be for very unique circumstances, and it wouldn't -- it would be the exception, not the rule. So the verbiage here had to be very clear, not ambiguous. And it looks like, you know, there's always a loophole, there's an end-around. And, you know, yeah, we just -- we're proud of ourselves. We just bought some Conservation Collier land but, you know, there's always something we can do down the road. So if you're going to bring something back to us, clarity is very important here is just, you know, my -- and that it's the exception, not the rule. It's for something very, very unique that we could not foresee, not to make it sound like at our discretion we can sell Conservation Collier land because we want to build an apartment complex. And I know that's not what it would be. But, you know, as Commissioner Saunders always says, words matter, and people who don't have as much depth and knowledge of Conservation Collier as you do and as we try to have, we don't want January 23, 2024 Page 45 them to read it for the first time and it looks like we just watered down Conservation Collier and gave us an opportunity to sell land that that -- you know, down the road that that program, you know, purchased. So that's -- CHAIRMAN HALL: Well said, and I'm pretty sure that's what our intent is here. Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Absolutely. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you. And this may be a question for the County Attorney as well. So we have this language about selling the property. And, I agree, we should always maximize that price. And, obviously, the property can't be sold unless it comes to the Board, so the Board will have that information. But I want to turn to Page 4, Section 6, because there's some language that is impacted by that, and that language deals with the use of the funds that go into Conservation Collier. And it says, at the direction of the Board, funds may be transferred between two funds, which we've talked about, or used for any other county purpose. And I do have an objection to that language. But assuming that language goes into this ordinance, my assumption would be no matter what we say here in terms of the proceeds can only be used for additional purchases of environmental sensitive land, there's a conflicting section that says that the money going in there can be used for any purpose. So would at least those funds be protected from being used for any other purpose, Mr. Klatzkow, or does that section kind of supersede, if you will, what we're -- we just talked about in terms of the sale of property? MR. KLATZKOW: The intent behind this clause is what the Board did during its second budget hearing where there was January 23, 2024 Page 46 allocations taken from the Conservation Collier Trust Fund. So this is simply mirroring what the Board has done. And at the end of the day, sir, this is a policy, and a majority of the Board could change this policy at any time. That's just the nature of it. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, obviously, when we get to this section -- when staff gets to that section, I want to discuss this -- that specific language. I know the Board always has the ability to take those funds and use them for other county purposes. I understand that. But we're creating an ordinance that specifically says that, and I just think that that sends the wrong message. And so we'll have some conversation about that when we get to that language. But I wanted to see if there was a conflict between those two sections. MR. KLATZKOW: I don't see a conflict, no. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: So I think what you're saying is, regardless of whether we sell property, that fund -- those funds go into the Conservation Collier Program, but can still be used for other purposes based on this language. MR. KLATZKOW: Yes. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I just wanted clarification on that. MS. COOK: Okay. The next change -- one of the things that you had asked us to do when we expedited the process -- so this change in policy would be that instead of large Active Acquisition Lists with 20, 30 properties coming to you at one board meeting, they would be split up so, as they're ready to go, if we have two or three parcels that we're bringing to you for consideration for acquisition to begin our appraisals and due diligence, we bring them forward. So if we have two, we bring two; if we have five, we bring five. And that way properties aren't sitting in limbo for five or six months till January 23, 2024 Page 47 we have a large enough acquisition list to bring to you. The next section, the procedures for selection and purchase, staff is adding -- is recommending that additional changes be made to the initial screening criteria for acquisition, and the additions are highlighted in yellow on your screen. So previously there was only one characteristic for habitat, and many of the parcels were able to meet that other native habitat within the category. So staff is recommending using these classifications as they've been identified by the University of Florida, Florida Fish and Wildlife, and the Florida Naturals Area Inventory as important for natural resource protection. Additionally, staff is also recommending including larger tracts of land, so areas that are over 20 acres in size, as well as parcels within the target protection mailing areas as acquisition criteria. These criteria were included in discussions with the CCLAC and supported by both the subcommittee and the full committee. Again, you had asked us to expedite that acquisition process. So as we updated the criteria from six to nine, staff is recommending that instead of meeting two of the criteria, you would -- parcels would have to meet three of the criteria to be considered for acquisition. If they don't meet -- if they were not to meet at least three, then they would still be presented to CCLAC, and with a majority vote of CCLAC, they could be forwarded to you for consideration. But if there were three -- again, going back to that list that we've added, there's now three different habitat criteria on there, and it wouldn't be possible for it to meet all three of those habitat criteria. It would only be able to meet one as a maximum. So therefore, at the most, of the nine criteria, it could meet seven at a max. Additionally, for acquisition, if they have five out of nine criteria -- and, again, they would only be able to meet seven at January 23, 2024 Page 48 most -- those would be -- forego the CCLAC process and come straight to the Board for consideration. CCLAC did not agree with the addition of this item, as the committee felt that being heard by the CCLAC provided for more transparency, provided more opportunity for public comment, and any concerns could be addressed at CCLAC instead of at the Board. Additionally, with some of the other -- some of the other items that were up for consideration to speed up acquisitions, they didn't feel that this -- that this would be necessary. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Just a quick question before you change. MS. COOK: Yes. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Go back to that other. Do we have the staff internally to make the decisions about the screening process to determine five of nine, seven of nine, three of nine, whatever the case is? How is that determination in, fact, effectuated? MS. COOK: It is done by staff internally with review of the property. They do the soils mapping and testing; they do site visits; they actually go out to look for listed species on the property, wetlands, habitats, features on the property, so yes. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And the one quick thought that I had was, you know, is there a potential for the property owner who's submitting the property for acquisition to do some of that analysis in advance that wouldn't necessitate staff time but could be verified should the Board decide to go forward with it that those criterium are met? MS. COOK: Potentially, yes. Some property owners have had wetland determinations done on the property or listed species surveys for whatever reason, and if they have, you know, we accept those and then verify on site. January 23, 2024 Page 49 COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. MS. COOK: The final -- the final item in this section for your consideration is that currently purchase agreements, once we've gone through the process, gotten an appraisal, done any due diligence, we make an offer to the property owner. If they accept that offer, then the purchase agreement goes to CCLAC before it comes to you. So that does add a little bit of time before it comes to you. Staff is recommending that purchase agreements, once accepted by the property owner, come directly to you and forego CCLAC. Neither staff nor CCLAC had any concerns with -- with this change. Some additional subcommittee recommendations that were not included were adding "in perpetuity" to the definition of management. That may potentially make properties more difficult to sell or ineligible for a sale, which conflicts with other items currently in the ordinance. The subcommittee recommended that any voting that's done changing funding percentages, allocating monies to other purposes, or extension of the program by Board decision be done by a supermajority vote which, again, may make some of these activities more difficult depending on the composition of the Board, so staff wouldn't have recommended that change as well. And then, finally, during the subcommittee meeting, it was recommended that an additional criteria of lands which provide climate resiliency for drought, flooding, or wildfires be included; however, community planning and resiliency is within GMD's purview, and upon speaking with the director of that division, basically any open space is already providing that resiliency for wildfires, drought, and flooding, so it doesn't necessarily need to be included. So our recommendation today is to, obviously, direct us to bring back the ordinance which would amend the current ordinance, and as January 23, 2024 Page 50 long as -- as well as and feedback from you-all of changes you would like us to make in the proposed ordinance beyond what I've presented today. And with that, I'll take any comments or questions. CHAIRMAN HALL: Mr. Klatzkow, in perpetuity, if the program ever was to sunset, would we have the responsibility to maintain what was purchased? MR. KLATZKOW: "In perpetuity" means three votes in this boardroom so that at anytime a future Board of County Commissioners can elect to do what they wish. CHAIRMAN HALL: Great, thanks. Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes. I had a comment with regard to somewhere -- I did most of my notes on the line -- the numbered line ordinance adjustments. I really like that provision. That allowed me to jump around and not have to go to page and paragraph. But in and around Line Items 151 through 153 -- and this has to do with what Commissioner Saunders was talking about with the combination, if you will, of the funds to be there. Is it really requisite that we have to set a percentage on an annual basis attributable to maintenance if there is a fund? MR. KLATZKOW: No. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. That was what I thought. And then the second part is I think we as a Board should regularly visit the aggregate fund and make sure that limitations are put upon future boards -- and I know you have an issue with us doing anything in the future -- but a limitation of a minimum balance be kept in the fund for ongoing maintenance based upon -- based upon the previous three or five years' ongoing expenditures. January 23, 2024 Page 51 MR. KLATZKOW: You would need to set up a third-party trustee, if you wanted to implement that, to take the power away from the Board. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: That's an interesting perspective. My thought is I'm not all that -- I'm not all that happy about a third-party trustee, but I think some consideration ought to be given to -- similar to, like it or don't, what the Board did last year with regard to the utilization of the aggregate fund, both combined acquisitions and maintenance. There was a reason and a rationale for why -- we had averaged about 1.2, 1.5. I remember five years ago the ongoing maintenance had been about 750,000 a year, and I'd like to -- I would like for us to give consideration to establishing a matrix, if you will, or a calculation based upon the last three or five years' average expenditures so that we certainly -- anybody in the future that looks to maneuver money around isn't withdrawing sufficient funds that would cause us to be burdened for those ongoing expenses. MR. FINN: If I may, Mr. Chairman. Edward Finn, Deputy County Manager. The setup of these budgets is actually fairly -- it's as sophisticated as anything we do here. There's actually presently a separate fund for the maintenance side of the house. Further, that maintenance budget, in addition to including the reserves -- the reserves that exist there from an escrow or an endowment basis, also has the individual major preserves identified as project numbers or WBS codes. So you have cost centers, you have projects that refer to the individual preserves, and the budgets for those preserves are established every year and, certainly, staff is capable of projecting those budgets out three, four, five years as necessary and, to a certain extent, they do do that. That's the current structure. So it does January 23, 2024 Page 52 provide for most of what you're looking for. Certainly, the -- if we're going to lean down the endowment, then the annual revenue to support that, that picture kind of changes. And if you're looking for a sophisticated burndown approach on what's left or some attempt to balance burndown against an annual revenue, certainly staff can do that on an annual or a multiyear basis if you desire. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Sure. We did that -- we did that the last time, and it was a fairly easily ascertainable number that we put in place to just ensure that we had sufficient revenues going forward to take care of that maintenance. So I just -- if it's requisite we have a third party, then we don't necessarily have to do that. I'm not interested in a third party at this stage. I just want that to be given consideration in the event that this ordinance moves forward and that the aggregation of the fund is completed. MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, I had spoken with each of you yesterday about the setup for our coastal zone groups, and we do have a separate policy relative to the reserve for catastrophe for the very reasons you're describing here -- different, obviously, for the beaches -- but to be able to fund up at least a portion up to a major event. So it sets a threshold that we build every year to a maximum amount. That amount used to be $500,000 a year to a maximum amount of $10 million, and that was to be used for nothing, but this reserve for catastrophe now is $500,000 a year to a max of $15 million. So I'm certain that if we can get the Board's perspective on what you think that ceiling is that -- your comfort level, perhaps we can work with the County Attorney to set up something like that. It's not -- obviously, it could be changed by future boards, but there is a thought process then and at least a level of protection provided for January 23, 2024 Page 53 that perpetuity maintenance. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Sure. And that may be a good way to go. I'm fine with that. CHAIRMAN HALL: So the way it is right now, we have just kind of like a swagged 75/25 split, and then the interest takes care of the maintenance even though we still fund it with 25 percent? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: It's not a swag. There's a reason for it. CHAIRMAN HALL: No, no. I'm just saying that's the way it is now. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes, that's the way it is. CHAIRMAN HALL: Just good round numbers. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And that's been adjusted from previous discussions. It used to be 85/15. And the word "in perpetuity" with that reserve fund was removed because it was a misnomer that that was an in-perpetuity fund. But it had a burn rate. It had a limitation. It had an amount, and it wasn't forever. It was termed out based upon the available funds at that time. So we increased -- that was one of the adjustments we made four or five years ago, increasing the revenue stream to an attributable 25 percent instead of 15. CHAIRMAN HALL: So with this ordinance change, there's no requirements, I guess, that we change anything. We just say that we have to -- we set that every year. Commissioner Kowal, and then we'll go to public comment. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Thank you, Chairman. I just dropped my pen down there, but I -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I've got mine. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: That's all right. When I was reading all this and studying this all before when we were going to the budget meetings back last year, these lines to January 23, 2024 Page 54 me -- I think the new -- the way it's written now, in the language in here now, it gives us the ability to -- because I knew the 75/25 was in the language at one point, and we were kind of sticking to it. But I think with the way the ordinance is written now, if I'm not mistaken, this will give us the ability to say, all right, this is a target number in the Maintenance Fund, and we can get to that quicker -- sooner than later to get to that ultimate number that we can use as interest to keep chugging along and keep the maintenance going, you know, even if it's for one or two years down the road that -- maybe not as much in acquisition, but at least we'll be there and have a minimum amount, and I like the idea of what the County Manager was talking about, if there's a way to do that, to kind of say, well, all right, this is a maximum/minimum that's in there all the time. You know, I think that would help us down the road and definitely -- regarding if the program's still -- you know, after 10 years is still here or not, but we'll still have the money to take care of what we have. So that -- you know, I think this language in here kind of gives us that flexibility, if I'm not mistaken, correct? So all right. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: Troy. MR. MILLER: We have two registered speakers, Mr. Chairman. Your first speaker is Michelle Lenhard, and she will be followed by Brad Cornell. MS. LENHARD: Good morning, Commissioners. Michelle Lenhard, chairman of Conservation Collier. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you today on the proposed changes to Ordinance 2002-63. Some of the information I wrote down Jaime already discussed with you, but the subcommittee did meet to review this, had a very robust discussion. The first item, and the sake of brevity, is Section 5 under January 23, 2024 Page 55 definitions. I know the issue of perpetuity has come up. The intent of the program and the original ballot language includes the language "perpetuity," and I believe that the intent of the public in terms of reaffirming this vote for this program speaks to the importance of perpetuity being retained in terms of this ordinance. The definition -- a definition for Conservation Collier lands has been excluded from the definitions sections, and CCLAC recommends that all parcels of land acquired under Conservation Collier be defined as such. Section 8, or properties eligible for acquisition and maintenance, Item 5 speaks to the sale of Conservation Collier lands, as has your discussion. The committee, as mentioned, does not support the intent or wording of this item since the goal of the program is to retain properties in perpetuity. But to assure fairness to the public, if this is where the Board wishes to go on this, CCLAC's recommendation feels that there should be a threshold of criteria defined as with acquisitions. So selling properties would have some criteria -- some detail established with it, which I think some of your conversation has spoken about, but I think would be very reassuring to the public in terms of ambiguity and the wording of that section. Section 12 speaks to procedures for the selection of acquisition proposals and placement on the acquisition list. The acquisition process has been streamlined. So Item 2, where it was mentioned, CCLAC does not support parcels of land automatically coming forward to you, because even though the staff does evaluate them and does provide -- can provide criteria numbers to us, that would eliminate, be in consideration, is this property in a target protections area? What if the property coming to you is one acre? So coming before CCLAC, it would not slow down the process, January 23, 2024 Page 56 I feel, dramatically at this point in time, and I think that at that point this section might be able to be eliminated or the thought of that. The last item I have does speak to voting and the supermajority recommendation of CCLAC. We request that the Board's votes on key areas of processing such as establishing millage rates and transferring funding between trust funds requires supermajority of members. Information shared with the public during the voting process explains the use of tax dollars including specific ranges, as you've discussed for acquisition and management. Conservation Collier, as a stand-alone program, received overwhelming support, and so a collaborative process of a supermajority is what we're recommending. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next and final speaker on this item is Brad Cornell. MR. CORNELL: Good morning, Commissioners, Brad Cornell. I'm here on behalf of Audubon Western Everglades and Audubon Florida. Appreciate the opportunity to address you on this. Audubon really applauds the Board for your work to fulfill the wishes of the voters who overwhelmingly want to see Conservation Collier succeed, to see land acquisition -- conservation land acquisition move forward expeditiously. So we're very happy to see your work on this today and in the coming hearing if you choose to direct staff to bring this back, which we recommend you do. A couple of points I wanted to bring up about the ordinance in front of you, the draft in front of you. Audubon agrees with staff that right now the conservation easement and the transfer of development rights policies that have been included in here are not fully ready to be implemented. They need work with the Growth Management division staff and with CCLAC and with the public to try and figure out how are we going to include those sorts of January 23, 2024 Page 57 strategies in the setup that we have now? For instance, conservation easements typically do not allow public access. Public access is one of the hallmarks of our preserves. So we've got to -- we've got to sort out that conflict. And in the TDR program, TDRs, as they're referred to in the draft language, looks at the Rural Fringe Mixed-Use District. But there are other sending and receiving lands throughout the county. What are we talking about in terms of transfer of development right policies as they relate to conservation land purchase? So I think we're premature in including this in the Conservation Collier ordinance. That doesn't mean that there's not value or there's not something to be explored, but I think you're premature in including those now. Regarding the purpose of the revisions to the ordinance, there are some cleanup languages here in addition to what we've just discussed, but also expedition of the process to acquire conservation lands is the primary objective here. And you've got two really good policies in here. One is to evaluate applications as they're received and bring them to you as quickly as possible rather than accumulating them in a lump, like, every six months or every year. That delayed unnecessarily. So I think that's a wise strategy. And the other one, which seems like a no-brainer, and you-all have heard of this before, and that is skipping the CCLAC review, the advisory committee review for contracts. Contracts, you know, are just rubber stamped by CCLAC. That delays it by a month or more. So just bring it right to you, and that's in here, too. So we think that's a great strategy. Again, thank you for your work on expediting the acquisition process. We support it. Thanks. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Brad. Do we want to take a court reporter break and then come back January 23, 2024 Page 58 and finish discussion? MS. PATTERSON: Yes, sir. If we have more conversation that's going to happen, which I believe it is with the Board, then it's time for a court reporter break. CHAIRMAN HALL: Let's do it. So it's 10:43. We'll come back at five till. MS. PATTERSON: Thank you. (A brief recess was had from 10:43 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.) MS. PATTERSON: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN HALL: So do we have any discussion that we want to continue on this ordinance? Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: We could certainly continue the discussion if it's the will of the Board, but my thought process is we're voting today on whether or not to bring back an ordinance in the future for the reconsideration of Conservation Collier, and so we've got an enormous amount of suggestion from ourselves and our staff, and my recommendation -- my motion is to move that forward. CHAIRMAN HALL: Second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor to move this forward? Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Oh. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: I'm sorry. CHAIRMAN HALL: Go ahead. Go ahead. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I apologize. I was extremely slow on pushing the button there. I'm going vote to move to forward with the advertising of an ordinance. I have some issues with what's being advertised and, obviously, we can make all the changes. But I'm going to encourage the folks that are really interested in this program to really evaluate January 23, 2024 Page 59 what's advertised line by line, and let's make sure that when this comes back, if there are issues to be raised, I want to have those out there so we can raise those issues. I will have several. I mentioned a couple this morning, Mr. Chairman, so I'll reraise those when this comes back. But I am going to support the motion to move forward. CHAIRMAN HALL: So the motion stands, and you just -- with your comments. Okay. Great. So all in favor? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: It passes. MS. COOK: Thank you. Item #11B THE MCDOWELL HOUSING PARTNERS - EKOS ON COLLIER APPLICATION FOR WORKFORCE HOUSING LAND ACQUISITION SURTAX FUNDING. (CORMAC GIBLIN, DIRECTOR, HOUSING POLICY & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT) (ALL DISTRICTS) - MOTION TO APPROVE BY COMMISSIONER LOCASTRO; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS - APPROVED MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, that brings us to Item 11B. This is a recommendation to approve the McDowell Housing Partners Ekos on Collier application for Workforce Housing Land Acquisition Surtax Funding. Mr. Cormac Giblin, your director of Housing Policy and January 23, 2024 Page 60 Economic Development, is here to present. MR. GIBLIN: Good morning, Commissioners. Again, for the record, Cormac Giblin, your director of Housing Policy and Economic Development. We're here to bring you the first of a request to use the infrastructure surtax monies to purchase land for workforce housing. Just a little bit of a recap. The infrastructure surtax was approved by the voters starting in 2018. Of that total fund, $20 million was set aside for workforce housing land acquisition, which was deemed as one of the several community priorities that were included in the tax. Last March, we brought an application acquisition policy to you, an application review and recommendation policy, and since then we've received five applications totaling over $26 million. This is the first one that's made it through that process and is before you today for acquisition. What we have is an application process that looks at all aspects of the development from the zoning, the growth management, the environmental, the project team, the financing, the whole package, and then that application moves through your advisory committees, starting with the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. That committee voted to recommend approval at their November 28th meeting, and then further it went to the Infrastructure Surtax Citizens Advisory Committee at their January 11th meeting, and that committee, likewise, voted unanimously to forward it with -- that it was a validated expense. A little bit about the specifics of this property. It's about 7.3 acres. It's off of Collier Boulevard heading south towards Marco Island, south of U.S. 41. We had a subject-matter team of experts from within Growth Management and other divisions review the application for, as I said, January 23, 2024 Page 61 zoning, growth management, environmental, floodplain resiliency, all the things that you would look at when you're concerned about buying a piece of property for a residential development. That -- a score was assigned, or a score was arrived at, and it was presented to the advisory committees. One thing of note on this property is that it does lie in the Coastal High Hazard Area, which is an area that is prone to evacuation and other disasters. You have a -- you have competing elements in your Growth Management Plan. You have a Coastal Conservation Element, and you have a Housing Element. The Coastal Conservation Element cautions against spending public funding in the Coastal High Hazard Area. The Housing Element recommends spending funding to further housing affordability throughout the county. And that's just a point to bring for your -- for your consideration. Given that, both advisory committees were made aware of that point and both voted to recommend approval. With me today I have Mr. Pat McDowell, Mr. Chris Shear, Mr. Bill Zinerman, and Ms. Scarlet Perez from McDowell Housing Partners, and they're going to run through their application and the highlights of their presentation, unless you have any questions for me before I turn it over. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yeah, I did have a question. The primary question was, how long will this -- this development be held in affordable status? It wasn't clear in the documentation that I read. MR. GIBLIN: Sure. Similar to the arrangement that the county currently has in the Ekos on Santa Barbara property, formerly known as the Bembridge PUD, the developer would take -- do a 99-year land lease with the county and keep it affordable in January 23, 2024 Page 62 perpetuity or 99 years, and we have a similar arrangement in the Golden Gate Golf Course with the developer we're partnering with there. Again, a 99-year lease. And this property would be -- Collier County would maintain ownership of this land for as long as the Board sees fit. So it's really up to the Board how long you would like to keep it affordable, but the standard would be a 99-year development agreement. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: So there would be a 99-year lease encumbering the property, and at the expiration of that, then a future board, which Mr. Klatzkow doesn't like us messing with, a future board would make a determination as to what the best utilization would be? MR. GIBLIN: That would be correct. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And then my second question had to do with being in the Coastal High Hazard Area. Are there going to be circumstances that are requisite for additional expenses associated with that? MR. GIBLIN: The developer was asked to address the consequences of being located in the Coastal High Hazard Area. They have made some enhancements to their application to address that. I'll let them address it when they get to it, but, you know, development occurs in the Coastal High Hazard Area in this county every day. There's -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Regularly, sure. MR. GIBLIN: Yeah. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And the only other point of clarification -- and maybe they'll get to it. Forgive me if I'm asking my questions before you present. But there wasn't a specific -- it said 100 percent affordable, and then anywhere from 30 percent up to 80 of AMI but not a -- is there going to be a flexibility allowed to move based upon some matrix of need? January 23, 2024 Page 63 MR. GIBLIN: The next step in this process, assuming the Board authorizes us to move forward with negotiating the sale, would be that we bring back the property contract along with a developer agreement, and then in that development agreement will be the specifics on number of -- number of units at which affordability levels within the development. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: So on that note, what I would like to see -- and I enjoy the flexibility for housing affordability, but that needs to be done with pragmatism. It needs to be done on the premise that the need today will be different 10 years from now as similarly as it was different 10 years before. And so I want that flexibility to be able to maneuver these developments to be able to service our community but certainly, at the same time, with pragmatism based upon a need. MR. GIBLIN: Understood. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: That's all. MR. GIBLIN: All right. With that, I'll turn it over to the McDowell team. MR. McDOWELL: Good morning. Can we go to the next slide? Can we get it up? There we go. Okay, great. Good morning, again. I know I've met some of you, but for the record I'm Pat McDowell, and I am the founder and owner of McDowell Housing Partners as well with the parent company, McDowell Properties. The best way to describe my company is that both companies have a singular focus, and that is to provide rental housing for workforce and senior residents of communities that we build properties in and that we buy and own properties in. We're a vertically integrated company. We have an acquisition team, we have a development team, a construction management team, an asset management team, finance, accounting. We even have our January 23, 2024 Page 64 own interior design group that designs the interiors of the units as well as designs the common areas for the community that meets the demographic need. McDowell Housing Partners is singularly focused on developing affordable housing. We currently have 1,700 units either completed or under development. We started the company in 2019, so we're only five years old, that company. The main company was started in 2004. We have 1,700 units that have been completed or are under construction. Most of them are financed with low-income-housing tax credits. The three properties that have been completed -- we have 11 total properties. Three have been completed. All of them are in Florida. One's in the Panhandle, one is in Tallahassee, and one's here in Naples. It was mentioned. You know, Ekos on Santa Barbara. The other eight properties that are still under construction, two in Texas and six in the state of Florida, and all of those are going to be complete over the next -- most of them over the next five months, and we have two, one in Broward and one in Miami-Dade, that will be completed at the end of the year. My focus on building affordable housing is to provide more than acceptable places to live for people who can't afford market-rate housing. And it's a passion of mine. It's something that I looked at. I've been in the business for a long time, as you can probably see. And this has become a passion of mine. And when you take a look at the communities we build, they don't look affordable. You go to Ekos on Santa Barbara, and you drive by, and it looks like a Class A market-rate property, and that's the kind of asset we're building. We want to build communities that our tenants have pride in ownership and pride in living there and pride to bring their friends to enjoy the common areas over the January 23, 2024 Page 65 weekend, et cetera. The parent company, McDowell Properties, buys and renovates workforce housing. We bought, since 2004, over 45,000 units in approximately 170 communities. What we do is we buy a property that's older, and then we turn around and we renovate the interior of the units, and then we renovate the common areas to make them more specific to the demographic. Demographic today is not the same as the demographic need was 1990 or 1980. So we changed those communities. Again, we make them better places to live for the workforce community. The other thing that we do in that company is we buy Freddie Mac subordinated debt. We're very close to Freddie Mac. We've bought $500 million of their debt over the last 10 years, and this, again, is all workforce housing. That debt is debt on workforce housing. So, again, the focus of the company is affordable and workforce. Now, the last thing I want to say before I turn it over to Chris is that, you know, partnerships are very, very important to me. I believe that you have to develop partnerships in business to be successful, and it's particularly true in the development business, I've discovered. If you don't have, you know, an engineer or an architect, a legal team, et cetera, that are really your partners, even though they're third parties, you can't get the job done. And, most importantly, you have to have a partner in the community, in the county or the state that you're working in. And we are very proud of the fact that we have Collier County as a partner because we have three projects now that we have ongoing. One complete, two are going to be complete, and hopefully we're going to have a fourth project to go with you, and that partnership, to me, it's extremely important in terms of the value and the way I look at the business world, and hopefully we can continue that partnership even beyond January 23, 2024 Page 66 the project we're talking about today. So with that, I'd like to just turn this over to Chris, and he'll talk about the project. MR. SHEAR: Good morning, Chair, Commissioners. Very happy to be here. We've been at this project -- Chris Shear, for the record. I'm COO of McDowell Housing Partners. We've been at this project for a little over a year now. We've brought it in front of staff. We've brought it in front of the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. We've submitted it for funding to the State of Florida now a couple times, and there's some good news on that end that I'll be sharing within the presentation. But we've heard the concerns. We certainly know the need at this county right now. We had our ribbon cutting for Ekos on Santa Barbara, which is our first partnership with the county, very similar to this in terms of the land conveyance. And we're well into the hundreds on our waiting list at this point. So I think the objective here is to deliver and deliver quickly because the shortage of housing is only continuing to grow. So just briefly through a few slides on who we are. Pat covered a lot of the bases. We have three projects under construction here -- we've been working in the county since late 2019, and so we've been able to secure funding largely from Florida Housing Finance Corporation and, on Ekos on Santa Barbara, in partnership with the county itself to develop these three properties. Total -- what do we have 320 -- 402 units. The first one is a family development. The second two, Ekos Allegro, Ekos Cadenza, are both senior developments. They'll be dedicated to a 62-plus population. They have a mix of income ranges going up to 60 percent of the area median income. And Ekos on Santa Barbara is more of a workforce product that services residents of the county up to 80 percent of the area median January 23, 2024 Page 67 income, and that is what we're proposing with the current project is to continue to serve a larger band of incomes to try to get, really, more of a focus on your essential service workers and your county staff and all the hardship we're seeing and continuing to hear as we are leasing our assets at this point. A couple nice pictures. We like to show this one off. So this is Ekos on Santa Barbara. We had the pleasure of hosting a couple of commissioners at this ribbon cutting just a couple weeks ago, 82 units, as mentioned. We have seven county employees living there, and really the only constraint there in servicing, you know, your employees and other essential service workers is just the limitation of the size of the development itself. A huge waiting list. It leased up, you know, almost immediately, and we're in the process of just physically moving the last few folks in at this point. Ekos Allegro and Cadenzas, this is right behind Physicians Regional Hospital, and it's 320 units. It is in partnership with the Collier County Community Land Trust, which was established, oh, not that long ago -- I would say within the last five years -- to work in conjunction with the county to ensure that properties remain affordable, that there's a conduit for the county's mission that aligns with the land trust to continue the development, and high-quality development at that. Something unique about these projects -- and this is what we really strive to do -- is not only deliver housing. We know there's a need for that. You could build a very inferior product and still have a lot of demand. The intention here is to provide really a quality of life that you're not going to get at a market-rate housing community even, and that comes with services, particularly in the senior realm. So we've partnered with the county Senior Citizens Nutrition and Activity Program, and they're going to be -- we dedicated a space, built out a -- sort of a mini kitchen, you know, coolers, sink, et January 23, 2024 Page 68 cetera. They're going to be providing daily meal services at the property for our seniors, and it may even be open to the public. I'm not sure on that fact. But it's going to be another outlet for the county service to maybe implement it, and most of our seniors are going to be taking advantage of that. I think that's a very -- it's a very pointed service that we typically don't see, so we're really excited about that one. We also have a partnership with Healthcare Networks of Southwest Florida. We've dedicated an exam room. We'll have a practitioner there on a regular basis. They'll be coming in, doing basic immunizations, exams, anything that can be services. It's their largest, I think, Medicare/Medicaid provider in -- one of the largest in the state, but particularly in this market. So we're looking forward to being able to service not only our residents with housing but with health and wellness as well. What it really comes down to today, that we think we've demonstrated and we've continued to look at is, you know, let's talk about the timeline and execution. We've been in the county working here for about four years now. We've learned a lot. We have the experience to -- and the ability to execute, and I think that's where, you know, looking at other projects, every county's unique. There's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of different processes and procedures you've got to be familiar with, and we have the distinct advantage of being able to move a project forward with that knowledge and with that rapport with your staff. We're familiar with the lease agreement itself, which is a heavy document that could be negotiated over many months, I think that would be expedited in this process given that we've already negotiated one that we're utilizing on the Bembridge parcel. In addition, we're very familiar with the neighborhood engagement process. You know, it's a tough thing to navigate, but January 23, 2024 Page 69 we understand the importance of that, getting the community involved, looking for feedback from their end. We want this to be part of the fabric of the community, not just another building with another name on it. We've learned a lot also on the construction and design side. This is a tough market to build in, especially coming out of COVID. It was probably the hardest construction phase that I've ever seen in my career and many will say that's ever been experienced. We had labor issues, we had material supply issues, a lot of subcontractor issues, and we've learned a lot of lessons. So I think all of that is really part of how we can improve upon what we've done already and, effectively, meet a timeline that's much more expedited than you would otherwise see with a new developer coming in posing a similar project. So we hope you take that into consideration. You know, the last thing is our ability to mitigate risk. So we have access to various insurance programs. Insurance is a very interesting market right now. Frankly, we all know it's skyrocketed, and I don't see it coming back down anytime soon, so there's a lot of competing interests, a lot of headwinds, and I just wanted to talk a little bit about our ability to mitigate those and our ability to execute if we move this deal forward. So we talked about the location. As you can see, it's right off of a major commercial intersection. We're about a quarter mile away from 41, from Tamiami Trail. Next to a Walmart, next to a Publix, which is really two of the biggest amenities you can have in a workforce housing community; people will be using on a daily basis. Development program. So I wanted to hit on our current mix. There is some flexibility in here; however, we've really tried to utilize -- this development was really taken in consideration of the new Live Local Act, Senate Bill 102. And so what we've done to really optimize the site that allows us to be efficient still so we can January 23, 2024 Page 70 afford to actually build the product has devised a seven-story single building with a separate clubhouse and all amenities, you know, within the 7-point acres. We have a mix of one-, two- and three-bedrooms. Those rents do range from 33 to 80 percent. But one thing I wanted to stress to Commissioner McDaniel's question is that we are trying to service more 80 percent units. And it's not just 80 percent. It's anyone 80 percent or below. So if you're at the 50 percent AMI level, you could still qualify for an 80 percent unit, but the maximum would be an 80 percent income level, and that changes yearly by HUD's designation, but the idea is to have more 80 percent units. Whereas we had a handful of 80 percent units at Ekos and Bembridge, we're proposing 40 percent of those units be at 80 percent AMI. So it allows us to serve, you know, more of essential service personnel who are typically between that 60 to 100 percent AMI range. In terms of the financing, you know, it's -- we've been looking, since we've been active in this market, scratching the surface everywhere and looking for opportunities, and it's been very constrained by the fact that the county itself doesn't have these geographic areas that get a boost in our financing program through the tax credit program. You just look at these quick maps. You can see the areas that are shaded are the areas that get that boost, and the one on the left we just happen to be in. That's a qualified census tract. The areas on the right, those are difficult development areas, and they're largely rural areas or very developed areas already where there virtually is no land or no land that we could afford. Going down to the current zoning, as I mentioned, we are utilizing the Live Local Act, so this property is zoned C-3, has a small portion of MH, which is the mobile home park. Very small portion. And we've been working with your zoning staff to January 23, 2024 Page 71 determine how we can utilize that site to provide us with flexibility and more efficiency but not have to go through an extensive rezoning process, and I think we have some great feedback on that right now. So this project can move forward with administrative approval through the site development permit process under the Live Local Act. So this could move very quickly through that process and not have to be subject to a lengthy rezoning public-hearing process. I hit on this already, so I'm just going to skip over this slide. But just some other facts on the current zoning and SB102. So the request today: We are here asking for a partnership similar to what we're undertaking already whereby the county acquires the land and leases it back to us, and we're also asking for the traditional services incentives that the county provides for workforce and affordable housing. So I think that's an expedited permit process that allows us to, I believe, move a little quicker through the process as well as the impact fee program. I won't hit on this too much, but we do meet all the surtax funding goals as they were outlined within that solicitation or within that program and policies. And some of the features of the project: We would propose to run the lease through the land trust as well, which gives us some additional incentive, as a land trust has opportunities to access capital. They have opportunities for ad valorem exemptions on the land portion of the property through Live Local. The other ones are just basic features that you'll hit. So I will move you on to the great news, and this is -- this is fresh off the press. So as of just last week, there was a solicitation for their $150 million that the Live Local Act has now granted to Florida Housing to administer for the development of workforce housing, and so Florida Housing administered a competitive process that had over 70 applications and selected, as this time, preliminary January 23, 2024 Page 72 recommended funding for, I believe, 13 of those developments. We were one of the recipients of that preliminary recommendation. So that basically solves the math problem on the financing. Now, we're subject to market changes, we're subject to cost of construction, but overall that solves the problem along with this surtax allocation and the traditional incentives that the county offers. We have the ability to move this project forward as fast as we can and as fast as the county will work with us to move it forward. So we're very -- very lucky here. There's a process that goes through a formal approval. We'll go in front of the February 2nd board of directors for Florida Housing. And then there's an appeal period. We do this a lot. Not to say that things don't happen, but we're very confident that our application will stand, and we will not be subject to an appeal, which means that we will have an invitation to underwriting probably within the next couple of months. And that's really just more of a formality to start underwriting. We're already working on the development. We're already working with financial partners to align our debt and our equity and sell our tax credits. So we heard a little bit about the Conservation and Coastal Management Element, and I think this is something we heard feedback on. We got some feedback on a few different areas, and I want to just talk about how we've thought about that and addressed that feedback, because I think it is -- it is conflicting, as Cormac said. You know, we do have policies to promote development of workforce housing, and then you have policies that also, you know, seek to mitigate and to be prudent on your approach to development within coastal hazard areas. And so in this case, we have spent time working with Mr. Summers at the Bureau of Emergency Services. My understanding is that that -- this project, in particular has went January 23, 2024 Page 73 through their risk assessment/risk analysis and did not trigger any concerns on that end in terms of being prohibited or not being able to be mitigated. So at this moment we do have support from Emergency Services. There's a couple things that were brought up in those conversations. We will be committing to put in a generator in the development. The site is in a flood zone. That site will be elevated to a level that takes it one foot out of the flood zone at the base flood elevation. So all of our collateral, all of our residents, belongings, everything in the building will be raised out of the flood zone. The building will be CMU block, will have impact windows. You know, all major systems, you know, will be in accordance with all of the strict requirements that, you know, the Florida -- the State of Florida also implements through their building code but also here in Collier County. You see a lot of development in the coastal areas. There's natural ways to mitigate it. And if you look at the location of where we're at, just from a practical standpoint, we're a quarter mile away from Tamiami, which -- and Collier. You can go any direction in the county very quickly. And so in addition that -- and this is just a matter of practice with all of our developments -- we have notices, we have regular meetings, especially during hurricane season, to notify our residents of emergency evacuation plans. We post that information regularly to make sure everyone is aware, especially in the senior populations, which this isn't. But, nonetheless, it's important to us as well as you because these are our clients. At the end of the day, our residents are our clients, and we need to make sure that their safety is first and foremost. So going back to the CCME, regarding the public funds, there's -- I've kind of put the puzzle together in this sense, but it looks like under state statute, Sections 163.3177, it requires the goals and January 23, 2024 Page 74 policies and objectives of the county CMME [sic] to limit expenditures that subsidize development in Coastal High Hazard Areas, and that's sort of the language that could be open for interpretation. And so we ran this by our land-use counsel at Nelson Mullins, large attorney overseeing, you know, a number of our developments, is active within the county, is active within the western part of the state. And what we discovered is that, you know, the limit is really -- that language in and of itself is part of the state statute which then gets picked up in, I think, every comp plan that's developed on a local basis. So that is boilerplate language that's adopted in comp plans throughout the state throughout many jurisdictions. It's up to the county in this case to determine if there's any additional mitigating factors that they want to impose in that limitation of public funds, and that's where our conversations with Emergency Management Services came in. It does not pro -- does not prohibit public expenditures from development, but it does say per -- and I have the letter. I'm happy to distribute to the group or anyone of interest. You know, there's often goals. There's often objectives that you are further stipulated within the policies of the local government and include specific design requirements or mandatory mitigation measures that must be taken for developments in a High Hazard Coastal Area. And so that's where we're happy to continue that conversation. We have some thoughts, as I had already laid out, as to how we see that being done practically, and we hope that that's not a limiting factor here. We think the development site, albeit within a Coastal High Hazard Area, is still very accessible and provides for the safety of our residents over the long run. In terms of funding, after I shared the fact that we are in good January 23, 2024 Page 75 position to be moving this deal forward from a financing perspective, we are full speed ahead. We're going to work as fast as we can -- we can with county staff. I think this project -- to not belabor the timeline -- we could put a shovel in the ground here within 12 to 16 months, I think, is a very realistic time frame. So here's a concept site plan. Saved this, I guess, for last. This is subject to change. Again, it's a concept. One of the things we're thinking, we have this great amenity with Henderson Creek which actually runs all the way out to the intercoastal, and we feel like it's got real potential to provide some sort of public access to provide some sort of amenity not only to our residents but also to the public in general. So that's things we'll be working with your staff on in trying to come up with a plan, again, that not only creates a development but adds some benefit to the public realm as well. I am available for questions. My team is here if there's any questions, but I appreciate your consideration this morning. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Mr. Shear. Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Thanks. Thank you, Chair. First off, congratulations, and thank you to you, Cormac, for all your hard work and your team and to -- and to you, Chris and Mr. McDowell. You know, when we were there helping to cut the ribbon on Santa Barbara, there's nothing low income about that facility. I mean, you put a lot of bells and whistles into it, and that's what we're looking for in the community. I think we all have a challenge with citizens at times separating rumor from fact where they all scream they don't want low-income housing by them -- by their neighborhoods, but they don't understand it. It's just a high-quality apartment complex that has a percentage of January 23, 2024 Page 76 units priced below AMI, as we all know, but sometimes citizens don't get that message. A question I meant to ask you that day -- and then I have a deeper dive -- how long are the leases that those people have at Ekos? Are they a year? Twelve months? Or are they longer? Could they sign longer leases? MR. SHEAR: One-year leases, but due to Fair Housing, they are -- they have the opportunity to stay. The new lease will be put into effect, and those leases are scrutinized, you know, by our lender/investor and the state. They have some Fair Housing regulations. So they're not -- they cannot be displaced, put it that way. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: But we will catch if somebody qualifies and signed a one-year lease and then all of a sudden they got a new job at Arthrex and they're making six figures, then they wouldn't qualify to be there and then they wouldn't be able -- I mean, you have measures in place to catch that, correct? MR. SHEAR: Well, surprisingly, because of Fair Housing, if that situation were to occur, we still could not displace them. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Okay. Well, that -- MR. SHEAR: That's subject to a different payment schedule, rent schedule -- COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Okay. Okay. MR. SHEAR: -- but we could not displace them, so this is -- COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Okay. Because, I mean, I know you've got hundreds on the waitlist. So my question is, when are we ever going to get to those people? And the only way you could get to them is if somebody moved out. You know, maybe they moved and took a job somewhere else, you know, on something else in between. Because people that are on the waitlist have sent -- because this is in my district -- have sent me a note and said, January 23, 2024 Page 77 you know, I'm on the waitlist, but I don't think -- you know, it's a joke. I'm number 417, and there's 82 units, so... MR. SHEAR: Yeah. I mean, that's the unfortunate situation in this county is that the demand just greatly out -- exceeds the supply. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yeah. I like how you talked about lessons learned. So I guess the question I was going to end with was when I spoke with the county staff -- and they spoke about that complex on Santa Barbara, and, you know, we finally got to the finish line, but there was a lot of hurdles, a lot of lessons learned. You have some projects in the pipeline coming up. Can you give us the short version of some of the lessons learned? Because the thing that struck me is the timeline to get to the finish line seemed incredibly long. And I know some of it is the state or funding and things that maybe are beyond your control. But I guess where I'm looking for the super short answer is, if there's anything here at the county that was slower than it could have been -- and not because people are negligent. But like you said, we all learn lessons. You know, these are really great projects. I don't think any of us want to artificially accelerate anything. You know, we want things -- we want to measure twice and cut once and make sure we're doing things smartly. But, boy, you know, it's like, to get to the end result, it seemed like we were building the Empire State Building. What, if anything -- just to have us put in our back pockets -- are the things that slowed down the previous processes the most? And are we overcoming them? And are some of those in-house here? You know, there's only so much we can do at Tallahassee or funding or whatever, you know, is in your tool bag. But what can you tell us to educate us more on these projects coming up and how they'll be better, faster, cheaper, smarter, whatever the things are? MR. SHEAR: That's all the intention, to improve upon all of January 23, 2024 Page 78 those. And I think the reality of the Bembridge parcel is that we did have to go through a PUD amendment. That did have to go in front of public hearing, and that took -- you know, Cormac probably knows exactly -- but I would say that was a six- to nine-month process in and of itself. We're running concurrent tracts on that. That does not occur here. We are subject to administrative approval. We do not need to go through any rezoning process and through that political process of public hearings. So I think that, in and of itself, expedites the timeline of getting through the design, entitlements, and permitting. Another big lesson we've learned is local subcontractors are of critical importance, and trying to bring in general contractor or subcontractors who are out of the market don't have the labor here, don't have the supply chain here really is a critical factor to ensuring the biggest risk we have, which is construction, construction risk. We know there's demand. We lock in our financing. Construction risk is our biggest risk. And I think that's where we'll be working, you know, as well with more of a local team that can really address it. And, you know, the focus is definitely more on execution than on cost at this point. You know, the lesson learned in general for me over my career is the cheapest cost definitely doesn't deliver the best result all the time. So, you know, we're going to be more cognizant of that, and I think this funding allows us to be more cognizant of that because now we're not so subject to the pressure of the economics. Being able to deliver a high-quality product and use highly qualified contractors and subs is going to be a big solution and a big help for us. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Okay. Perfect. Thank you, sir. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes. Two questions. January 23, 2024 Page 79 Number one, compatibility with the area. Driving down 951 there, I'm not remembering seven stories being in close proximity. I know there are some towers down close to the airport. How is this -- how is this proposition with regard to that? MR. SHEAR: I'll just answer quickly. And if Mr. French wants to speak, I'm [sic] more than welcome to. The reason we're okay from a development perspective with the height, there is a development -- the Live Local Act, just to kind of answer the question first, is about one -- I think it's one mile from the site, the highest building. I don't know the exact building that referenced that has been vetted with your planning and zoning administrative staff, and that was the verification we received back from them that that was -- the height limitation was the effectively 75 feet, which gives us a maximum of seven stories. From our development perspective, we are putting this on a primary frontage on Collier Boulevard. It has the presence -- this is not located within a single-family neighborhood. There are -- there's the mobile home park, just an older mobile park that's been there, and there are some town homes in -- a few parcels over. But overall, given that it's the frontage, that's where we got comfortable with the height, and we don't think that it necessarily clashes with -- with the overall massing of the community because of its location on that primary frontage. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Sure. I'll let staff speak. But don't go -- well, you can go ahead. Yes, okay. That's fine. MR. FRENCH: Thank you, Commissioner. For the record, Jamie French. Your Fiddler's Creek PUD -- so this is literally right next door. So you're within -- even if there is -- the glitch bill comes out with Live Local, they're still going to meet the site distance, and they're built or approved to 75 feet. So we can apply that same height January 23, 2024 Page 80 limitation there as Fiddler's Creek under Live Local. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. Very good. And then my other question for you, Chris -- and you mentioned the Collier County Land Trust as a partner in another development that you're doing over behind Hacienda, and then you're partnering with them again. I wanted -- I want to be very clear that the -- this is not Collier County's land trust that you're partnering with. This is a separate not-for-profit organization. And what's your rationale for utilizing them as an interim step between the county's ownership of this property and yours? MR. SHEAR: Sure. And it's not a necessity, I'll start out with that. It is something that we think does add value because it gives you some stewardship of these lands over time to be able to ensure that the affordability is there. It also provides us with some incentives under the Live Local Act. The land value would be exempt from ad valorem taxes. The building would still be taxed as it's currently drafted. So there is some incentive there to take a little relief off of the operating expenses, which allows us to borrow more debt and build a better project, et cetera. So there was the benefit on that end as well as what we've heard and understood the land trust is -- intention is to work with the county to ultimately -- albeit separate entity, to be a steward of various county resources and programs that they're administering to ensure, you know, affordability, to ensure the quality of the product, et cetera. But, again, it's not an absolute necessity. It's something we thought would add some value to the public. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And, again, I'm not objecting to it particularly, but I think it's very important to qualify the fact that that's not -- that's not a county entity. That's a separate third party that's in between the county and you. And so you may perceive that as a value. I'm not seeing that as January 23, 2024 Page 81 a need. We can certainly strike a deal -- we're obviously quite comfortable in working with you. And I'm not uncomfortable in working with the Collier County Land Trust. It's just that that's a separate organization, completely separate organization, and where do they fit and why do they fit in this transaction between us and you? MR. SHEAR: And just to put a pin in it, we are not here today asking for the land trust to be directly involved. Our request is to enter into a lease with the county. If the county and staff and we want to bring this back or if we want to discuss that if that's an administrative approval, if there want so to be that -- if there needs to be that extra conduit for any reason or if that's the desire of the county, we can discuss it. But we're not here asking for that today. So there's no -- there's no requirement on our end. There's no necessity on your end. And I think that's crystal clear. So the land trust was an idea that we thought may add some value, and we're open to it. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Got it. We're not -- I'm not closed to it. I want to say that out loud. I'm not saying there's anything negative with regard to it. It just needs to be delineated, distinguished as a separate organization. And I want to hear from our staff whenever the developer agreement comes back, because I think today we're just voting on the approval of the acquisition utilizing the sales tax money. Then there's going to be a development agreement come back where there will be specifics with regard to the percentages of AMI, how many units, so on. The proposition here is the proposition, but there will actually be a developer agreement. You already heard that I want to see flexibility in those -- in those numbers with regard to affordability with pragmatism and a matrix to be able to allow you that opportunity to move based upon what the needs, in fact, are, and then January 23, 2024 Page 82 I'll get a report from staff as to the value for the county having the land trust -- the Collier County Land Trust be an interim in between. MR. SHEAR: Okay. Thank you. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: So with that -- you want to make the motion for approval, Commissioner? COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yeah, absolutely. CHAIRMAN HALL: We have comments. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Unless you've got some comments. CHAIRMAN HALL: Yeah, we have two more, three more. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Oh, I'm sorry. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you. Just for a little bit of education for me, the land cost in this particular project is about 23,000 -- $24,000 per unit. Typically, what type of per-unit land cost can you afford for these types of projects? And I know it's a lot of interest -- you know, there are a lot of things that go into that, but just, in general, what are you looking for? MR. SHEAR: I will say the value -- anything under $30,000 is a huge value in this county. As you know, land is limited, but zoned land that you can actually build an apartment development on is extremely limited and largely just to the Planned Unit Developments that are out there, and most of those Planned Unit Developments are entitled by the developer who's intending to actually develop them. So as we've been in this county for four years and looking at every corner of it, one of the biggest challenges is finding land that is well suited for multifamily housing that we can afford and that is within one of these basis boost areas that I'd mentioned. So we feel extremely lucky to have found this site that kind of checks all those boxes, and the land value itself is very underwriteable from a January 23, 2024 Page 83 financing perspective. You know, it depends on the other sources of funding, but, you know, we would probably top out on our programs around $40,000 a unit, so we still have some good value here. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, hopefully there are other locations that will meet those criteria. I will say that this is exactly the type of project that was contemplated when we put that line item in the one-cent sales tax to create that $20 million fund. And if there are other developers listening, hopefully there are other developers in other properties that will meet these criteria. But I want to thank you. This is a really incredible project. With all the projects that you're developing, I think it comes out to 602 units altogether, if I -- I may not have added it -- added that up correctly, but in that range, and that puts a dent into the need, and hopefully we'll have more projects like that. And whoever makes the motion, I'll second it. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Oh, quit. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Kowal. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Thank you, Chair. My questions are more just kind of a self-education to myself because, you know, from my understanding of the Live Local Act and, you know, from what I was told, you know, when it was going through the state and finally got passed and the governor signed it last March -- and I'm not against this. I don't want you to take these questions, you know, in any -- I should be because you cut me out of the picture in the ribbon cutting; I saw that. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: I don't remember you there. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Evidently nobody's going to remember me now, so... But that being said, I thought the intent of the Live Local Act was individuals -- or developers use their own money to buy blighted, old, rundown commercial properties that only have 50 percent January 23, 2024 Page 84 occupancy and invest that money and automatically get a magic wand waved and say, hey, it's residential now. Build up to as high as the closest building, you know, an air mile away and this and that, not so much a partnership of the people's money being used to buy the property and then intermixing the two, you know. Just clarify this for me, or maybe staff can help me. But I'm just trying to get a grip on it, because I didn't think that was the intent of the Live Local Act. MR. SHEAR: I think that's one of the scenarios that was thrown out there, analogy when Live Local was on the table in front of the committees originally. Like, we have this. And at that time when this was thought of, it was the -- I think the state was in a different place with COVID still, when this kind of came out of that, and we saw occupancies in retail spaces drop. So that was one of the catalysts, seeing that market change that I think brought the Live Local Act. The Live Local Act is much more comprehensive than that. It provided -- it provides a number of incentives, preemptions, different funding sources, hometown heroes, for instance, a mortgage program. There's a lot of things that got put into that bill with a more comprehensive effort to stimulate affordable and workforce housing. That is one scenario, and we -- unfortunately, we've looked around for older commercial buildings, and your occupancies are very strong here still. So we never found the opportunity, but that was one of those "here's what we're thinking about, this could help," but it certainly isn't limited to that. So there's a lot of ways to make these deals work, and the reality of the other headwinds that we're facing is that it often takes partnership. It takes collaboration. It takes work with local governments. It takes work with the state. It takes work with January 23, 2024 Page 85 foundations in some cases. It takes work with operating partners. There's really -- this business is not your traditional market-rate development: You find your lender, you find your investor, you build your product, and you pay some waterfall of returns. This program is really set up for partnerships. It is a public partnership itself. This is a federal credit administered by the state. You've got the state entity, who we're in agreements with for -- we're 50 years on those land-use restriction agreements that we enter into in consideration for their gap funding or for their tax credits. Unfortunately, that's not enough to get it done these days. You do have to -- you do have to commingle sources of funding, and it's a tough thing to do. I think, you know, this is kind of the labor of love is that it's not the easiest business, but it is a really feel-good business, and it is a business that certainly has no shortage of demand. So I don't know if that answered your question fully, but the idea is to -- you know, public/private partnership through Live Local. Live Local provides one piece, but it's not necessarily enough to make deals happen. And you'll see that over time, that just because the legislation is in place, it doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a flood of development as a result of that. There's a lot of other factors and variables that all have to align right for us to be able to make these things happen. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Okay. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: So, Chris, I'll sum up with this before we finish up with the motion. I do have a question and concern; it's both the same. I can see all of the stars aligning, which excites me. I love this. But one thing -- how long did it take you to complete the Santa Barbara project? COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Seven years. January 23, 2024 Page 86 MR. SHEAR: Twenty months. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Oh, yeah, but from start to finish. That might have been the construction. But I think Chris Hall's -- Commissioner Hall's saying same thing I am. Is like, you know, from conception, you know, to when we cut the ribbon. MR. SHEAR: The time I was sitting here -- from the time I was sitting here originally in front of many of you, a couple different faces here, I think that was June or July of 2019. CHAIRMAN HALL: So we had COVID. We had some issues. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: It wasn't seven years. It was four. CHAIRMAN HALL: How long has it taken you from the very get-go for the Allegro and the Cadenza project? MR. SHEAR: Those came together without -- without some of the challenges we had on Bembridge. There wasn't a new entitlement. We didn't need to amend a PUD, et cetera, so those came together much faster. Putting me on the spot on the dates, but those -- both of those projects started -- we initially applied for funding, which is really the trigger. You know, it's hard to spend all those dollars and make that investment until we got an idea -- CHAIRMAN HALL: Gotcha. MR. SHEAR: -- that we're intent or confident enough that we're going to have the funding to go forward on it. So those are probably two-and-a-half years in the making, and we have both of them scheduled to deliver units for occupancy in the third and fourth quarter, respectively, of this year. CHAIRMAN HALL: Okay. Fair. MR. SHEAR: Or, actually, sorry. The first one's coming online next quarter, so... CHAIRMAN HALL: So I guess my concern was on the January 23, 2024 Page 87 application you had listed five years for completion, and that didn't really make me warm and fuzzy, because this is a need that we have sooner than later. And I didn't know if we could -- I don't know who -- if this is for Cormac or the County Attorney, but are we able to approve the surtax funding with an understanding that we're going to do this faster than five years with a firm commitment? Just to make me feel better. MR. KLATZKOW: You could do that if you want. I don't know how comfortable they're going to be. CHAIRMAN HALL: I'm just asking. MR. SHEAR: You know, it's not uncommon to have conditions, because you want to see progress. You're tying up funds that, you know, if we don't move forward, rightfully so, you want to dedicate to another project, and that's why shovel-readiness is often a factor in all of this, and I think that comes with a competent developer who's done their due diligence to be able to move that forward through a convoluted timeline and critical path. So in this case, it would not be -- it would not be unusual. We would be open to putting some term on it whereby if we don't -- we don't close financing, which means we put a shovel in the ground, by a certain period in time, that we would have to come back in front of the Board to extend that. CHAIRMAN HALL: I guess my question is, can we do that now, or do we need the development agreement to -- MR. KLATZKOW: They're going to be bringing forward a developer agreement. I think that would be the opportune time to raise the issue. Typically, we put mileposts in these agreements, financing, what have you. So I'm sure staff will consider that. CHAIRMAN HALL: I bring it up, Chris. I'm not looking to flush you by any means. I'm looking to get some teachers and some firefighters in those apartments as fast as we can, so that's why I January 23, 2024 Page 88 brought it up. So do we have a motion? COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: You've got a motion. I make the motion to approve. I mean, we have a lot of homework assignments buried in it. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I'll second. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Line jumper. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yeah, line jumper. CHAIRMAN HALL: Line jumper. MR. FRENCH: Commissioners, if it's the will of the Board, before we bring back a developer agreement, we'll ask them, you know, not to quote Commissioner LoCastro, but we so appreciate when he says "use a sharp pencil," because I say that often, especially when they're applying for permits. Nonetheless, we'll identify those considerations in your lease agreement perhaps with some clawback provisions that we've done before so there's some penalties then if they don't hit their mark. CHAIRMAN HALL: Good. Fair enough. MR. McDOWELL: Just one more comment in terms of timeline. We fully expect this to be much quicker than the last number of projects. You know, this was -- as Chris said, this was a very difficult time to build in. We had supply chain issues, we had labor issues, and part of the labor issues you were faced with is I think all of you read the newspapers. This country has had a record number of market-rate apartment communities built over the last number of years. I mean, it's astounding. Like, I think there are 600,000 units that are going to be completed this year in the country, and that drained the workforce. And so we, quite frankly, had labor problems with some of the subs, and that really delayed us. And the economics of building an apartment community market rate today is if you don't have everything -- you can't put a shovel in January 23, 2024 Page 89 the ground and make something pencil today. Jamie will probably back me up on that one. It just doesn't work. And so that's all going to stop. And we don't believe we're going to have the labor problems that we had before, and we've learned our lessons related to subs and contractors, et cetera, and we've already got a plan in place to make this much quicker. CHAIRMAN HALL: Great. Thank you, Pat. So we have a motion and a second. All in favor, say aye. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Moving forward. MR. SHEAR: Thank you. Item #11C WAIVING THE NIGHTTIME HEARING REQUIREMENT AND HEAR A LAND DEVELOPMENT CODE AMENDMENT REGARDING FOOD TRUCKS AND FOOD TRUCK PARKS AT TWO REGULARLY SCHEDULED DAYTIME BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONER MEETINGS AND APPROVE A REQUEST TO ADVERTISE THE LAND DEVELOPMENT CODE AMENDMENT – MOTION TO APPROVE WITH MODIFICATIONS BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER KOWAL – APPROVED MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, that brings us to Item 16A7, now Item 11C. This is a recommendation to waive the nighttime hearing requirement and hear a Land Development Code January 23, 2024 Page 90 amendment regarding food trucks and food truck parks at two regularly scheduled daytime Board of County Commissioners meetings and approve a request to advertise Land Development Code amendment. This is being brought to the agenda at Commissioner Saunders' request, and Mr. Mike Bosi, your Director of Planning and Zoning, is here to answer questions or present. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Mr. Chairman, I can be very quick. Obviously, food truck parks can have a rather significant impact on a community. And I know that there was a public hearing and I guess a neighborhood information meeting. And my question is for the Board, because this can be such an impactful type of a project, should we have at least one nighttime hearing? I'm not a fan of nighttime hearings even though we've got one this evening. But I'm just wondering, in terms of this particular issue whether or not that should be given some consideration. I'm okay with having both hearings during the day, but I wanted to at least have a little bit of discussion as to whether we should open this up a little bit more. So that's my question. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yeah. Thank you, Chairman. I like the idea of at least testing it, you know. We're hearing from a lot of citizens who they would like to see this meeting in the evening, which is not realistic. You know, we get those emails all the time. You know, we're all at work and we can't participate. And it's like, okay, we're at work, too, and this is where our work happens. You know, if you remember back to the conversation of the Isles of Capri food truck park, and then we talked a bit about Celebration Park, I think when it comes to the food trucks, it's still a really new January 23, 2024 Page 91 and unique, you know, type of thing that we don't have our arms fully around. So one of the things I've said generically is night, day, evening, morning, whenever, I'm all for, you know, not squelching citizen comment or flushing out as much back -- feedback as we can get. So it doesn't mean we're passing something that says from here on out in perpetuity we'll have all nighttime meetings, but I didn't know if there was something in the middle that showed we were trying to be positive, and then if it didn't have a positive result, then, okay, we tried it. And so -- I don't know. That was just my initial thought. I might not know every single detail that you're trying to kind of cover, but my initial thought was it doesn't hurt, and we see what happens, but... CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yeah. And I agree. I mean, if it's -- I think in this digital age that we have with hybrid meetings -- I know we all do town halls and have them with multiple, multiple options for folks to attend. You know, I'm not opposed to having an evening meeting, at least one of these hearings in the evening, but I'm -- you know, if -- on the same token, I don't really see the need for it either. It's conducting business. And I take -- I know myself, and I know most of us do as well -- personally, I take emails and phone calls and comments from people whether they're standing at the podium and wearing a red shirt -- in the room as most important as the folks that are standing at the podium and wearing a red shirt [sic]. So, I mean, what was your intent, Commissioner Saunders? I mean, I think the intent was to waive the hearings, the nighttime hearings, and hear these -- hear these food truck amendments during the day. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, that's what the request January 23, 2024 Page 92 is of staff, and I understand it, and there was a public hearing in the evening on this early on. But people don't really get energized over issues until they see something in the paper or they know something's coming up for us to vote on. Now, this is not site specific, and so it may not generate any interest, but if there was a food truck park, for example, going into Isle of Capri, as an example, the one we had, there would be tremendous interest in that because it's site specific. So there may not even be anybody that would show up for this. But these are very controversial, and that's just a thought. But as I said, I have no issues with having two daytime hearings, but I just thought it was worth a discussion on an issue like this. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: When I was reviewing this, I was -- this is more of an adoption of the Land Development Code criterium to -- because the way I understand it, we're going to be hearing every single one of these. It's going to become a conditional use when one of these proposed already existent zoning classifications qualifies for a food truck park. That's still not going to be a by-right process. They still have to come to us, and that would be -- those would be the ones that I would prefer, when the site-specific ones are coming to us, that maybe we move those to a nighttime hearing. But this one is -- this is just Land Development Code adjustments to facilitate those site-specific and move them to -- my understanding is move them to a conditional-use process. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, that convinces me that we don't need to have a night hearing on this as long as we are flexible to having a night hearing when an application comes before us. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I'm looking at him making sure he's shaking his head positively, because I don't want to misquote what his intent is. January 23, 2024 Page 93 MR. BOSI: And, Mike Bosi, zoning director. As it's proposed, there's not a requirement. And the conditional use is triggered when you have any proposed outdoor amplified sound or alcohol being associated with these food trucks. One food truck at a commercial center that doesn't have amplified sound or alcohol does not require a Board approval. That could be straight -- a Site Development Plan amendment. But it's if they have alcohol involved or if they have alcohol and it is amplified sound, those are the ones that require conditional uses. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, what I was looking at was there's two things here. It's regarding food trucks and food truck parks, and it was the food truck parks -- MR. BOSI: Parks. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: -- that's got my attention. We certainly don't need a nighttime hearing on an application for putting a food truck at a bazaar, at a park, or something like that. But if we're going to develop a food truck park similar to what was discussed on Isles of Capri, then I think something like that probably should come back at night. So I'll make the motion to approve waiving the nighttime hearing for this purpose. But if we do have a food truck park -- it's not part of the motion. But if we do have a food truck park, I think consideration should be given to having something like that in the evening. MR. BOSI: And staff can modify the proposed language to put verbiage that we will poll the Board of County Commissioners as to whether you would like to see that conditional-use hearing moved to a nighttime hearing. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: That would be perfect. MR. BOSI: We can put that within the proposed ordinance. We'll make some modifications. January 23, 2024 Page 94 Just to let you know, we did have a nighttime hearing with the Planning Commission on the 7th of December. There were no public who attended. And I think you're right, unless it's a site-specific location, it's hard to get the public to get excited about the proposal of an LDC amendment. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: So I'll make that motion to approve this with the understanding that if there is a food truck park, that the Board will be presented with the opportunity to have a night hearing if the Board so chooses at that time. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Second. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Kowal. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I mean, I was on the same lines with Commissioner McDaniel on the way I looked at this. And now Mr. Bosi's kind of confirmed it, that, you know, if it's specific and we're looking at a particular park and somebody wants to develop -- designate their food trucks -- and, I mean, you could see we've already exercised our time-certain. We're going to do that today at 5 o'clock. And I think, you know, we get the temperature of our constituents on a particular item like this, if there is a food truck, that we're going to hear it, and, you know, a park, we're going to hear it in the future regardless, that, you know, we can always exercise the time-certain, you know, and not have to create a whole, you know, 'nother ordinance or something just on those lines. So I feel comfortable with the motion the way it is, so I'll second it. CHAIRMAN HALL: So just to follow up my comments, you know, I don't want to get into the habit of every hot issue that comes up that we need to feel obligated to do it in the evening meeting. I know, like Commissioner McDaniel, I've got the best interest of my constituents. It may not be what I personally want to do, but I'm going to back them. That's what they elected me to do. January 23, 2024 Page 95 And whether they're in the room at 7 o'clock at night or whether they're -- they've made their emails plain, their phone calls plain, I don't take any -- no one's more important here than they are on my email. And I want to say that because I don't mind doing -- I'm not a -- let's see. I'm not opposed to making the extra effort, but I don't want to get into the habit of feeling like we need to pacify people that just can make it in the evenings when they have every ample opportunity to let us know and to communicate in times advanced. So with that comment, we have a motion and we have a second to waive this. All in favor? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. MS. PATTERSON: Commissioners, that is the end of our regular agenda items except for public comment on general topics not on the current or future agenda that weren't addressed previously. It may be something -- do we have one now? MR. MILLER: Well, that's just it. I have a Zoom person that was mislabeled. Actually, we probably should have heard them at 7. With your indulgence, can we hear them now? CHAIRMAN HALL: Yes. MR. MILLER: Jackie Keay is joining us on Zoom. Jackie, you're being prompted to unmute yourself. I know you're there, Jackie. There you go. You have three minutes. MS. KEAY: Can you hear me? MR. MILLER: Yes, we can. MS. KEAY: Oh, I'm here for sure. MR. MILLER: Go ahead, Jackie. MS. KEAY: So good afternoon. My name is Jackie Keay. I January 23, 2024 Page 96 will be talking about religious hypocrisy today. In the parable of the four soils, Mark 4:14, Jesus reveals how four groups of people respond to the truth of God's word. The first three groups of people either don't listen, the word does not take root in their hearts, or the pleasure of the world is more important than following Christ. The fourth group of people are the good soil. These are true disciples who are willing to obey, suffer, and give up everything for Christ. In essence, Jesus is telling us that most people who say they are Christians, i.e., religious hypocrites who reject God, do not have a relationship with him. With the social and political climate, how can you tell the difference between the true disciples of Christ and the religious hypocrites? Let's look at Jesus' qualities to see how they compare to Satan's, which should tell people whose kingdom they are aligned with. So for Jesus, we have love, kind, protector, humility, forgiveness, empathy, compassion, joyful, self-control, tolerance, selfless, truth, servant, peaceful. He died for our sins, and he lives out the scriptures. And then we have Satan: Evil, toxic, bully, delusional, hate, no empathy, selfish, two-faced, seeks power and control, and the seven deadly sins of greed, lust, pride, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth. He tempts us to sin, and he quotes and weaponizes scripture. Jesus also dealt with religious hypocrites. In John 8:44, he told the Pharisees they were like their father, the devil, who was a murderer, liar, and father of lies. The current religious hypocrites are blasting in the name of Jesus Christ to garner votes, to justify lies, evil, racism, and homophobia. Like the Pharisees, they are possessed by the same devils. They have weaponized Jesus/God and are attacking the very people he wants to have a relationship with. January 23, 2024 Page 97 They are lying about Jesus, waging war against and causing damage to his kingdom. They have chosen to become God's enemy. At the appointed time, God will defend his kingdom against such Satanic attacks. Those are end time -- these are end time confirmations. Lastly, Jesus loves us very much unconditionally, and to say to people out there, I love you all, too, and love is the greatest power that can change any person's heart and soul. So thank you all very much. That is it. CHAIRMAN HALL: All right. MS. PATTERSON: Commissioner, with that, it leaves staff and commission general communications. It would be your pleasure whether you want to take these when we conclude the 5 p.m. time-certain or if you would like to handle these now. CHAIRMAN HALL: What do you think? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I'm down with doing them now and getting them out of the way. CHAIRMAN HALL: I'm down with doing them now to get them out of the way, yeah. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Commissioner Saunders said something about pizza tonight, so I'm going to want to get to that. MS. PATTERSON: All right. Well, I'll start. I only have one item for you, and it's just to advise you that there's a request from the City of Marco Island for some work on Tigertail Beach and Sand Dollar Island for tilling and raking at the north end, so -- and it is time sensitive due to the permitting. So we will be out there working, but the cost will be reimbursed by the City of Marco Island. And if we need to take any further action as an after-the-fact, we'll bring that back to you-all. But just wanted to advise you that that would be happening. Mr. Rodriguez. January 23, 2024 Page 98 MR. RODRIGUEZ: All good. Thank you. MS. PATTERSON: County Attorney. MR. KLATZKOW: All good. Thank you. MS. PATTERSON: All right. Chair. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes, I have -- thank you, Mr. Chair. I have two. The first of which I'd like to get a head nod on suggesting that we give direction to our staff to prepare GMP and LDC amendments, whichever is requisite, to better manage the charter school implementation in Golden Gate Estates, and I'd like to give direction to staff to start that process. I want to move those charter schools over to the conditional-use process and not by right as they have been being treated so far. And so with -- if it meets with your consent, I'd like to -- I'd like for us to give direction for that process to be begun. We'll certainly see all those things. It will all come back to us, but I need -- I need to have your concurrence to give that direction. CHAIRMAN HALL: No, I like that. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I like it, too, and I think as part of that we would need some information from the County Attorney as to what authority we do have as part of that proposal. MR. KLATZKOW: We'll work with staff. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: In perpetuity. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: You took my line. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And then, secondarily, we had given previous instruction with regard to the exotic removal ordinance that we have, and it's very cumbersome. I'd like an abeyance of those rules interimly here until March when that comes back before us so that we can, in fact, move forward with -- CHAIRMAN HALL: So I had a conversation yesterday with January 23, 2024 Page 99 staff, and I was aggravated why it took so long. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Right. CHAIRMAN HALL: So what we're going to do is put stay on the action. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: That's the abeyance of the rules. CHAIRMAN HALL: Okay. I didn't understand that. I'm from Texas. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes. CHAIRMAN HALL: So we're going to nip that for the time being until we can come back and make it official. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: That's correct. So those are the two items that I had, sir. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Do we need a vote of the Board to -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: You know, we got positive head nods to do that if, in fact, you guys are -- if you folks are in favor of that. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: But do we need a vote of the Board to give that direction? Because you're putting a pause on it now until we fix that problem. You don't need a motion to do that? MS. COOK: Correct. With your decision today, we will stop those inspections until we bring the ordinance changes back to you in March. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, Mr. County Attorney, do we need to have a formal motion so that it becomes a decision of the Board? If not, that's fine. I just -- MR. KLATZKOW: I think it's more prudent to have a motion so -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: So moved. MR. KLATZKOW: -- nobody down the line can question it. January 23, 2024 Page 100 CHAIRMAN HALL: Moved. I second it. All in favor? COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Ms. Patterson brought this up about Marco and Tigertail and Hideaway, and, boy, the misinformation on -- in my district about why we were and weren't raking beaches and all that -- I'll just give you the short version. I mean, when environmental groups come down and say, you know, you have a grassy, patchy area on your beach and you can't rake it because birds are feeding there, we can't do it just because we got 100 emails and people who, you know, want us to just do it anyway. But my shout-out is really to Trinity Scott, Coastal Zone Management, all the county staff that were working with me. We were getting very, very colorful emails from citizens. So impressed with the professionalism of Andy Miller from Coastal Zone Management and his staff and all of us who are replying back to citizens trying to separate rumor from fact. We're now out there raking because the birds are no longer feeding and nesting. But it wasn't negligence. We weren't stupid. We weren't leaving algae and grass on the beach, and we didn't care about it. But we could have easily popped off very quickly and, you know, got back to citizens in a very colorful way. You know, maybe I did a little bit, but the staff didn't. So thank you. You all -- I guess, from what I understand, we're out there now because we've gotten all of the permits and approvals from the state and from these environmental agencies that we were squeezing every day. And so, you know, thank you for that effort, January 23, 2024 Page 101 and I know the citizens that understand the moving parts appreciate it. That's all I have. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Kowal. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Thank you, Chair. Well, I did learn something today that in perpetuity means 3-2 or 99 years. I saw that several times in a few of our different items today. So -- I didn't know that, but now I do. The other thing, back to Conservation Collier, I had a conversation with the manager's staff and the manager herself, and I know we've been looking at ways to save money, pinch here, cut here -- you know, cut here. And I know we're actually looking at possible -- you know, the zero-based budgeting here in our future, near future. You know, and I was asking questions about the maintenance side of the Conservation Collier, and come to find out -- I didn't under- -- I didn't realize, but we have certain staff that is dedicated only to the maintenance of these properties that are within that program. And I know initially when we purchase a property, that the initial buying of it and the initial clearing of it and the exotics and the things that get it to the point where it's -- you know, it's acceptable for their standard, that's the biggest hit, but a lot of times, you know, some of these people in the staff, I don't know if they're just doing busy work from time to time or, you know, or this is something we can look at to where we're -- you know, I know we have the -- we just created the task force out in the Estates for our stormwater team to do cleanup and, you know, clean swales and things of that nature. You know, maybe we could possibly join, you know, these teams so when there's downtime in the Conservation Collier maintenance side of it, that they can be working alongside with, you January 23, 2024 Page 102 know, Trinity's group with some of these other projects that they're just as important, you know, to us and we're kind of like, you know, sharing the cost and we're not dumping a whole lot of money or bringing in a subcontractor for some things that the team could possibly do, you know, with equipment and that for the conservation properties. So maybe cutting some -- because we just learned today in that report that, you know, we're going to save $2 million up to almost $2.4 million in doing a lot of in-house inspections on our future projects. You know, this also could be something we can look at and say, you know, maybe we could share the manpower in the future. So I just wanted to have that conversation maybe in the future. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I hope it's -- I hope it's common business practice if we have silos going on internally departmentally, that that siloing stops. We're all one. CHAIRMAN HALL: Big 'ole team. MS. PATTERSON: Yes, sir. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I don't think I have anything to add other than I look forward to seeing everybody at 5 o'clock. CHAIRMAN HALL: I don't have anything. So with that, we will recess and be back at 5:00. (A recess was had from 12:13 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.) MS. PATTERSON: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Ms. Patterson. Well, good afternoon. Welcome to Phase B of today's meeting. So we have a big agenda. We're going to cover a lot this afternoon. And if you have not silenced your cell phone, now is the time to do that because it will go off. That's Murphy's Law. And then as a -- there's 20 -- there's about 30 registered January 23, 2024 Page 103 speakers; 26 here and four on Zoom so far. So I just want to remind you that we're very interested in hearing what you have to say, pretty much understand why you're here, to support the moratorium, but there's not 30 different ways of saying you like it. So if somebody says the same thing that you plan on saying, you're just as effective with us, maybe even more, by saying "I agree exactly what that speaker said" and just stand up and let it be known that that's why you're here. But everybody has three minutes, and the protocol is when the yellow light goes off, that's the 30-second mark, and when the red light goes off, that's when you land the plane. Land it very promptly right there so that I don't have to interrupt you and say "thank you." So with that, Ms. Patterson. MS. PATTERSON: Yes, sir. One housekeeping matter that I wanted to remind everybody, because I'm afraid I'll forget later, we do have a workshop on February 6th here in the chambers regarding the strategy plan, the AUIR, and the upcoming budget process. Item #10A COUNTY ATTORNEY TO ADVERTISE AND BRING BACK TO THE BOARD AN ORDINANCE THAT WILL IMPLEMENT A TWELVE-MONTH MORATORIUM ON PRIVATELY- INITIATED GROWTH MANAGEMENT PLAN AMENDMENT APPLICATIONS FOR PROPERTIES LOCATED ADJACENT TO (1) IMMOKALEE ROAD FROM I-75 EAST TO OIL WELL ROAD, AND (2) VANDERBILT BEACH ROAD FROM I-75 EAST TO ITS END, WHILE GROWTH MANAGEMENT PLAN January 23, 2024 Page 104 AMENDMENTS ARE VETTED WITH THE PUBLIC AND ADVISORY BOARDS – MOTION TO DIRECT CAO TO ADVERTISE A PUBLIC HEARING FOR A MORATORIUM AND BRING BACK TO THE BOARD BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS; NO SECOND – MOTION FAILED; MOTION THAT THE BOARD IS COMMITTING THE FUNDING FOR PROJECTS OUTLINED BY TRINITY SCOTT, AND DIRECT STAFF TO WORK WITH DOT TO ADVANCE THOSE PROJECTS BY COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS; SECONDED BY COMMISSIONER MCDANIEL – APPROVED Okay. But that brings us now for the item for this afternoon. This is Item 10A at 5 o'clock time-certain. This is a recommendation to direct the County Attorney to advertise and bring back to the Board an ordinance that will implement a 12-month moratorium on privately initiated Growth Management Plan amendment applications for properties located adjacent to, one, Immokalee Road from I-75 east to Oil Well Road, and, two, Vanderbilt Beach Road from I-75 east to its end while Growth Management Plan amendments are vetted with the public and advisory boards. This item was brought to the agenda by Commissioner Saunders, and I'll turn it over to you-all to begin, and then we have staff. CHAIRMAN HALL: Go ahead, Commissioner. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you, Mr. Chair. First I want to thank the county commission for scheduling this public hearing. We discussed this back, I think, on December 12th, and the Board did not have to continue this. The Board could have said, no, we're not going to continue this hearing. But I want to thank the Board for doing that because it -- obviously, there's a lot of January 23, 2024 Page 105 interest in this issue. I've actually received 455 emails in support of this, and I've received zero in opposition to it. But that's not -- that's not how decisions are made. Decisions aren't made based on the numbers of pros and cons in terms of emails. I want to say that probably the single most heard of issue, the issue that I hear the most of from constituents is problems with traffic. We have great law enforcement. We have great municipal services, water, sewer, garbage collection. I almost never get any complaints except for, perhaps, this past Sunday on some water issues, but almost never get any complaints about municipal services and things of that nature, but traffic is on everybody's mind. And so, again, I want to thank the Board for taking the time -- because this will take a little bit of time -- to hear from the public. Tonight's focus is on Immokalee Road and Vanderbilt Beach Road. We have traffic problems throughout the county, but tonight we're really focusing on those two roads. I have two objectives, Mr. Chairman and Commissioners, tonight. The first objective is to discuss a 12-month moratorium, as was outlined by the County Manager, on these two roadways from I-75 heading eastward. For properties that are adjacent to those roadways, I'd like to see a slowdown, if you will, or a pause in comprehensive land-use changes and rezones of what is really Estates-zoned residential property. Developers are coming in and buying residential lots, and they're paying a fee for those residential lots that reflects that it's zoned for residential, and then they're coming in and asking for a comprehensive land-use change so that those residential-zoned lots can then be put together and developed into a commercial project or into a fairly high-density residential project, condominium or rental apartments. January 23, 2024 Page 106 And what we are, in effect, doing is on a case-by-case basis, parcel by parcel, we're changing our Comp Plan, and I think that for long-range planning, that's not the best way to proceed. So first objective will be to have the Board consider scheduling a public hearing on an ordinance to take a pause on those types of applications. Now, the second portion of this, and I think probably just as important, if not more important, I've been working with our transportation staff for the last two -- last month and a half to try to come up with some solutions to some of the traffic problems on these two roadways, something that staff can implement immediately, and I'm going to give you one example. Staff has already done the design work and already has the right-of-way for what's called a diverging diamond intersection at I-75 and Immokalee Road. Now, by putting in that type of an intersection in that location will have a tremendous positive impact on traffic on Immokalee Road, but that project's not funded. And as Trinity Scott will explain, the county's been in this position before where we've had an intersection with the interstate, and we have advance funded an improvement to that intersection which ultimately results in the Florida Department of Transportation reimbursing the county for that. The effect of it is we move a project up by literally several years. There are other projects that Ms. Scott is going to outline that we can advance fund that are a whole lot less expensive but will also have a positive impact. And so the second portion of this is to direct staff -- I'm going to ask the Board to direct staff to proceed with those projects. I'm going to ask the Board to commit the funding for that once we make that funding commitment, and we can do that tonight. Staff has identified the sources of these -- for these projects. Once we make January 23, 2024 Page 107 that commitment, then staff can go to the Florida Department of Transportation and say, we have the funding available. We want to move this project up. We want to start it right away. And DOT -- Florida DOT's likely to at that point include it in their I-75 project that's coming forward, the Moving Florida Forward project. So to me that's an easy thing. It's a $40 million price tag, but it's something that I think this board could do and feel very good about. As I said, I've received literally hundreds of folks that are in support of a moratorium. That's important, but also advance funding these projects, that's important as well. And, Mr. Chairman, I think for the flow of business, I think the best thing to do would be to have Trinity Scott make her presentation on what we can do, how we can advance some projects, and I think that might answer some questions as well. But I do want to get in -- ultimately, get into this issue of the moratorium as well. But I think this portion of it is very timely and very important. So, Mr. Chair, I would request that, if that's okay with the Board. CHAIRMAN HALL: That will be fine. Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to say, the reason I voted to have this hearing was my hope is that discussion is more inclusive, more dynamic, and more productive than just 30 people coming to the podium saying yes or no to a moratorium. There's -- the gentleman in the front row here said sort of -- and I'll pick on him here for a second. He said to Commissioner Saunders before the meeting started, wow, I have a lot of ideas I want to discuss with you. The reason I wanted to speak, and Trinity being next -- will be a perfect segue. But as you're sitting there thinking about what you January 23, 2024 Page 108 want to say in your three minutes, merely coming to the podium and going, yes, we need to lock the gate of Collier County, which we hear a lot, you know, traffic's crazy, you're overbuilding everything, you know, you've torn down all these trees and you're turning everything into Miami, I don't know that that's productive for tonight and, actually, it's not realistic. I said to my constituents, there's no such thing as vacant land in Collier County. It's undeveloped land that's owned by somebody, and then we do an awful lot that citizens sometimes don't see behind the scenes and in front of the scenes to work with contractors to skinny down a project. When you drive by something, you're seeing the final result, and that would be Draft 20. Draft 1 through 19 might have been argued in this very room. So your three minutes goes by fast. I got 300 and something emails as well just saying vote for Commissioner Saunders' moratorium. I'm hoping more dynamic discussion comes out of this and we have more homework assignments or things that are possibilities to look into in this very specific part of the county that may or may not benefit from a whole host of things that we possibly could do. And so I would just leave you with that thought. Your three minutes will go by fast. I'm really hoping we hear a lot of different things. Commissioner Hall said it perfectly; there's not 30 different ways to say, I'm for the moratorium. I want to hear the other 29 things so that our staff can digest that. That's why I voted for this hearing. And very impressed with the turnout. Thank you so much for coming tonight and helping to add to our knowledge base about some things that we can look into and do for the betterment of the community. Thank you. January 23, 2024 Page 109 CHAIRMAN HALL: Ms. Scott, the show is yours. MS. SCOTT: Thank you. Good evening. For the record, Trinity Scott, Transportation Management Services department head. The first couple slides I'm going to talk about are a little bit about how we do transportation planning here in the county. We have a large audience, and it's a good opportunity just to kind of share what we do and what you-all deal with because you work with us with different hats on throughout the year on our transportation plans. So first and foremost, this board sits on the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is a regional transportation planning agency that is responsible for the Long-Range Transportation Plan, and that Long-Range Transportation Plan is for Collier County as a whole. It identifies the current transportation system. It forecasts the transportation needs and the anticipated growth, and, currently, we're looking out to 2045. And right now we're actually in the process of updating that plan to 2050. So we do look at, long range, how do we accommodate the growth, and that plan is responsible to select financially feasible projects to best meet our future demands. So as part of that planning process, we use the county's interactive growth model as well as the Future Land Use Map to identify where we anticipate additional dwelling units, and on this map, the additional dwelling units are in those darker blue colors, so we anticipate a lot of that growth to occur out east, as well as additional commercial area, once again, out in the eastern part of the county. But this plan marries up with your Collier Interactive Growth Model. And we identify what we need. If money were no object whatsoever, what can we do? And then we ratchet that plan down to a cost-feasible plan that's January 23, 2024 Page 110 constrained by the anticipated revenues that are going to come in based on gas tax, impact fees. We're very successful in trying to get grants as well, so we also look at that. The Long-Range Transportation Plan, we're required to break that down into five-year increments, and those five-year increments, when we do our long-range plan, it just says, hey, you need to do all these improvements by 2045, but it doesn't really tell us when we have to do those improvements. So what do we use to identify that? We use the Annual Update and Inventory Report, a report that this board just saw back in December. In the Annual Update and Inventory Report, it provides us an assessment of the state of the transportation network, a snapshot one time throughout the year looking at our non-season peak-hour peak directions. We -- during that analysis, we look at -- we apply growth factors to try to determine when a roadway may exceed its capacity, and we utilize that information to not only feed our Long-Range Transportation Plan to identify what projects need to be done sooner, but also it feeds our capital improvement program, which is that five-year document that you're seeing as part of the AUIR that ultimately rolls into the one-year budget. The Annual Update and Inventory Report used to be something that was legislatively required. It's no longer legislatively required, but this board saw the value in that document and has put it as part of your strategic plan to utilize that as one of our planning tools. So that's one of your Board priorities as part of that strategic plan. So your strategic plan that Board of County Commissioners works on feeds the AUIR and feeds our Long-Range Transportation Plan, and they really do all work together. So with that being said, what have we been doing? I'm going to say it was back in 20, probably, '18. I remember Commissioner January 23, 2024 Page 111 Saunders saying to me, great, we're doing Vanderbilt Road extension. What else are you doing? Kind of a similar conversation of what we had, and we kicked off what we call the Immokalee Road corridor congestion plan, which this board adopted in October of 2021, and the goal of that plan was we looked at Immokalee Road from Livingston all the way over to Logan and said, okay, we know that with the increased growth that we have, even with what we anticipate with Vanderbilt Beach Road extension, through 2045 we still need some more improvements to reduce congestion and improve safety. That plan identified the following improvements: The addition of a westbound right-turn lane to convert that to a through lane, an overpass at Immokalee at Livingston Road, and interchange improvements at I-75 to include a diverging diamond interchange, and as part of that, we would also do improvements to the Strand as well as the Northbrooke intersections. So that plan was complete. We identified improvements that needed to be done. So what are we doing now? We've begun the largest and most expensive transportation project, which is Vanderbilt Beach Road extension. That project is anticipated to be completed in September of 2025. We're just about -- just over a third of the way there on the project. And it's progressing well. That will be a new roadway alignment out to 16th Street Northeast from Collier Boulevard. We have lots of other projects that are included within our capital project plan, but ones that are specific to this area are extending Vanderbilt Beach Road from 16th Street out to Everglades Boulevard, so giving just that additional route to be able to get in from Golden Gate Estates. We have funding programmed within our five-year capital program for the Immokalee Road at Livingston overpass; that's the design and the construction. We have been able to obtain a grant through the Florida Department of Transportation to put $10 million January 23, 2024 Page 112 towards the Immokalee Road shoulder conversion of the right-turn lane to a right through lane from Livingston to Logan Boulevard, and we also have within our five-year program, this was a sales surtax funded project, the Immokalee Road at Randall Boulevard intersection improvements, including widening Randall Boulevard back to 8th. In addition, since our last meeting, Commissioner Saunders and I have had a few conversations where he said, what else can you do? So here's a few things that we've come up with. We really went back and brainstormed. A few meetings back we talked about the Vanderbilt Beach Road at Logan Boulevard intersection improvements. And as part of those intersection improvements, we had gone out to bid, and the bids came in higher than our budgeted amount, and so we had plans to put the project on hold perhaps until our next budget year. We had already -- we have already rejected those bids. But what we will do is we are going to go back out to bid and rebid this project, hoping that we'll have a better bidding environment to be able to do this intersection improvement. This will add additional turn lanes at the intersection which we believe will help us with the operations at that specific intersection of Vanderbilt Beach Road at Logan. In addition, I talked about that larger shoulder project or the converting the right-turn lane to a through lane on Immokalee Road, which will essentially give us four lanes westbound in the a.m. Well, it's going to give us four lanes all the time, but it will benefit us in the morning. We went back and we looked at that project to see if there were any areas that we could do without doing substantial permitting where the pavement already existed, and we found that we would be able to take a subset of that project from Valewood to Northbrooke, January 23, 2024 Page 113 which is immediately east of the interchange, and be able to do that re-striping now. So we're currently working with our striping contractor to be able to get those quotes and get that work scheduled. We hope to be able to accomplish that over this spring. One of the biggest improvements that we're going to see from Immokalee Road is the Moving Florida Forward Initiative that the Florida Department of Transportation, led by Governor DeSantis, has brought forward, which is going to provide two additional lanes on I-75 from Golden Gate Parkway to Corkscrew Road. For anyone who has had to go to the airport or just travel north anytime on I-75 in the evenings, lately there's been a 15-mile backup of congestion. And so this -- and up to Corkscrew Road. Once you get up to Corkscrew Road, it really starts freeing up. So this will be an immense help to Immokalee Road, because we are backing up all the way to and through the Immokalee Road interchange, which doesn't allow people to be able to get onto the interstate, and now -- then they're sitting on Immokalee Road not letting that traffic traverse between that interchange. Since our last meeting, our traffic operations team implemented a signal timing adjustment in the morning at Vanderbilt Beach Road at Livingston Road. It consists of what we call a double run of the left-turning movements. You see the lefts go in the beginning, it stops, the greens continue to go, and then before the end of that cycle, we run those green lefts again. We actually started that at Golden Gate Parkway and Livingston Road, and it worked really well for us. So we're doing that. We started that on January 11th. Our observations, previously the roadway would queue from Livingston Road through Village Walk. With this signal timing adjustment, we've been able to cut that queue in half by just some simple signal timing adjustments. In addition, we've been working on a project -- and we're going January 23, 2024 Page 114 to be implementing it over the next month -- which is a retiming of all of the traffic signals on Immokalee Road from Arthrex or Collier Preserve -- or Collier Reserve to Woodcrest Drive/Quarry Drive. So that's pretty much the entire corridor of Immokalee Road that has traffic signals within it. The in-season recommendations are under review. Our implementation of that is imminent. We are also following that up with a second phase, which will be our out-of-season signal timing that we'll be doing, obviously, out of season this year, and that's funded through a grant by the Florida Department of Transportation. So there's an opportunity that we have. I talk about the I-75 and Immokalee Road interchange. The county conducted a study, the Immokalee Road Corridor Congestion Plan. The conclusion of that was that we needed to do a diverging diamond interchange, that interchange improvements were necessary. Separate from our study, the Florida Department of Transportation conducted the I-75 master plan. It also came to the same conclusion. And FDOT's plan, master plan, stated that interchange improvements were needed in 2025. What I can tell you is the I-75 and Immokalee Road interchange is not included in the Moving Florida Forward I-75 project. It's not funded in FDOT's 2045 strategic intermodal system plan. So what that means in non-FDOT speak is it's not funded through the state, and the project has been on the MPO's priority list for over five years. We've been in this position before. Exit 101, Collier Boulevard, if you recall a few years back, I came to the Board asking if we could put funding forward to advance that interchange. The Board supported that. We went back to FDOT, and lo and behold, FDOT found the money to fund that. We actually did not need to advance it, but it was enough to push them ahead. Exit 107, Pine Ridge Road, we did a similar corridor congestion January 23, 2024 Page 115 study a few years ago on that. We had actually programmed those improvements. We were going to take them on with some nominal money from the Florida Department of Transportation. Moving Florida Forward funded that interchange. And Exit 111, Immokalee Road, we found ourselves in the same exact position in the early 2000s with FDOT when they were doing the I-75 expansion project previously where we went from four to six lanes -- we called at the IROCS project -- where this project was originally planned to be included, then it was taken out, and this board came forward and put forth the dollars to be able to advance that project and be able to be reimbursed. So I believe that we have the opportunity to work with FDOT to advance that interchange improvement to allow for its construction concurrent with the main line I-75 interstate improvements, and by doing that, we save mobilization. What I'm going to tell you and I'm going to tell all the public that's here, when we go through construction, it's not going to be fun. Go drive Collier Boulevard right now. It's not fun. It's in the middle of construction. But the improvement, once you get it, will be amazing. But to be able to do that concurrent with those main line means that we're only inconvenienced by construction one time and not two separate times and with who knows how many years in between. We've had some preliminary discussions with FDOT, and they indicate that design and construction is upwards of $40 million. I didn't ask them to sharpen their pencil until I could get some direction from the Board, but I'd really like some direction today to go back and work with FDOT, have them sharpen that pencil, tell us how much money and what the timing would be on it, because depending on their contracting mechanism would depend on when we would actually need to provide those dollars to them. And then I January 23, 2024 Page 116 can work with our Finance Committee and our budget office to see what we can do and also look and scour to find any grants that may be available as well. As you know, our team is really good at going out and finding grant money. So with that, I thank you for your indulgence this evening, and if you have any questions... COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Quick question. Just -- may I? Do you want me to light up? The $40 million for the diverging diamond, my memory serves me that that's about half of what the cost is. MS. SCOTT: Actually, up in Lee County for their Colonial Boulevard project, they're about $40 million -- 40 or $50 million, and that includes a continuous-flow intersection as well as an R cut and the diverging diamond. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. Good, good. I just recall in one of our previous MPO meetings that there was -- maybe it was 951 -- Collier Boulevard and I-75, that it was close to $90 million. MS. SCOTT: You are correct, sir. I-75 at Collier Boulevard was $90 million, and that's a partial cloverleaf intersection. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. So it's a different -- MS. SCOTT: It's a different configuration, yes, sir. CHAIRMAN HALL: We're smarter now. Commissioner LoCastro. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Ms. Scott, yesterday in my office, you and Mr. Bosi gave me a good sort of common sense, very easy to understand -- an easy understanding of what a moratorium would do. I got the same 500 emails that Commissioner Saunders got. We probably all did. I'm not saying -- this is probably a mixed group in the audience here, but quite a few of those emails imply that the person thinks if right now we pass a moratorium for a year, all January 23, 2024 Page 117 construction across that entire area will cease to happen and there will be a freeze on everything, and that's not what Commissioner Saunders is implying -- but some of the emails I got that were just a couple of sentences. And that's not the case. So I don't know if this is a good time to sort of package that. And I don't want to leap forward. I hope we have a very diverse conversation, and it's not moratorium, yes or no. But as we all know, we got some emails that were two sentences. Say yes to the moratorium and stop all the building across that entire area, and that actually wouldn't happen even if we did move forward as aggressively as possible, just hypothetically. Can you, in short terms, sort of repeat what you said in my office which sort of painted a much tighter and more eloquent, sort of, explanation of -- you know, people think moratorium, they just think, complete halt and then it's like, you know, we're going to take a 12-month break on everything. And, you know, I'll pitch it back to you. I think it was actually Mr. Bosi that said some of it, but you-all are a great tag team, so... MS. SCOTT: I can start, and then Commissioner Saunders may jump in. My understanding of the proposal is that the moratorium would prohibit, for a period of time, privately initiated Growth Management Plan amendments. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Amendments. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: On two segments of roadway. MS. SCOTT: Correct. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Only. And are we not -- forgive -- who's -- I'm second on the list. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Go ahead, sir. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: No, no. It's the Chair's job. January 23, 2024 Page 118 CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you. Thank you. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: I'm done. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Two things, Ms. Scott. When this hearing is completed, there are going to be some motions, and one of the motions is going to be to allocate the funding for that diverging diamond interchange as well as the other projects that you have listed. And so I want to be -- make sure that we make the motion that's going to be most effective for you to go to the Florida Department of Transportation and get this project moving. So at the end of all this, that will be one of the motions that will be made. But on to the moratorium for just a quick second, because I know we're going to get to public comment, and that's going to be the big issue. There is no single-bullet solution to traffic problems anywhere in the county. Some folks are going to say, perhaps, well, a moratorium isn't going to solve the traffic problem. I agree 100 percent. If we have a moratorium today, tomorrow's traffic's going to be the same as it was today. It's not going to change traffic, but what it will do is a couple things. One, it will send the message to developers and speculators that are buying residential lots with the belief that they're automatically going to get a rezone to commercial and a comprehensive land-use change, it will send a message that that's not -- there's no guarantee that you're going to get that. But it will also -- it will basically put a pause to these site-specific comprehensive land-use changes that is resulting in these traffic problems. It's only for a year. So albeit that's a small amount of time and it's a small location, but I think it sends the right message. And I kept this deliberately small because if I came into this commission and said I want a countywide moratorium on rezones, January 23, 2024 Page 119 there would be no consideration of it. This is very precise, very small, sends the right message, and will have some impact; it will give us some time. And so, Commissioner McDaniel, that's what I'm trying to accomplish and, Commissioner LoCastro, that's my goal here. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Yes, sir. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: It's not a cure-all. It's just a piece. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: We already know. Are we going to have a presentation from Planning and Zoning with regard to this? I saw some maps yesterday with the properties that are impacted. Are you the only staff that's going to present to us today? MS. SCOTT: I am unless you have other questions. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. I have other questions. Are you -- am I going to be allowed to -- I mean, I saw maps yesterday that delineated the road segments that are being impacted by this. I saw a heat map with growth. I saw the total amount of property owners that are impacted by this, and I'd like a presentation on that at some stage. Now, if you want to go to the public and have the public comment and then have that come in, I'm fine with that as well. I don't really -- I don't really care. But there's a lot of information that's out there that really is impactful with regard to what's being proposed tonight. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: And, Mr. Chairman, if I can make one comment for Commissioner McDaniel. And if the Board votes tonight to go forward with a moratorium, what that means is we have a public hearing on an ordinance. So we're not voting on a moratorium today. January 23, 2024 Page 120 COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Oh, I'm well aware of what we're voting on. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood that. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I appreciate you clearing that up for these people, but I knew walking in here what we were actually doing, so -- and, again, it wasn't -- my lack of support the last time that this issue, in fact, came up wasn't that I didn't want to hear from the community. As a matter of fact, I suggested that and that we move it to the evening to better engage the community and get a report from our staff with things that we could, in fact, do. It didn't have to do with the support of the moratorium. But I appreciate your clarification, sir. So do we want to do that presentation from Zoning and Planning now? CHAIRMAN HALL: I would like to hear it, but I would like to get the public comment so that we can get down to our discussions and all of our points without the interruption. MR. MILLER: Mr. Chair, we now have 38 registered speakers here in the room, and I currently have two people on Zoom. I'm going to remind the speakers here -- I'm going to call a couple names. We'd like you to queue up at both podiums so we can move along a little quickly. Your first speaker is Danielle Hudson, and she will be followed by Brad Cornell. MS. HUDSON: First up. Good evening. My name is Danielle Hudson. I'm the vice president of public policy at the Naples Area Board of Realtors. We are here in opposition to the proposed building moratorium being moved forward for further discussion. While traffic is certainly a worthwhile concern to discuss and to find solutions for, January 23, 2024 Page 121 our board feels that congestion along two large arterial roadways does not constitute a building moratorium. Traffic is also not the only concern that we have as a county. Time and again, in these chambers, we have heard the drum being beat for creative solutions to the workforce housing and affordable housing concerns that we have in Collier County. We at the Naples Area Board of Realtors have, for years, advocated for attainable solutions to the attainable housing crisis starting first and foremost with building more housing and allowing individuals the full realization of their private property rights. While often deemed self-serving by those against development, as an industry group, along with our coalition partners in the building industry and attainable workforce housing space, we have a duty to educate the public that there has been a historical decline in the number of new housing developments each year down from 1.7 million in the United States to 1.3 million in January 2023. Commissioners, we are still not close to closing the gap. As we heard earlier today, the demand for this type of housing greatly outweighs the supply. We acknowledge that the language of the draft ordinance does allow for development along the roadways; however, we have to ask ourselves whether the development we will get is the development we need. We believe that the building moratorium will disable or, at a minimum, slow down efforts to solve for concerns like attainable workforce housing, and the commercial developments needed to support new housing because it will disallow consideration of projects that may require different zoning, density, and height to allow for streamlined development of affordable multifamily rental housing and middle -- missing middle housing in commercial, single-family residential, and mixed-use zoned areas. January 23, 2024 Page 122 Our board believes that two things can be true at the same time. The county can look for short-term and long-term solutions to traffic and infrastructure concerns along Vanderbilt and Immokalee Road while allowing developers and land landowners to still bring forth their plans via the already existing review approval or disapproval process. That is in your hands. Also, we find it interesting that in the last presentation it was mentioned that traffic is heavy in the afternoons on I-75. We posit that perhaps some of that traffic would diminish if there were housing for individuals to live in that was closer to where they work. AUDIENCE MEMBER: That's bullshit. MS. HUDSON: We thank you for your consideration of our concerns and ask that you do not move forward with further consideration of this moratorium. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Ms. Hudson. You know what, we're not -- all right. If I hear another comment like that, I'm going to have these guys remove you, because we're not going to put up with that. We're going to run a professional meeting, we're going to be courteous, and we're going to be professional. And as the Chair, I have every right to do that, and so that's just fair warning. Let's all be nice. Let's all be respectful, and that's all I'm going to say about it. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Brad Cornell. He'll be followed by Rae Ann Burton. MR. CORNELL: Good afternoon, Commissioners. I'm Brad Cornell. I'm here on behalf of Audubon Western Everglades and Audubon Florida. And I wanted to add some comments in complement to what your staff have said and what a lot of the public discussion has been in the community on these two big road corridors. January 23, 2024 Page 123 We recognize that the moratorium is not going to solve all the issues. There are a lot of issues in every big road corridor. We see that as well. And we also recognize the need for solving affordable housing and for looking at traffic issues and look -- and what we see this moratorium doing is giving us a chance to stop, pause, and look at -- it's not a complete stop of development. It's a pause in these rezones and Growth Management Plan amendments that gives us an opportunity to look at the bigger picture. What are some smart ways to comprehensively solve some of our problems and address some of our issues? Among those issues, from Audubon's perspective, is that nature has important environmental services to offer in these corridors. We've seen catastrophic wildfire in the Immokalee Road corridor in the last year, and we've also seen flooding, and these are things that threaten our neighborhoods. So we want to look at ways, as we look at the traffic in these corridors, to look at some of the other issues that perhaps we can work with the natural resources to solve. Managing traffic goes hand in hand with investing in green infrastructure in these areas, like the Conservation Collier Alligator Flag Preserve, which is right across from the Laurel Oak Elementary and Gulf Coast High School. And it's also a part of the Mirasol Flowway, which is an important component of green infrastructure in moving water and keeping flood waters away from where we live. Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary has been overdrained for the last 20 years. We are suffering severe dry season drawdown of our wetlands. We don't have any wood storks nesting at Corkscrew anymore, and we need to raise groundwater levels to not only restore those wetlands but also to fight the risk of catastrophic wildfire like we saw along Immokalee Road corridor around Wilson. So that could be helped by considering perhaps moving -- in strategic areas with some central water and central sewer in these January 23, 2024 Page 124 corridors, that would help raise those groundwater levels without conflicting with septic and sewer. Also investing in transit and bike lanes would help ease congestion nominally. We also recognize and appreciate -- I've driven a number of these diverging diamond interchange improvements. That makes a lot of sense. And, finally, I just want to note that Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary has a vital interest in seeing effective management and sustainability of these two road corridors. They are the ways that most of the 100,000 people that visit Corkscrew get there and get away. Thank you. Thank you, Brad. CHAIRMAN HALL: Your next speaker is Rae Ann Burton, and she will be followed by Steve Harrison. MS. BURTON: Thank you. Good evening. Item 10 on today's agenda needs to be approved and a direction given to the County Attorney to advertise and bring back an ordinance implementing a 12-month moratorium on private initiated rezoning petitions requiring Growth Management Plan amendments to increase density beyond the current plan. Growth needs to be controlled, and today's infrastructure cannot even handle today's growth, let alone the future. There's much concern with the increase of traffic on Immokalee, and without any control, it would be even worse. These development density increases currently are creating congestion and dangerous road travel and even death. The infrastructure needs to be ahead of development, not behind; therefore, please approve this mandatorium [sic] that will slow it down and give us more chance to catch up. Since the developers are requesting these rezonings, they need to January 23, 2024 Page 125 be -- that want to be increased in density and shorter borders to create more profits, they should pay more of the infrastructure fees and not be dumped on the public. The developments are the reasons for our congested traffic and even deaths due to the densities of the communities and the taxpayers paying most of the cost. This -- developers should not be allowed to reduce their share of infrastructure fees just because they state they will set aside affordable housing which is used as a carrot to get approval. I've seen it too many times at these meetings only to be changed at the next meeting. Other incentives that -- are leaving the cost burden on the taxpayers. We need to have it under control now. Please put a pause on it, and let us catch up. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Steve Harrison, and he will be followed by John C. Johnson. MR. HARRISON: Good evening. I think all of us would agree that the underlying issue here is the density of utilization of the property in the county. A couple of things that are within your bailiwick that you can consider right away: Take a look at code enforcement and the rules on density, and some of our streets in the Estates, we now have what are amounting to trailer parks being set up with multiple trailers occupied by renters and their pets. I've complained, myself, to Code Enforcement. They come out and look. I'm not sure we have any teeth to take any action to keep for illegal density improvements that may not even be connected up to septic facilities. In the same vein, in the building permit area, I'm aware of structures being added to without the benefit of building permits. I don't know how you control this, but people are looking for more intensive ways to use their property because their costs are so high. January 23, 2024 Page 126 They want to get some revenue out of the properties one way or another, okay? You may need to take a look at the scope of the moratorium. I live not far from Golden Gate Boulevard. The county, to take pressure off Immokalee, has now built six north/south connectors to take traffic off of Immokalee and soon to be Vanderbilt down to Golden Gate Boulevard. That may now be a failed roadway. Trinity would know. But I can tell you that it's bumper to bumper traffic at 6:30 in the morning every day of the week. Mostly tradesmen and people going to construction sites in town. That's it. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is John C. Johnson, and he will be followed by Shirley Lytwyn. I hope I'm saying that right, Shirley. MS. LYTWYN: Yeah. MR. JOHNSON: Good evening, Commissioners. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for giving me -- my opinion on the traffic on Immokalee Road and Vanderbilt Road are so congested. First, what are some of the most expensive neighborhoods in Collier County? Port Royal, Aqualane Shores, Olde Naples, the Moorings, Parkshore, Pine Ridge Road Estates, Livingston Woods, the Oakes. None of these neighborhoods are gated and have roads that you can use to go through them to help take the congestion off the main roads. Now, let's start where the problem is, Immokalee Road from 75 to Oil Well and Vanderbilt from 75 where it currently ends. There are 53 gated communities in this area and another 17 in the Vineyards. Thank God somebody was thinking and made them put a road that ran north from Pine Ridge to Vanderbilt Beach Road. There are over 50,000 people that must use these roads to access the entrances of their gated communities and another 50,000 that need to January 23, 2024 Page 127 get home in the Rural Estates. Commissioner Saunders, you have been an elected official for 42 years that represented this area did nothing. County Attorney, 1982 to 1986; County Commissioner, 1986 to 1994; State House, 1994 to 1998; State Senate, 1998 to 2008; and county commissioner, again, 2016 to present. The cows are now on the beach in Port Royal. It is way too late to close the barn door, but it's not too late to drain the swamp. Thank you again for this opportunity to let me talk. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Shirley Lytwyn, and she will be followed by Jody Ressler-Tetro. MS. LYTWYN: Hello. My name is Shirley Lytwyn, and I would like to talk about the subject red-light running. There was a significant accident on Immokalee Road and Wilson Boulevard, and I'm going to read to you what happened. On December 1st, 2023, at 4:30 p.m., a dump truck and a truck hauling sod had a collided at Wilson Boulevard and Immokalee Road in Golden Gate Estates. Eastbound lanes are completely blocked. Expect significant delays. Karen Handman said, Golden Gate Boulevard is backed up too. I was at Immokalee and 951 around 5:30, and I decided at the last minute, rather than try to go back to Golden Gate Boulevard because Collier Boulevard was completely backed up. She ended up going to 75 to 29, Oil Well Road and Everglades Boulevard. It took her 40 minutes to get there. Tina Rose said, I was in the turning lane two cars behind the dump truck. Both trucks went through the red light, but the sod truck didn't even try to stop at this light. What are we going to do about running red lights here? So Collier Boulevard was backed up. Golden Gate Boulevard was backed up. All these places have a lot of accidents, too. January 23, 2024 Page 128 And down to this, what do we want to give the people in the east? They want a Home Depot. They want a Walmart. They want a Lowe's. Give the people what they want. And it's going to cut down on traffic because now they have to go clear off of Pine Ridge and Airport. Give the people what they want. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Jody Ressler-Tetro, followed by Joseph M. Harris. MS. RESSLER-TETRO: Good evening. I just want to thank you, Commissioner Saunders, for hosting this meeting. I actually said something similar at a recent Collier County Planning Commission meeting when I believe it was Commissioner Shea, in reference to the JLM East development, he was listening to the presentation, he was listening to the traffic studies that were done, and he made a really interesting statement by saying, we keep approving all of those rezonings of these new developments allowing for greater density. We have traffic studies that suggest that the roads can accommodate all of the additional cars that are going to result from these developments. But he says, we don't have a good handle on the cumulative impact of everything we're approving. And I thought that was an incredible insight, and I would ask that you think about the same thing as you continue to approve developments that involve rezoning. I'm all for affordable housing for our essential workforce. They need a place to live. We need them. They're year-rounders. But they do -- obviously, all of these things are going to increase additional traffic. I don't have a solution to the traffic. I can tell you, as somebody who lives at The Quarry, you put in a -- there's a stoplight there now at Woodcrest and Immokalee Road. One of the things that I would urge you to think about from a traffic planning January 23, 2024 Page 129 perspective is consider a right lane turn on that road when you're heading north, because in the evening that road is backed up all the way to the Rotary, because anybody who's going straight across Immokalee Road into The Quarry is backing up the majority of the people who want to turn right. So I think that would help. The other thing that I would just ask you to think about -- I've heard a couple of comments already just about the traffic and all of the things that folks are doing south of Immokalee Road. I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that people who live out east, not everybody heads south into the city. There's people that work in Bonita that are going to always have to go on Immokalee Road. And I guess my final comment would be, I don't know much about diverging diamonds, but all I can say is it takes me 30 minutes in the morning -- I'm not sure why you're doing that. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: They're scary. You just have to follow the signs. You don't die when you go through one, I promise, but they're scary. MS. RESSLER-TETRO: I'm not -- I'm not concerned, but I was up at Colonial and 75, and I will agree it was scary with all of the construction. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yeah. MS. RESSLER-TETRO: But I would hope that there's going to be two lanes for people to merge onto 75, because it is backed up forever, that right lane in the evening and in the morning. So thank you for the time. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Joseph M. Morris. And he doesn't seem to be -- is that you, sir? At this podium, please. Mr. Morris will be followed by Mary Tatigian. MR. MORRIS: Short people. Thank you very much for allowing me to speak. January 23, 2024 Page 130 First of all, I'd like to say I don't want to take up too much of your time. I did send an email to all five of the commissioners. I hope you got it. I hope you take the time to look at it for my suggestions and comments. I don't want to be redundant. So I'd like to thank Commissioner Saunders for hosting this and suggesting the moratorium and the rest of the Board for considering it as well. And, obviously, I'm in support of the moratorium. I'm over at Heritage Bay Golf and Country Club on Immokalee Road, and it's death defying just trying to get out of our complex. And I'll let the others speak. You can look at my email, if you will. Thank you very much. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Mary Tatigian. We're going to follow Mary up with Robert Smith on Zoom. Ms. Tatigian's been ceded additional time from Maryann Bachelor. Can you raise your hand, Maryann. (Raises hand.) MR. MILLER: And by Chas Tatigian, who is right there. Mary will have a total of nine minutes. And let me put her slide show up. MS. TATIGIAN: Good evening, and thank you very much for holding this session tonight. We understand you have a long workday, and we appreciate your time tonight. My name is Mary Tatigian, a resident of Naples for 40 years, and I am in District 3. And we thank Commissioner Saunders very, very much for bringing this issue forward. The Board of Collier County -- the Collier County Board of County Commissioners is comprised of five elected members. Commissioners serve as the governing body of the county and have the responsibility of setting policies that protect the health, safety, welfare, and quality of life of our residents and visitors. I just want January 23, 2024 Page 131 to point out "quality of life for the residents." That's my key point there. The Golden Gate Master Plan, which has been in place since the '80s, again, it's a guide of land use and public facility decision-making to balance the need to provide basic services with natural resource concerns through the well-planned mix of compatible uses with the -- which -- to ensure the health, safety, welfare, and quality of life of the residents, local residents. So rezoning from low density to high density is definitely a negative impact on the quality of life of residents. Why the need to slow the growth? Quality of life, peace and quiet, shortage of resources like water, lack of infrastructure, traffic congestion, accidents, increased crime, shortage of law enforcement personnel, inability to receive proper healthcare. And the last thing, because it's the right thing to do. Quality of life. We need the commissioners to protect what we deserve and what we pay taxes for and to abide by the Golden Gate Master Plan. Please, no rezoning. Resource scarcity and sustainability. Is there enough water? What about fires? Evacuation routes? Is there enough roads for us to get out of there? If there are big wildfires out there in Golden Gate Estates, I don't know how people are going to get out of there. Have we thought about opening up Everglades to I-75? Fatal traffic accidents in Collier County. In 2022, I was told by the Sheriff's Office that fatal traffic accidents in Collier County have risen 50 percent. That was in 2022. Traffic accident report, as you can see, how many traffic accidents are reported in the city. Naples had 37. That was for December. Accidents in Collier County are a major cause of property damage, injury, and death each year. Collier County's statistics from January 23, 2024 Page 132 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that traffic crashes remain a primary public safety issue. So as a registered nurse of 30 years, my concern for my community is the welfare and health and safety of our residents and our visitors. Collier County has seen a drastic increase in crime. These were just some of the crimes in December. Each day the crime has just risen due to the increase of growth. Those are just some slides of our finest trying to take care of us. Healthcare dilemma. Like I said, as a registered nurse, I focus on the health of our community. I see patients every day, and they tell me I cannot get in to see my primary care physician. We just have a shortage of doctors -- a shortage of all workers, but we continue to build, build, build high density with more people, and we just cannot get the healthcare that we deserve. I think that's a crisis. Slow the growth, please. As residents of Collier County, we would like you to restore and maintain our quality of life. Thank you. (Applause.) MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is going to be -- excuse me. Your next speaker is going to be coming to us on Zoom, and that is Tom Eslip. Mr. Eslip, you're being prompted to unmute yourself, if you'll do that at this time. Mr. Eslip, you're unmuted. You have three minutes, sir. MR. ESLIP: Thank you very much for taking the time today to hear from the citizens of Collier County. At the risk of being redundant, I just want to touch on a couple points. I won't cover what other people have said. Number one, I don't know that I've heard enough about safety concerns, specifically U-turn and left-turn lanes. With the increasing traffic that is coming in mostly east on Immokalee, there are a January 23, 2024 Page 133 number of places where the left-turn lane gets backed up into regular traffic. And I would like to see, as part of the studies that are being done, safety concerns with that with sudden lane changes that are happening, most especially during rush hour, because that's when they back up into the regular traffic lanes. But I have yet to hear any commentary with regards to concerns of safety and what might be able to do done to make left turns and U-turns safer than they are today. The second thing is just with regard to the density concerns. Yeah, I guess it's frustrating for residents that it always seems like the builders' concerns and needs are always outweighed than what the residents would feel. It just always seems that when the zoning changes are requested, the momentum of the builders far outweighs what the residents would think. So I just want to encourage the County Commissioners to have the courage to reject zoning just because they're coming from powerful builders versus the constituency that's actually voting. And the third point I just want to make is the side roads, artery roads. For example, I know there was reference to Immokalee and Woodcrest Drive being the first cut-through from Immokalee over to Vanderbilt. This is a very small, narrow two-lane road with ditches on either side, that if anybody is on that road, morning rush or evening rush, you'd understand very quickly the amount of backup there and the safety concern with the narrowness of that road, and it's quite a residential area. Is there due consideration being given to those roads beyond just what I would say would be Immokalee or Vanderbilt in the process? And my final point is going to be -- I know there was a lot of discussion over the interchange at Immokalee and 75 and the diverging diamond, which I don't know what it is. But I could tell you, having traveled that road frequently, the problem isn't the January 23, 2024 Page 134 interchange. The problem is the capacity of I-75. Once you're on I-75 and you finally clear through, it's fine until you get to Bonita Beach Road. It backs up again. So I would just caution thinking that the interchange itself is going to make the problem go away. It is -- it is backed up well onto 75 for at least a half a mile, if not a mile, due to the inability of I-75 to handle that. So I know there was a conversation about FDOT expanding 75. I think that needs to become a major priority of this commission, because until the capacity of 75 is addressed, the traffic problems, not just Immokalee, but Pine Ridge as well, which are the entrance and exit ramps, is going to continue. Thank you for your time. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker here in the room is James Muur, and he'll be followed by Diane Oczkowski. MR. MURR: Good evening. I'm Jim Muur. My wife and I live near Logan and Immokalee Road. And I won't repeat what everybody else has said. I fully agree with it, but what I haven't heard enough conversation about is -- and I heard Tiffany say she was going to -- we're working on a light timing -- Trinity, I'm sorry -- a light timing issue, but because it backs up so much, the traffic backs up into the intersection. I know that's illegal. We don't have enough sheriff's deputies to support that. But at Valewood, Logan, and Collier Boulevard, traffic frequently backs up into the intersection. Nobody wants to get stuck. They all want to move forward. And there's going to be additional serious accidents at all the intersections where traffic backs up into the intersection. I know you're working on it. I'd like to see the work done a little faster. Maybe timing the lights is the answer. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Diane Oczkowski, followed by Jim Kamaryt. Diane has been ceded additional time January 23, 2024 Page 135 from Kevin A. Schmidt. Could you raise your hand, sir? (Raises hand.) MR. MILLER: Thank you. Margaret Kelton? (Raises hand.) MR. MILLER: And Robert Carlsen? (Raises hand.) MR. MILLER: She will have a total of 12 minutes. MS. OCZKOWSKI: I may not use them all. MR. MILLER: Okay. MS. OCZKOWSKI: Good evening, Commissioners. My name is Diane Oczkowski. I live at Island Walk. And I've been very diligent the last few weeks trying to get Commissioner Saunders' notice of this hearing out to all the residents at Island Walk, standing two or three hours at the post office trying to encourage them to go to the hearings and email the commissioners because I really care about these overburdened, overcrowded roads. And our Island Walk board voted unanimously for a moratorium, a one-year moratorium, and I am for the one-year moratorium. But that being said, I wanted to mention the Collier County Board of County Commissioner hearing held on October 24th and what occurred there. That hearing was regarding the Ascend high-density apartment project. There was close to 75 speakers with a full hearing room of attendees opposing the project which was going to be diagonally opposite Island Walk on Vanderbilt Beach Road, and we knew that it was going to affect our traffic and probably cause more accidents. Also, many letters to the commissioners voiced their disapproval, yet the majority of commissioners voted to approve the January 23, 2024 Page 136 rezone of Ascend after all the protests. So the commissioners don't listen to their constituents no matter how many show up at these hearings, speak, or write letters. Also, one of the commissioners, I won't mention his name, criticized the seniors attending that hearing saying, in effect, there's a lot of seniors here who have nothing better to do. So in addition to being ignored, seniors are insulted by the same commissioners who they vote to reelect. So I wonder if it's a waste of our time coming here to this hearing, speaking, and writing letters. All Collier residents want is smart growth in this county, which means better planning for the current and future built roads so that the roads are not overburdened with traffic congestion and also better planning for our environment and our wildlife so we still have some clean, green space left and our panthers, bears, et cetera, do not become extinct. These are reasonable goals. Now we're -- now we're faced with this problem at today's hearing of how to ease the traffic congestion during rush hour on Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Roads. We're discussing this now after the damage has already been done to these two roads with the six-laning of Immokalee Road and the Vanderbilt extension. The commissioners know it's going to get even worse for these two roads with all the future developments planned east of Collier Boulevard. Why are the commissioners reactive instead of proactive when it comes to planning? As per your request for public input on easing the traffic on Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Roads, I did some research and came up with some ideas. One, the easiest temporary solution is a one-year moratorium on rezoning and building permits until improvements have been made to Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Roads to improve traffic flow. Two, have adaptive, synchronized traffic lights that turn green at January 23, 2024 Page 137 every intersection along Immokalee Road and Vanderbilt Beach Road going west from Collier Boulevard to Airport Road during morning rush hour and going east Airport Road to Collier Boulevard during evening rush hour. The timed adaptive green lights are in effect during morning rush hour from 7 to 9 a.m. only and evening rush hour from 4 to 7 p.m. only Monday to Friday. You can delay the start of the green light for each intersection after the first one by a few seconds so traffic moves smoothly and efficiently along both roads without any stop-and-go traffic. Side streets and north/south turns would be delayed until major traffic has passed the intersection. The goal of adaptive synchronization of traffic lights is to get the greatest number of vehicles through the intersections with fewer stops, and there would be fewer red-light runners, as traffic would be flowing easily. Three, encourage flex time for businesses, agencies, et cetera, so not everyone arrives to work at the same time. For example, construction would start at 7:00; hotels, 7:30; schools at 8:00; public agencies, 8:30; banks at 10:00; also hospitals, banks, restaurants, et cetera, could have their workers choose their own shifts and, in many cases, be encouraged to work at home. This idea could be promoted through advertising campaigns, business meetings, et cetera. Four, ban truck and freight loading vehicles during morning rush hour from 7 to 9 a.m. and evening rush hour from 4 to 7 a.m. Monday through Friday only. Five, electronically charge drivers via their license plates a set fee for driving along Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Roads during morning rush hour from 7 to 9 and evening rush hour from 4 to 7 p.m. from Collier Boulevard to Route 41 on both roads. Cameras would be installed on these two roads only. We pay more for airline tickets at peak travel time and higher hotel rates at popular times of January 23, 2024 Page 138 the year, so congestion pricing would work the same way. Over time it will pay for itself and pay for other road improvements, public transit, advertising, et cetera. Those residents who do not work will choose other times to travel on these two roads or use alternate routes, and workers will find an alternative way to get to work. Six, charge city employees and hospital employees parking rates to encourage use of alternate forms of travel. Seven, improve CAT transportation so workers have an efficient and reliable alternative form of travel. Have pickup stops at the entrance to most gated communities. Eight, create economic incentives for developers to have more worker housing in the city closer to work. Nine, divert traffic to a ring road to avoid roads with heavy traffic. You would have to decide on the road to use. Ten, stop allowing any more construction on already congested roads such as Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Road up to Collier Boulevard. Instead, fill remaining space on these two roads with parks, playgrounds, recreational areas, and other green spaces which we do not have enough of. Eleven, have strong land-use laws that do not encourage continued urban sprawl to outlying areas that require long commutes for workers such as in the Golden Gate Estates area. These are my ideas, Commissioners. You can take all, some, or none of these suggestions. But if you do nothing, traffic congestion will increase to drastic proportions on Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Roads, and this will pose a real threat to the quality of life of urban Collier County, and that will be your final legacy to your constituents. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Jim Kamaryt. January 23, 2024 Page 139 (Applause.) CHAIRMAN HALL: I would like to just say let's hold the applause. It works the same way both ways whether somebody cusses or whether you clap, and it's interrupting, so thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Jim Kamaryt? Kamaryt. All right. I'm going to move on to Andrew Blitch, and he will be followed by Diane Ebert. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Before Andrew gets up, can I make a suggestion? I just -- and I'm assuming our staff's paying attention, but I'm hearing a lot of real good ideas from our community, hot spots where there's circumstances that are going on, improvements that can be made. And I would like, if you could, please, submit your list to the court reporter and/or our staff. I just want an assurance that you folks that drive these roads every single day, these are -- these are issues that are going to be heard. So thank you. MR. MILLER: Mr. Blitch. MR. BLITCH: Yeah. Good evening, Commissioners, and thank you for taking time out of your evening to listen to us. Before I get into my -- what I wrote here, I want to address -- the very first speaker, Ms. Danielle, made a claim that if the moratorium were to happen, it would prohibit low-income housing from being built. Not true. There's plenty of already zoned commercial lots, as you know, throughout Collier County, buildings that are vacant that can be redeveloped. So this moratorium wouldn't stop low-income housing from being built. It would just force the developers to use those already commercial lots and not use residential lots. So, yeah, that statement was -- that bugged me from the very minute she said that. My business -- I'm a small business owner here in Naples. My business is a home service business that employs 14 people, and we January 23, 2024 Page 140 have six service technicians who are driving the roads every day in their work vans. Traffic is definitely a problem here in Naples. It is difficult for my employees to get to work on time in the mornings, and also going from job to job takes way too long, and it's difficult to get to their jobs on time. I, myself, experience these issues driving to work westbound on Vanderbilt in the mornings and eastbound in the afternoons. I'm always stuck in traffic. Mr. Hall, last week I heard you on the radio morning show discussing the issue. Oddly enough, I was sitting, stopped in traffic on Vanderbilt Beach Road listening to you discuss the traffic issues on Vanderbilt Beach Road. You acknowledged that there was, indeed, a traffic issue that needed to be solved. You also stated that this moratorium won't make the traffic any better. That is correct, but I haven't heard many people make that claim, and if they are making that claim, they're incorrect. This moratorium won't make the traffic any better, you are right. What it will do is it will prevent the traffic from getting worse. If you add more construction projects to those roads, then the traffic will get worse on those roads, but if you halt construction on those roads, or rezones I should say, at worst the traffic will remain the same, but it won't get worse -- well, it won't get as bad as if you didn't do the moratorium. Given how bad the traffic already is, we don't need more construction to make the traffic worse than it already is. I would also like to talk about the rezone issue. In a recent meeting, Mr. Saunders brought the issue when Mr. Bosi was up here, he had asked Mr. Bosi if he remembered any time in the past year where the commissioners has voted no on any rezone project. Mr. Bosi couldn't -- could not think of one time, and Mr. Saunders agreed and also couldn't think of one. January 23, 2024 Page 141 I did some research, and it's been more than a year. It's been several years since this commission has voted no on a rezone. While there may have been some 4-1 votes, with one dissenting, the developers, ultimately, have gotten their way 100 percent of the time over the past few years. So in order to prevent traffic from getting worse and to remove the stigma that you are a rubber stamp for the developers, I ask you to vote yes on the moratorium. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Diane Ebert. She will be followed by -- Ed, forgive me. Is it Pysa? MR. PYSA: Pysa. MR. MILLER: You'll be after Diane. Diane, you have three minutes. MS. EBERT: Good evening, Commissioners. My name is Diane Ebert. I used to sit up here for six -- for eight years on the Planning Commission. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: You did. MS. EBERT: And you're right, the developers do get their ways. I moved to Collier County in 2000 when Old Cypress was being built. It was one lane east and one lane west. It was 10 years to get three lanes. Ten years we waited for the three lanes. Now, we have Logan Boulevard. The problem with Logan -- and it's a great road. But the problem with Logan is it is one lane either way. It can't be changed because of developers. But what is happening is if there is an accident or if I-75 is blocked, we are the only north/south road east of I-75. I have gone south in the evening, and when there is an accident, they start turning on Pine Ridge on Logan to get north to get beyond January 23, 2024 Page 142 Immokalee and to get to Bonita Beach Road. We have a big problem right there and, you're right, we back up into the intersection. If we would just follow the growth development plan and not overbuild and not use more density, if we use what is in the Growth Management Plan, we would do ourselves a favor. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Ed Pysa. He'll be followed by Amanda Masino. MR. PYSA: Yes. Hi, gentlemen. My name is Ed Pysa. We live in La Morada, which is just at the intersection -- close intersection of Collier and Immokalee. I'm not going to take up all of my time, because it would be redundant, and the last gentleman I thought made a very good point, and that is that the traffic isn't going to get any better. In fact, what really bothers me is that you have these plans, long-term plans, and the plans are based on something, I don't know what, because if you continue to allow developers to take residential property and build 300 homes like they're doing on Immokalee just near our community -- you've got 300 homes in the place of three residential, maybe four residential properties. So I don't know how you can plan if you can -- for the future, if you continue to allow developers to do what they want. The second point is that going out -- getting from Collier -- excuse me. Getting from Immokalee to Vanderbilt Beach Road on Woodcrest is a disaster. You wait maybe 15 minutes to turn right to go a quarter of a mile, and if you speed up traffic on Immokalee to get east and west, it's going to make -- it's not going to help getting onto Immokalee any better. So I think some of these plans maybe for the future need to be looked at in terms of the access to Immokalee and to Vanderbilt January 23, 2024 Page 143 Beach Road. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Amanda Masino, and she'll be followed by Dr. Linda Dye. MS. MASINO: Hi. Thank you. Longtime listener, first-time caller. So thanks for allowing me to be here. I'm sorry. This is the first time I'm ever speaking in front of a group like this, so I apologize. CHAIRMAN HALL: You're doing good. MS. MASINO: Linda was supposed to go first. She has a bigger scope on this; however, I am a resident off of Immokalee Road. I live in Heritage Greens. And I've been a resident here for just under two years. And there's a big traffic problem when it comes to the do-not-block intersection that you guys have tried to diligently monitor, and it's continually a problem. So I just wanted to bring attention to it. And I had a couple of, you know, ways to solve it, big ways, little ways, whatever it is, and I would love an opportunity to share those, but I don't want to waste time because I understand that there's a lot of people here. So I just want to bring attention to the fact also that we have the Ivy Medical Center that is going to be happening right there. That is going to -- as of right now, they follow the same traffic pattern as us. So if we are driving, let's -- the hardest route is driving on Immokalee Road heading west towards 75. You have to make a U-turn at Saturnia Lakes to get into the development. To get out of the development, you have to wait until all three lanes of traffic stop so the do-not-block intersection is free. The likelihood of people doing that is very unlikely, which causes a lot of zigzagging, a lot of people getting out there, sitting in the middle of traffic not knowing what's going on behind them, the January 23, 2024 Page 144 cars that are in traffic, and it's just a huge problem. So coming up with a couple of ways, you know, from the perspective of, you know, making a service road a little bit from, you know, our exit to the area of Laurel Oak where there's, like -- Laurel Oak and Gulf Coast High School have gates that are set back from Immokalee Road. So there is an area that is south of Immokalee Road. Preserve Way kind of extends over. And there's a public road there. So being able to utilize that and access that in some kind of way would greatly help that traffic, at least I would see. But I just want to, once again, bring the attention to the commercial use of the medical center that's being in there that has no straight in or out. They also have to do U-turns everywhere. And then on the other side of Saturnia Lakes you have the for sale of property that is over there. So I just wanted to bring attention to it. Thank you for my time. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Everybody clap for her. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Dr. Linda Dye, and she will be followed by Doug Brown. DR. DYE: Good evening, everyone. I wonder if Trinity is still here. MS. SCOTT: Right behind you. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: She's right behind you. DR. DYE: Okay, good. Trinity, I would like to have a copy of your slides to share with my community; is that possible? MS. SCOTT: Sure. Yep. DR. DYE: All right. That's very good. I'd like to share with people the ideas that you have been talking about so they'll know what might be going on. One of the things I want to talk about is Heritage Greens was built over 25 years ago, and there are also about 55 other communities that were built along this strip on Immokalee. And one January 23, 2024 Page 145 of the things is that many of these places have only one egress and ingress, and that is only one lane going out and one lane going in. So we have 527 households, probably a thousand cars, trying to use a one-lane driveway, basically. And what Amanda talked about was that we have a don't-block-the-box, and it doesn't. We tried. We're patient. We've talked with the commissioners. We really need a light there. Please figure out how that could happen. My people talk about this. I've been on the board as a president of the board for three years. Every single meeting I hear about the traffic. It is a never-ending problem, and it doesn't look like it can get any better unless we stop the development or figure out a way to control the development and the roads that go with it. By the way, everyone sees traffic, but nobody sees water, sewer, and other kinds of infrastructure developments, which I have no knowledge of. But if we can't keep up with the roads, are we keeping up with all the other infrastructure? Here's what I'd like to suggest. Any new planning, please make sure every single development has access to at least two different roads whatever you have to do because, for us, we are dangerously landlocked. If there's an access or tree that goes across our Heritage Green Drive, we can't get out. It could be a flood, it could be a fire, a hurricane, anything. There's no way for us to get out of our community. You could have a fire there, and none of us would be able to escape. The traffic on the road, even if you could get out, is also so slow that we can't go anywhere. I can walk to Pebblebrooke in 20 minutes, but I can drive there in 25 minutes, all right. That's how bad it is in that particular area. Let's see here. I hope you'll take whatever time you need. If it's a one-year moratorium, great. If you need a little more time to figure out the right answer, let's not keep repeating the same old January 23, 2024 Page 146 things that we have been doing and repeating what the first 55 communities have done on Immokalee. Let's try and make the new ones, whatever you do, better than what you have now. And I guess that's about it, and thanks for inviting us to come tonight. And I know I have a whole crew here that would have something to say. All right. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Doug Brown, and he will be followed by Dr. Allen Menkin. MR. BROWN: Thank you, Commissioners. My name is Doug Brown. I've been a resident of Naples for going on 32 years. My profession happens to be country club management, which there's plenty of clubs to manage when I'm down here. I'm currently at Heritage Bay Golf & Country Club. In my early part of the career in this town, I was at a club way, way out east called Twin Eagles, and that was in 1998. It was a two-lane road at that time. And I can tell you, driving that road every single day for two-plus years, it was a somewhat dangerous road at the time, but it was limited to two times a day, early morning and then late afternoon as everyone passed through there. You fast forward to now, and I look at a six-lane road that capacity seems maximized, which I was -- I wish I was a traffic engineer and I had a solution. I like solutions being brought to me. I have no solutions for you. I'm hoping staff members like Trinity Scott have these answers, and they can bring them to you, and you're going to follow through and get these things done. I represent 1,250 doors, 2200-plus members, and we're in support of that. And I'm not going to repeat all the other things that everybody else has said. The one thing I think we all understand, development is going to occur. You said it; it's undeveloped property that we have in this town. So it's how we develop it I think is important. January 23, 2024 Page 147 All's -- I think all of us are asking is future developments need to have a means of properly and safely having an ingress and egress for existing properties as well as all future properties, whether it's two going in, two going out, whatever it is, because I can tell you at Heritage Bay right now, I'd love to get a light, but I'm not looking at that. I just want it to be safe getting in and out of the community and all the other ones down Immokalee Road. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Dr. Allen Menkin, and he will be followed by -- forgive me, again here -- Fritz -- is it Rieya? MR. RIEY: Riey. MR. MILLER: Riey, thank you. Dr. Menkin. DR. MENKIN: Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I'm going to be very brief. I live at Twin Eagles, and the traffic is much, much worse than when the last speaker was there, and it's not going to get any better. My family's also lived on the East Coast in Dade-Broward for over 65 years, and it pains me to see the same things happening here that happened there, and I hope that we can do a better job of it. I would support almost anything. If you pump the brakes on the traffic here and we don't have to jam the brakes on Immokalee Road, great. If you need a moratorium, great. If you need a five-year moratorium, but do your best to do it. I completely support it, and I thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Fritz Riey. CHAIRMAN HALL: Troy. MR. MILLER: Yes, sir. CHAIRMAN HALL: Let's take two more speakers, and then we'll have a court reporter break. MR. MILLER: Thank you, sir. Mr. Riey will be followed January 23, 2024 Page 148 by -- Krysta Sylveystry? MS. SYLVESTER: Sylvester. MR. MILLER: Sylvester. I'm sorry. I can't read that. Sir. MR. RIEY: Okay, thank you. So, yeah, I'd like to thank Commissioner Saunders for bringing this issue up. I've been in Naples for six years, and one of my observations, though, is -- you know, I've lived in places like the northeast where there's a lot more density, and there are things that could be done, I think, in -- and planning is probably the key thing. So I think having a moratorium that allows time to plan and also, then, trying to follow the plan, I think is really critical. Things like traffic calming, there are all kinds of things that are being done worldwide that I think potentially -- and I've got to say, I thought the traffic planning studies that were done within Collier were pretty interesting, but the thing is, you have to also, then, follow the plans. And to do ad hoc changes to zoning just at -- it destroys the value of the plans. So I'd recommend that the moratorium would allow a little more time to come up with ways to better plan. I think people's property rights are valuable, but at the same time somebody who buys residential property does not necessarily have the right to get a windfall to have it converted to commercial. So I think there's something -- you know, property rights are valuable, but you don't have inevitable [sic] right to just take windfalls and damage other people's property rights. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Krysta Sylvestry [sic], and that will leave us 13 speakers after the break, sir. MS. SYLVESTER: First of all, thank you for allowing us to speak and to share our thoughts and our concerns with you. I did not plan on speaking tonight until I got here, so this won't January 23, 2024 Page 149 be polished, but I'm going to try my best. I live in Ventana Pointe right off of Immokalee Road in North Naples. I grew up in a construction background with my family who's been building since the 1950s, so you can probably understand I support construction. I support construction when it's done right, when it's done at the right time, and when it's with good intention. I'm also a real estate agent, so I travel the road all the time, anytime, weekday, weekend, it doesn't matter; we're always on the road. So I see the traffic in the morning, I see it in the evenings, and I've noticed a considerable amount of traffic jams. Having to arrange our showings and getting to places on time is proving to be more difficult and difficult because of the amount of traffic that has come to our roads. The biggest thing is, I would like to say that being out on these roads I'm seeing what's happening. I'm seeing the traffic. And the moratorium is something that -- like, I'll rebound off of what other people said. It's not going to solve the issue. It's not going to make it any better. But by allowing the county time to do better -- to implement better planning and put things into place for these roadways, it's going to hopefully make it not get any worse. And the biggest thing is these developers, let's face it, none of them are from here. As a real estate agent, I have really great ways of finding out where people live. And I can tell you this much, none of these developers live here, number one. They don't care about us, they don't know us, they don't know why we chose to live in paradise, okay. They don't care how it affects us and what it's going to do. They also don't live with an apartment complex in their backyard. Most of them have water views, golf courses, preserves, you name it. So -- and I'm pretty sure anyone that's in here that has chosen to January 23, 2024 Page 150 come here to live in paradise didn't want to have an apartment in their backyard. They would have chose to live in New York; Chicago; Youngstown, Ohio, where I'm from; LA, any other of those other places. We chose Naples. We chose Collier County because it's paradise. That's why we came here. And I'm in my 30s and I'm young and my husband's young, and we work really hard to live here. And we're not the bigger bear, and the construction people are the bigger bear, and they're going to squash us. And we are the future, the young people that are coming here that want to live in paradise and that want to keep it as paradise. So I urge you to please, please go forward with this moratorium even if it's just for a year so it allows us better planning, us as residents time to adjust, and keep these developers -- tell them to slow down a little bit. Tell them to make their planning a little bit better and give those of us that have chosen paradise the chance to live in paradise the way that we wanted it to be and to keep it as such, because it needs preserving. Thank you very much. CHAIRMAN HALL: All right. With that, it's 6:31. Let's take a court reporter break. Let's come back at 6:45. (A brief recess was had from 6:31 p.m. to 6:45 p.m.) MS. PATTERSON: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN HALL: Let's take our seats, please, ladies and gentlemen. Let's get rolling. Mr. Miller. MR. MILLER: Mr. Chairman, your next speaker is -- thank you, please. Your next speaker is Brian McPartlin. He'll be followed by Jerry Solomon. Brian -- is it McPartlin? MR. McPARTLIN: Yes. MR. MILLER: Oh, thank you, sir. And then Jerry Solomon. January 23, 2024 Page 151 MR. McPARTLIN: Good evening. Thanks for having me. Just -- I'll be quick. I'm from Heritage Greens as well, so you've already heard from our neighborhood. And my biggest thing is the whole -- the Immokalee corridor for the moratorium, I am for it, to pump the brakes a little bit and see what's going on. Two things. My biggest thing outside of all that is the safety getting in and out of our community. It's terrible with the high school there, the grade school. We've already seen, I think, someone last year get hit on their bike coming across. So anything that could be done -- I know we've tried for lights -- to slow it down and just kind of clear the intersection up is very important to me. But -- and I'll keep it real quick. We've heard it all here so far tonight, the double diamond. I'm from Detroit originally. In the past five, six years, I lived off I-75 up there for my entire life. They've just installed double diamonds in main open county [sic], five of them, and they work. The only thing I could tell you is, if you're going to install them -- what they did not do in Michigan or Detroit, they didn't give the community a lesson as to what they are and how to get through them. Because when they opened them all up, we started kind of going around each other and like, what's going on? But once they opened it up, it really made a big difference in the main intersections off I-75. So my main thing also -- that's just my comment, my experience but also anything you could do regarding the safety in the community around there to get it -- it's basically -- for the kids in our community is greatly appreciated. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Jerry Solomon. He'll be followed by Cheryl A. Ollila. January 23, 2024 Page 152 MR. SOLOMON: Good evening, and I want to thank you for having this hearing. I agree with what everyone has said regarding the moratorium, whether it's crime, safety, quality of life, so I'll focus on a different topic. And I'll focus on data. Anyone who knows me knows I like to approach problems with data. Mrs. Scott -- Ms. Scott discussed long-range planning, and I assume any long-range planning, traffic counts are an important component. So I went to the Collier County site -- website and looked at traffic counts, and it covers every section of roadway in the county. If you look at Immokalee east of Collier, it's grown almost 50 percent from 2012 to 2019. Immokalee east of I-75 has grown 32 percent. Immokalee west of Wilson Boulevard has grown 37 percent. Some of these have grown 6 percent a year, which means it doubles in 12 years. Simple arithmetic. How can we continue? And you might wonder how I looked at 2012 to 2019. I wanted to go to '22, because that's the latest data available, but as we all know, we've had COVID depress the data for the last few years, so it's unreliable, yet it's still increasing in many of these roads over the last few years. So, you know, my question is, how do these counts factor into planning? You know, if we're going to do long-range planning, we need reliable data, and we don't have the data for the last few years. So if nothing else, we need a moratorium so we could collect realistic traffic counts to base future plans on. Going with what we have now is just totally unrealistic. So, again, I ask you to be patient, wait the year, get good information, and we can move forward with reliable information. Thank you for hearing us. January 23, 2024 Page 153 MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Cheryl A. Ollila, and she will be followed by Austin Beach. MS. OLLILA: Thank you. Good evening, Commissioners. I've been a Quarry resident for 16 years. I serve as president of the association. It's a 900-home community off Immokalee Road near Collier Boulevard. I've been in front of the commissioners, in front of the Planning Commission, in front of Trinity. You've all been very accommodating listening to our concerns. A lot of development over those 16 years. But what I find incomprehensible is how every single traffic study that seems to be done for projects says that the roads can handle it. And in 2019, I believe it was, I was at one of the public hearings off Immokalee Road on a project, and it was stated by the Transportation Department, Collier County, that Immokalee Road would be a failed road in 2021, and there were many who were saying it's already failed, yet the approval for development has been unabated. It just continues on and on and on, and I don't understand how every traffic study that comes before the Commission says it can be handled. This project should go through. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't correlate. I am in favor of the moratorium. I think we need to do a pause so that some of these transportation projects can catch up. I truly support trying to get the advance funding because the development takes place unabated, and the transportation projects are good, but they're too long into the future, perhaps beyond some of our lifetimes. So I would ask that you do consider this pause. I thank Commissioner Saunders for proposing it. It's desperately needed. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Austin Beach, and he will be followed by Monica Fish. Austin? Mr. Beach? January 23, 2024 Page 154 (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: All right. Monica Fish, and she will be followed by Gary Kluckhuhn. I hope I'm saying that right, sir. MR. KLUCKHUHN: Yes. MS. FISH: So I'm a Golden Gate Estate resident of 16 years. And I'm coming into Naples early this afternoon. I experienced people run red lights, switch lanes without signaling, not slowing, stopping for racing lit ambulances, and I actually saw that, two cars. Tonight it will be racing, passing recklessly, more running lights, and I mean it, there's running lights everywhere. Every time I'm on the roadway, it's a running light, and it's so scary. Accidents are out of control. I'm a part of the Facebook, you know, Golden Gate Estates, and it's just like, are you serious? Are you serious? Are you serious? And when I'm driving down the road, I mean, to see these cars that are, like, upside -- collided down on their backs. And then this thing that just happened in Immokalee off -- on Immokalee Road, I mean, I have to, like, say the rosary as I'm going down Immokalee. Because I work in Central Florida, and so when I am driving home late at night, and I'm going the rural way going on Immokalee Road to head to Golden Gate to Everglades, I'm scared for my life, absolutely scared, scared, because these people drive superfast. They go right behind you, and then they go around you. And then they're looking at a car, and they're about to just, like, smack into each other. I do not know why they are allowed to do this year after year after year. I think that there should be more officers back in dark area, like kind of Ave Maria area. I like how Commissioner Saunders talked about cumulative effects. Similar to the wetlands dilemma, government keeps giving waivers away to destroy the wetlands. Soon there's going to be no wetlands; there's going to be no green area. I think green area is January 23, 2024 Page 155 very important because it is a psychological thing. I mean, I've been here for, like, 16 years so, I mean, I experienced a forest when I was in Golden Gate Estates. Now it's a terrible -- like, kind of a sprawly looking place, and it is true. It is disgusting. People are coming. They're getting rid of their yards, and then they're putting their business stuff in, like, all their scrap and all -- whatever the scrap metal and such. And they're working. And it's, like, nonstop noise. People that moved in that area were, like, I love the nature, I like the quiet, the rural, thatness. I can't even bike on my street anymore, so -- and I don't really like to go all the way down to Picayune because it's kind of boring there. I like to be in nature. That's why I got that house, so I could be in nature there. So now I've had to start buying properties to try to prevent people from, you know, getting rid of it. I want wildlife. It's very important to me, and I know a lot of people want wildlife. I get development. Some of the solutions really quickly; I think sheriffs, police officers, should just sit their cars in the medians and get some people to actually just be more law abiding. They do do that over in the Golden Gate Estates area. So it's just like an officer's car; nobody's in it, but, actually, people slow down. They do that all over central Florida. Should I stop? CHAIRMAN HALL: Just wind it up. MS. FISH: Okay. Electronic messages, like stop texting. Grady does that well in Polk County. Like, he does, like, funny little sayings and such. And I just think that there should be more traffic officers driving within the public, just being a part of it. Like, they should just have somebody that's just driving so you see their officers’ cars. Because, January 23, 2024 Page 156 again, people will be more law abiding when they see an officer. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you. MS. FISH: Okay. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Gary Kluckhuhn. He'll be followed by Richard Conover. MR. KLUCKHUHN: Thank you, guys, for working this late hour. I remember the last time I was in here, about a year ago, January 10th, we were here till about 9:30. And I've talked to a couple of you about it, the zoning, the rezoning on Isles of Capri that took place and increased the density and the burden on that infrastructure and the high-rises. Everyone that spoke, as you guys recall, was in opposition to it from the community, and, of course, Mr. Hall pointed out very clearly to me that I didn't know what I wanted, we didn't know what we want, we don't know what we need, we don't know what's in our best interest. That's a quote; we've got it written. And I was told I'd get thrown out or -- basically, when they said what's the problem, and I blurted out density, and I blurted out pretty loud, and Mr. LoCastro told me that didn't work favorably for my cause. Well, that is the cause. Density, that's the issue here. And a moratorium -- I lived at Tahoe. In '75, we had a moratorium on building. And you balance it. You work with it. But the solution, you don't need -- you're not obligated to give someone a rezoning. That's not a property right. The gentleman over there the other day told I had -- I've got no skin in the game. The developer has all the money invested. You got no skin. Well, hell, I got -- everything I got's invested in this community, in this town. And I've been a builder/developer all my life in the real estate business, and I have a suggestion that we seriously consider air rights above the commercial space where there's already paving, such as the January 23, 2024 Page 157 Coastland Mall or the shops down on Manatee Road and 951. We could go with the zoning that's there, and we -- senior housing, the underlying zoning privileges -- for example, you go senior housing, you've got no density limitation to speak of. And in commercial you can go high, and you only have one parking space for every two units. So there -- the density issue, a developer/builder can manipulate or use it to his advantage to accomplish that he wants to get done, and we can. With the zoning we've got in place, we can accomplish what we need. Getting into these air rights and perhaps a consideration for affordable workforce housing in a 20-story building -- why not? They've got 20-story buildings on the beach -- we could get a lot of -- we could solve a lot of the housing and transportation go along. We could develop 10,000 affordable housing units above commercial spaces within all the zoning, all the approvals, minimum burden on the infrastructure. And I'd like to propose that we look at some of these solutions. The bottom line is, also, we need the river of grass in its entirety. We need the wetlands in it to give this cloud cover that we used to get, and we'll talk more about that. But the Board, politically, could help influence the governor and the president to get the river of grass, get sugar out. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Richard Conover. He'll be followed by Brooke Beardsley. MR. CONOVER: Thank you. Commissioners, thanks for having this meeting tonight. It's important to hear from the people. Commissioner Hall, you did mention a couple days ago, the traffic is the traffic is the traffic, and it is. It is the traffic. I agree with you, the moratorium isn't going to change our traffic situation. But this moratorium on rezoning, it is a symbolic measure on the commissioners' part to show us, the citizens, because we are the January 23, 2024 Page 158 citizens. We are the voice. We are the citizens, we are the citizens, we are the citizens. We want you to hold up your end of the bargain with us. The Growth Management Plan was put in place for a reason, and it's a plan to follow. It's not a new plan. It's not a living document. It's a plan that was put into place to manage our growth. I come from the northeast, and rezoning is such an absurd concept to me. I worked for a billboard company, and my job was to find eligible real estate where we could put the dreaded trash on a stick. Billboards were the blight of everything everywhere. And to get a variance or a rezone, man, we had to make the bar so high. And to look at what goes on in our county where it seems as though -- maybe it isn't -- but it seems like a rubber stamp. Like, I can just come in with a bunch of money and say, hey, I'm going to -- I need to buy up four of these residential lots and turn them into a high-density apartment complex. I'll pretend or I'll say it's affordable housing, which is one of the most nebulous concepts that I have heard. What is affordable housing in Collier County? What's the number? How are you going to enforce someone to rent an apartment for a certain amount of money? We talked about property rights. I live on 7th Avenue Northwest. I bought a three-acre parcel with my wife with a home on it. These are low-density residential lots. They're at Vanderbilt Beach Road and Collier Boulevard. Part of the reason I'm here today is because the rampant rezoning, the rubber stamping of allowing just anybody to come in and rezone residential lots either to commercial or high density, has emboldened a local charter school, Mason Classical Academy, to come into my neighborhood and try to purchase four residential properties at a bargain, at maybe a fifth of the going price. And while it's not a rezoning issue, it's not something that you folks have January 23, 2024 Page 159 any control over, they've been emboldened by your rubber stamp. So I'm here today to ask you folks to do what is right, to listen to the people, follow the Growth Management Plan, and lay off rubber stamping rezoning. It doesn't need to happen. And, again, you know, it's not going to solve all of our problems, but this is a matter of integrity, gentlemen. It's a matter of keeping your promise to the people who voted for you. And I can tell you, each one of you, the next election, we're going to act in Collier County, like, we all vote for all the commissioners all the time. And if you don't do what we need you to do, we're going to vote you out one way or another. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Brooke Beardsley. Brooke Beardsley? (No response.) MR. MILLER: All right. I see no one responding. Amy Kurtz, and Amy will be followed by Kathleen Curatolo. MS. KURTZ: I'm back. Good evening. Thank you, Commissioner Saunders, for allowing this meeting to happen. It's a little overdue, but it's better late than never. I was going to say, everybody's kind of said what I wanted to say except for a couple of things. Just saying yes to every developer isn't a must. Let's take a pause. As you know, we were talking about apartments. My street is going to have -- go from 45 homes to 208 apartments. We're smack dab in the middle due to a rubber stamping which is -- in my opinion, it's just ridiculous, but that's a done deal. But let's take a pause and see what happens. What transpires when these, you know, 500, 600 people move in on Vanderbilt Beach Drive, and they have to do U-turns and pull in front of Island Walk? And then when we have Mason Classical Academy right down the January 23, 2024 Page 160 road with no buses so every parent has to drop off their kid and pick them up on 951 and Vanderbilt Beach Drive, let's see how that works, and then maybe we can decide what other building can occur. Stick with the Growth Management Plan. Is it a joke? I mean, if it is a joke, let's revise it. Let's amend it. Let's own up that the Growth Management Plan in Collier County doesn't mean a hill of beans. It just -- it's not working. You don't -- you don't abide by it, and it's caused a lot of trouble. Being here 38 years almost, seeing one gated community, another gated community with no side roads, one entrance, one exit, is scary, and we watched it all happen being here this long. There's no -- Pelican Marsh was built. I'm like, well, certainly they're going to put in a road in between that goes between Airport and 41. Nope, no road. You have to -- you have Immokalee. You have Vanderbilt. That's it. Maybe we should interconnect some of these developments. Maybe we could interconnect Island Walk with Heritage Green. I don't know. I know everyone's worried about security and safety, but maybe that -- that might be something helpful to think about putting pathways or something in there, let the kids ride their bike through if parents allow that. I mean, that's about all I want to say. And, you know, let's just do the right thing. Let's think about the people. Let's think about our future in Collier County. I'm moving. I'm done. I've seen it. I've lived it. I'm gone. But let's make it good for everybody else. Thank you. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Kathy Curatolo. She'll be followed by Donald Schneck. MS. CURATOLO: Good evening, Commissioners, Kathy Curatolo. I represent the Collier Building Industry Association. Ninety percent of the companies that I represent are small businesses, January 23, 2024 Page 161 folks who live and work in this community. First and foremost, I want to thank you for this evening's town hall meeting. I'm very impressed. I'm encouraged. I'm enthusiastic about the transportation ideas that have been presented this evening. When you talk moratorium, it's very frightening to my members. I think we need to be very clear, very committed to an understanding of what privately initiated GMP amendments are. How many have we had in 2023? What effect do they have on the process of construction in our community and how they affect transportation? I personally have lived in this community since 1997. I would be more than happy to serve doing research to some of the ideas that were presented this evening and work with our community, our commissioners, and those folks who work in the industry to work on some of these transportation issues. Thank you so much for allowing me to speak this evening. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Donald Schneck. He'll be followed by Gerry Manning. MR. SCHNECK: Thank you, Commissioners. I look at this after a 45-year career in transportation, and I look at the issues from a transportation planning perspective. When you look at the study area, you're drawn immediately to Immokalee and 75. You have a long-range plan for 75. I look at the intersection of Immokalee, and I see when you prioritize and run the traffic signals, you're looking -- it looks like you're prioritizing each individual traffic signal. And what that's doing is that's slowing down the most important throughput of traffic, the straight-throughs. And when you don't do that, you slow them down, stop them; you're congesting everything else. So you've got to prioritize the throughputs, steal time from the side streets, and get that moving. I really enjoy your idea of introducing the diamond January 23, 2024 Page 162 intersections. That's a very good idea. When you do that, try maybe not to impose or obviate the potential for doing what you did on Golden Gate Boulevard there at Airport where you put an overpass on just in case things get so bad that could be a long-term option. But you need to look at things from a network standpoint. Someone doing traffic signals is looking at them independently, and you're not optimizing the throughput movements. If I look at key times on Immokalee and Collier, you've got three lanes turning left there, and what they do is they get off Immokalee and go down to Vanderbilt Beach Road, and they just make that bad. So the issue is improving the throughput on Immokalee, and that's really what you need to do. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Are you retired? MR. SCHNECK: No. I'm the federal government's risk manager for the worst projects. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Get his contact information, please. MR. MILLER: Your next speaker is Gerry Manning. He'll be followed by Laurence Hulbert. MR. MANNING: Hi. I'm Gerry Manning. I live at -- in Old Cypress, 7399 Monte Verde Way, and you probably know that we're going to have a roundabout now coming out of Logan and our community, and it's going to be a real exercise in learning, because people coming off of Immokalee taking a right or taking a left and coming into our roundabout that's immediately outside of our development -- I mean, I know what roundabouts are about, and I've lived in them and around them for a long time, but a lot of people are going to have a lot of trouble with this. Hopefully it will work out, and we won't have more accidents clogging that way. I just wanted to say, first of all, thank you very much for bringing this moratorium January 23, 2024 Page 163 to our attention and that we can offer our opinion. I'm in favor of it. A moratorium without a real concept about what you want this community -- what we want this community to be like in the next several years, many years, decades is a huge discussion. We understand that there will be maybe 20 million people moving into South Florida in the next 20 years. I'm not going to be here. I'm almost 80 years old. I'll be 80 in July, so -- but a lot of people are going to be here, and kids are going to be here, and grandkids are going to be here. If a surgeon was looking at our corridor, they would say we are a heart attack waiting to happen. We've got clogged arteries, and the only way to save this patient is to do bypass surgery. Well, bypass surgery means condemning land so you can put in other roadways, and that's a problem. That's going to be a problem for drainage. That's going to be a problem for communities. That's going to be a problem for landowners who do not want to give up their property to a condemnation, which you will have to do in order to put these roadways in. It's a tremendous problem. My feeling is that right now what we can do, what we should do, we, as taxpayers -- I think it's -- Conservation Collier has a certain amount of money. There are properties along the corridor that could be purchased and retired, and there are properties that could be developed for community necessary services. But I understand profit motive. I've been a businessman all my life. I'm an entrepreneur. I've been a miner in Australia. Believe me, we have more environmental constraints in Australia than we even dreamed of having here. But I just want to say that I think that you guys are presented with a tremendous problem. And the thought process that you're going to have to put through is not just for now, not just for 10 years from now, but it's for a very long-term problem that we're going to January 23, 2024 Page 164 have in this country and in this state. So thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. MR. MILLER: Mr. Chairman, your final registered speaker for this item is Laurence Hulbert. MR. HULBERT: Thank you, all. I appreciate the opportunity to speak before you, and thank you for taking the time to listen to us. I have no idea where each one of you-all stands on this issue. And what I'd like to ask you to do as you consider how you're going to move forward is to answer these questions: Where's the fire if you're against this proposal? Why not have a moratorium? I'm asking that question. What would be the overriding positives of voting not to have the moratorium? Secondly, what would be the harm created by voting for Commissioner Saunders' proposal? I'd like to know, and I hope you know. I hope that you'll be able to articulate that. Finally, I want to sincerely thank all the commissioners for your service, for your time. And I've lived in about five different counties, and I want to thank you for not only the work you do and the leadership you provide, but you have the most outstanding staff I've ever had the opportunity to work with, no question. They're so helpful. They honestly have the attitude that we're here to serve, and they do. So thank you, all. MR. MILLER: Mr. Chair, that was your final public speaker for this item. CHAIRMAN HALL: So do we want to open this for discussion? How do you want to handle the -- let's handle the moratorium discussion first, and then we'll move to the 40 million question. Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: On the moratorium, and as I January 23, 2024 Page 165 said at the beginning, this is not a solution to a problem. It's not even close to a solution to the traffic problem, and as several speakers have said, if we vote to advertise an ordinance and come back for a public hearing on an ordinance to impose a moratorium for a year, traffic isn't going to change one little bit, but what it will do is a couple things, and I think they're important. One is it will send a message to the community, to our citizens, that we do care about the problem, we do care about the issues that they face as they are trying to enter and exit their communities, and we want to take a pause so we can try to implement additional solutions to help solve that problem. It will not slow growth, it will not stop development, but it will send a message to the community, and it will also send a message to speculators that are purchasing single-family residential lots with the understanding that at some point in time they can turn that into a high-density residential project or into a commercial project. We need to send a message that our zoning is important, that we are not a rubber stamp. I will say -- and this is a little difficult for me to say, but I have kind of found these rezones and these Comprehensive Plan changes, they kind of sneak up on you. They're site specific. Oh, what's the harm in this particular development? But then you start adding them up. And what we're doing is we are basically destroying our Comprehensive Plan one parcel at a time, and I think we need to take a pause and stop -- stop the bleeding. And so, Mr. Chairman, that's why I'm going to make a motion to -- at some point. I don't need to make the motion right now. But I will make a motion to direct the County Attorney to advertise and come back with an ordinance to impose the moratorium as has been described in the executive summary that I presented, the moratorium for one year on site-specific land-use changes -- Comprehensive Plan January 23, 2024 Page 166 changes as outlined in that executive summary. So that's why I've brought this forward. CHAIRMAN HALL: Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Yes. Early I had a discussion -- I saw some maps yesterday, and I think if we have the capacity -- Mr. Bosi, Mr. French, do we have the capacity to show those maps that we were shown yesterday about the impacted properties that are out there, or no? MR. FRENCH: Will of the Board, sir. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Because I think it's important for the community to see the corridors so that the moratorium, impositions, looking at the impacted properties that are on those sites or on those segments of roadway and how many property owners are actually impacted by this. MR. FRENCH: Thank you, Troy. Good evening, Commissioners. For the record, my name's Jamie French. I'm the department head for the Growth Management/Community Development department. With me this evening is our Planning and Zoning director, Mr. Michael Bosi, as well as in the back of the room we have Ms. Jaime Cook that performs the function of director for environmental and -- development and review. And new to our staff, Mr. Bert Miller. Bert has got a diverse background both in GIS, as a former GIS professional, and currently reinstating his AICP planning, but he was one of the first planners in Maricopa County, Arizona, and he's worked all over the country on stormwater and stormwater planning, and he's part of our long-range planning and resiliency group under Chris Mason. But, Commissioners, just taking a look -- and staff just really looked at those corridors identified within the moratorium that's January 23, 2024 Page 167 being mentioned. And so we simply just ran what -- under the Property Appraiser data and what was made available based on nongovernment-owned properties that weren't currently within a Planned Unit Development, and these were an aggregate of Estates properties as well as mobile home agriculture type properties, and it was pretty diverse range. Some are not developable, meaning by size. So when you've got some that are illustrated on here -- and I'll show you another caption of really what the impact of some of the already zoned properties would look like, these are -- in the shaded areas, these are all those previously zoned areas. So we just kind of opaqued it to show you what's currently out there. Now, this is not a representation of what was approved and what has already been built. This is simply what was left out. And these are the vacant parcels that would be impacted by those. Now, as Commissioner Saunders and I spoke yesterday, this would not preclude a developer who wanted to assemble land to put these lands together, perhaps buy the doughnut, the center of the doughnut or the hole in the doughnut that could very well have a home on it, that could already have a development that could put these properties together. But all in all, it's about 57 parcels, and some of them are under common ownership. And you can see there's a couple parcels. Like on Parcel No. 23, we understand that that is owned by the Diocese of Venice, and we've been in talks with them over numerous years about what they intend to do with the property. And so we don't -- we never want to say -- as Commissioner LoCastro said, nothing's in perpetuity, but we don't believe that the Diocese of Venice would ever be compelled to sell that property for development, and that's right there at the corner of Wilson and Immokalee Road. January 23, 2024 Page 168 But all in all, we're -- about 57 parcels have an aggregate amount of just under 217 acres. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Does that include Parcel 23? MR. FRENCH: That would be inclusive. We only shaded it out, but it is under -- looking at that data -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I understand. We have to take it into consideration because it's there. I understand it. MR. FRENCH: Right. And so here's really kind of a blowup of the map legend that exists within those maps. And we've got this in several different layers. I can tell you, Commissioner, realistically, when you put me in this position all the way back in 2010, the one thing we've done is we have enhanced our data to a point where our margin of error is probably way less than 10 percent, maybe just over 5. We run a very transactional-based software and development program that this board purchased many years ago, and we have enhanced that to a point where they're actually able to sell more software because of the enhancements we've made and the data we're able to capture. So I can tell you the effects of COVID. I can tell you what was built, what the intended uses were. Unfortunately, with some of the state preemptions that are out there, some of your speakers spoke of this evening with regards to businesses that have moved to the Estates, Vacation Rental by Owner, we're preempted. We don't track that. That's not available data to us, and it doesn't come through your permitting software. But this is what we have demonstrated to the Board before, and I think this is what you were talking about, Commissioner McDaniel, with regards to residential homes that we have seen developed. These are homes that received a certificate of occupancy where -- whether they're a year-round resident. We did not look to January 23, 2024 Page 169 see if they were homestead or not. We know they were built. There was service provided to them. There's an FP&L meter they can -- for lack of a better term, they can flush toilets and make ice. So they can occupy -- they can occupy these structure. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Sooner or later, somebody's going to be in one of those houses? MR. FRENCH: Thirty seconds or 30 days or 30 years, it's irrelevant to us with regards to the Florida Building Code and the way we do -- and the way we perform the zoning action under that state law. And you can see, over the last 10 years -- and it's certainly been enhanced during the COVID years where we saw a migration of homes and we saw more activity in those Estates. Clearly, in the way this map is demonstrated, almost like a heat map, as I've demonstrated to this board before, we're starting to see a great deal of urban sprawl on those lots that exist currently in Golden Gate Estates. And of about 24- or 25,000 platted lots that exist that are east of 951, we've seen a significant change in that number of what's available left to build. And so this would demonstrate your commercial compared to your residential. From the economic development side, we recognize that businesses are going to chase rooftops. No different than you have items coming before you. Look at the Planning Commission next Thursday. What we're going to see is we're going to see additional commercial come forward as those residential units come online where they can pencil out the number. CHAIRMAN HALL: Jamie, you've got the same slide. MR. FRENCH: I'm sorry. So it is significantly different, especially when we're seeing those eastern lands start to be more occupied both by PUDs and both by these residential already entitled properties to where the behavior is being forced to drive east to west January 23, 2024 Page 170 to receive goods and services, doctors' appointments, jobs. And although we're seeing Publix or a gas station come out in these -- to this community, this is where we've talked -- and Mr. Bosi can certainly speak of this, but this is where we've talked about the villages and why we put those requirements on there that they provided enough commercial to not only support their community that they intend to -- that they intend to develop, but also those neighboring communities so that we can perhaps change that driving behavior from the west to the east now certainly to try to impact that east-to-west direction. And then, finally, here's your Golden Gate Estates parcels that you asked for yesterday, and this -- I think this was our conversation that you brought out because we've provided this to the Board. This was today. So there's approximately 8900 vacant parcels that are not in government ownership that have not been built that are greater than 1.13 acres. Now, that does not take into effect if I've got a five-acre lot, I can split it. If I've got a 10-acre lot, I can split it a couple times and come before the Board and create a division by the Land Development Code. But there are alternatives, but this is simply vacant properties under the Property Appraiser data, and this is directly out of their data today, and this is what we ran this evening. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: It's about 9,000 of those left that are still yet undeveloped, if I can see that from here. MR. FRENCH: And I apologize, again. This was kind of a last-minute chart. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Plus or minus. MR. FRENCH: But in comparison to 2022, there was about -- almost 9600 vacant lots. So that's a big number. And especially during the COVID years where we tracked, all and all, we were averaging probably around 24,000 inspections per month, January 23, 2024 Page 171 building inspections, and right around 60,000 building permits per year. And so what we've seen year over year now, because of scarcity of commodities, cost of commodities, scarcity and cost of labor, we've actually seen about a 23 percent decrease from COVID year to current still tracking about 1 to 2 percent higher if we removed that anomaly. So we're still on an upward swing but, as Mr. Bosi would tell you, is that if you look at your annual population growth, your annual population growth compared to previous years is now below 2 percent on an aggregate level year over year. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. MR. FRENCH: And we're available to answer any questions that this board might have. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: That's wonderful information. I do have one quick question for Trinity, if I can, and then we can move into deliberations and discussions. For records sake, for my brain, to what capacity do we build our road systems from a level-of-service standpoint? MS. SCOTT: We build to a Level of Service E. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Which, for non-educated people... MS. SCOTT: Depends on the specific roadway -- COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Which is me, by the way. MS. SCOTT: -- for a six-lane facility, is we look at p.m. peak hour/peak direction, so afternoon, typically that's an eastbound direction, is roughly 3,000 to 3500 vehicles per hour. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: On a six-lane facility? MS. SCOTT: Yes. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Is there -- and the adage that comes to my mind is we don't build a church for Easter Sunday. We January 23, 2024 Page 172 build a church for the regular accommodations and then suffer from overcrowding on Easter Sunday. So our capacities on our road systems are naturally going to be constrained during a.m. and peak p.m. traffic times. We don't build our road systems to accommodate those influxes of traffic. MS. SCOTT: We definitely don't build our roads for those large influxes, particularly right now for seasonal traffic. We are -- we are building to have just enough capacity to move the vehicles during our off-season time frames. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: So what you're saying is during season it's super compounded? MS. SCOTT: Yes, sir. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: You know what you should add, though, to that, Trinity -- it makes it sound like that's just what we do. FDOT does that in the whole state of Florida, and every state's transportation agency follows that exact same model. So we didn't invent it here in Collier. We're not dumb or stupid or any of -- and I know you know that. But we sit in this room a lot with FDOT for hours, when this room's empty with [sic] citizens, and we have that exact same conversation, and that's directed by them. So I don't want any -- you know, I want to make sure that, you know, we're speaking clearly to the citizens who are listening, and maybe they're listening and following this for the very first time. And, rightly so, they're unhappy with traffic and built construction and whatnot. But there's an awful lot that got talked about at the podium here that actually we can't legally do. I wrote down all the things here that people said that actually are either untrue or we aren't able to do it. And, you know, I think you would confirm that with FDOT. I think they've sat in here for hours January 23, 2024 Page 173 and told us that exact same thing. We build for traffic to move in the off-season, and then on Easter Sunday the church is overflowed. And that's -- that's their direction. We can't change that. MS. SCOTT: And there's -- sir, there's reasons why we do that. It's a cost standpoint as well of -- you know, to build new roadways or to widen these roadways further would be very costly to the taxpayers. Also, from a long-term maintenance strategy, whatever we build, we have to maintain. We have to resurface, too. So you don't want a lot of pavement sitting out there that, you know, three-quarters of the year isn't being used. So those are all decisions that have gone in all through the years on why those decisions were made, and why that's what we follow. And you're right, that's what major communities follow, our surrounding communities as well. CHAIRMAN HALL: Great. Well, you know, to Commissioner LoCastro's point, the public seems to think that, well, they don't count traffic during season because they're trying to skew the numbers. That's simply not true. We're trying to do things as smart as we can, the way that we're told to do things, and for the long-range planning. And with that, I want to address a few things. I listened really diligently tonight. And one of the main themes of everyone's comments were, it gives us time. It gives us time to study. It gives us time to mitigate. It gives us time to take a look and to reassess. And whether we do a moratorium or not, nothing is bothering our time to do any of that. If we put a halt on applications, we still have the time to do everything we ever wanted to do. We're not constrained on time. And another thing was mentioned a lot about the powerful builders and the ones that have all of the money. You know, I don't care if you have an application and you're a billionaire or you've got January 23, 2024 Page 174 $200 in your pocket. I'm not looking at you. I'm not looking whether you're from here or whether you're not. I'm looking at what the public benefit is for the application and for the applicant. Commissioners, you know, we have a Growth Management Plan. Why don't you stick to it? Well, if you think about the words, there's growth; that means we are going to grow. There's management; it means we have the responsibility to manage that growth and do it well. And then there's plan. We have to have a plan, which we do, in place. So I agree with a lot of the comment about stick with the Growth Management Plan. I totally -- I understand it. I get it. Commissioners, why are you so -- why are you reactive and not proactive? Well, let me tell you why. The traffic that we have today and the growth that we have experienced today are not our decisions. They were made 10, 15 years ago, so that's why we're reactive. The proactive part is where we can go forth and do it and do it smarter. But the moratorium as far as traffic -- we heard a lot about traffic. People running red lights, people not obeying -- people backing up into the intersections, crashes. You know, yes, all that's true. Commissioner, you said the traffic is the traffic is the traffic. It is. It's what we have to deal with. And by what Ms. Scott brought forth today and some of the changes that we can implement, we can help that. But a moratorium's not going to make a hill of beans different in the traffic today, tomorrow, or a year from now. It's just not going to make a difference. The assumption that if we don't do a moratorium is that we rubber stamp -- that's another term we heard a lot. We're going to rubber stamp stuff. I can tell you right now, as this commissioner for District 2, I'm not rubber stamping anything. January 23, 2024 Page 175 The real message that we can send to the public is to the people who are assuming that they can come in and ask for a rezone and get it. That's the message. We deny some of that stuff that's asking for high density that just doesn't make good sense. That's the message that we can send. But a moratorium -- I understand what Commissioner Saunders is saying as far as the message to the public, but the real message is the truth, that we don't have to -- we're not -- the Bible says that we owe no man but love, and that's it. We don't owe them rezoning. There was a project that was coming today. I'm going to say it publicly. I am not in favor of it from the density. That project may change. We'll see. But while we are talking also about getting -- you know, 40,000 people come in Collier County every day, 40,000 people leave. And there's been discussions on how we can -- we can lessen that if we can get the workforce or some of those people that are traveling that road, if they can live here locally, to lessen the commute, and that does make a lot of sense. And I can see in theory how that would work over time. But what I don't understand is if we have a project that has 200 homes, and 30 percent of them are going to be affordable, so how we're going to take 60 people off of the road, but we're going to add 140. So we're going to increase to decrease, and I don't follow that logic at all. We had some surtax discussion this morning offering a company to do 100 percent affordable homes. That's the kind of smart growth that we can do. So, you know, I welcome the discussion. If you have any questions, Commissioners, I'll entertain them. Commissioner McDaniel. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: You know, Laurence, you January 23, 2024 Page 176 brought up a couple of good questions that I've been arguing with myself about with this evening's hearing. I'm -- for those who don't know, I'm not in favor of a moratorium. I have concerns about litigation for the community with regard to it. I have concerns about -- even though my County Attorney told me very clearly yesterday that this board can do pretty much anything we want until the judge says we can't, I don't want to, on purpose, walk into litigation. We haven't talked tonight about the enormous efforts and re-prioritization of infrastructure for our grid system in the east. I would like, tonight, for us to have a discussion. I don't know if you fellows are coming or not, but I know myself, I'm going to Washington, D.C., in the latter part of April. I'm endeavoring to schedule a meeting with the Federal Department of Transportation. I would like support from this board to be able to move forward the opening of the partial interchange at Everglades Boulevard and I-75. I've lived here for 42 years, ladies and gentlemen. Short of Mary Tatigian, some of you, you folks are all new growth to me. And so we're suffering on a regular basis from good growth and bad growth. Growth is inevitable. Our goal has to be to endeavor to manage it. I got hung out by that young fellow -- and I'm pointing at you, young lady, that lives in Ventana out there. I got hung out by that guy. He came to me, big, long sob story, told me all kinds of poor-me things, and I agreed -- because typically you're allowed one or two units per TDR within the Rural Fringe Mixed-Use District, and I agreed to allow him increased density at, I think, two-and-a-half units per TDR. But we got some really environmentally sensitive lands that he went and bought, so I traded it for the environmental sensitivity side. But the next thing I know, he dumped that piece of property off to Pulte, you're living there now, and he moved back to January 23, 2024 Page 177 Tampa. He was one of those people -- I was misled by that -- by that argument, and I can only say out loud that it won't happen twice. I think we have to remember we have a choice to accept the positives and the negatives that come with this inevitable growth. There's been a lot of discussion tonight about that Ascend project that we approved over on Vanderbilt, on the west side next to the cemetery. I think, Gary, you and I were talking about it. We're sitting here looking at a developer that owns a piece of land. The uninitiated believe that it can only be developed for seven homes, seven single-family homes, and we approved 200 units. And the folks in Island Walk are still mad at me about approving that development. What did I get? A development that's going to produce up to 400 trips, enhanced setbacks, I got enhanced buffering, I got a fire hydrant on 7th to help the residents with their fire protection over there, I got control and no -- no access out onto Cherry Wood off of -- out of that development, I think maybe except for an emergency access that was in there, but no ingress and egress. What you folks didn't see was, by right, a charter school -- and we're now facing it for -- MR. CONOVER: Over here. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: There you are. For the -- COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Mason. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: -- folks over on the west side -- or the east side of Vanderbilt for a school by right can come in there with a Site Development Plan. No control on access, no control on setbacks, no control on anything, and plunk a school in there. And all we can do is suggest by state law -- all we can do is suggest by state law that they try to manage their traffic and manage their internal circulation and keep the -- keep the parents that are coming in there. January 23, 2024 Page 178 And the current model for a school is a thousand kids in a pile, K through 12 in one building. And so on the Ascend project, I'm sitting here weighing up to 400 trips with the enhancements, with the traffic control, with the additional buffering, so on and so forth, or I was staring at 4,000 trips. That's what you're going to see when Mason Academy comes in there on that east side, and we have nothing to say. We have nothing to say about that. Now, what this board did do today in our earlier session is this board agreed with me to give direction to staff to amend our GMP and amend our LDC, Land Development Code, to force the charter schools that, to date, we've been treating as a public school system, to come in as a conditional use, at which point you have a say-so. I personally believe we're at the beginning of the gold rush. We were all happy about -- well, not all of us, but we were -- a lot of us were happy with regard to the school choice that was promoted in the last legislative session, the voucher system that lets the money follow the child which lets the parents better educate your children and put them where they believe they need to be, but on the same token, we have these charter schools flying at us right now. And right now the model is K through -- K through 12 all in one building. Pretty soon we're going to see elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools that can be set on a different size footprint, considerably smaller, and then all of Golden Gate Estates, irrespective of where they are, those smaller footprints, those vacant lots are availed for a school today by right. And that's an important factor that folks need to bring into consideration, that we have to weigh with regard to the property rights that already currently exist when we're making a change. Now, I do concur with Commissioner Saunders, a message needs to be sent that we don't have to approve every single thing that January 23, 2024 Page 179 comes along, but I also believe that moving towards taking of the property rights on some 47 property owners that are along there that have to come to us, that have to propose that they're going to -- that their density increase is good for the greater good in relationship to -- right here, that map that's up there right now, there's 9,000 rooftops that could come in that are going to increase the traffic on the road systems that are already exacerbated. Now, I would highly recommend and support a hearing to review all of the suggestions. That one nice lady -- there she is in the back. She had eight or nine different ideas. Some of them were kind of out there, but I'd like to -- I'd like to review. MS. OCZKOWSKI: They were ideas. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Those -- some of those were really, really good ideas. I'd like to review them. We have had discussions in the past when folks have come to us and brought ideas, and I'd like those to be weighed. I'd like those to be vetted. I'd like those to be discussed. How much is plausible? Some of -- there was -- there was one fellow that talked about -- and Trinity said, we're finally getting around to doing some re-striping on Immokalee Road. Finally. Those are things -- what can we do now to assist? I'd like -- I'd like to have our Sheriff's Department here. There's no argument that we live in one of the safest communities in this country, but our -- we need to engage with our Sheriff's Department. We need some way for the community -- I mean, today I had to go out to Tractor Supply on the East Trail, so I had to go around by the bus station on the other side there. That traffic signal might not could have even been there. People coming on the westbound side of 41 heading into town, they were lined up in front of me five cars deep through that intersection. There was that one lady that lives out in the Estates was talking about the poor driving habits of our January 23, 2024 Page 180 community. I'd like to engage with the Sheriff. I'd like to find a way so that those of us that drive our roads all day every day have an opportunity to report hot spots on a nonemergency line so that when you're involved with something like that, that will better help our already limited law enforcement agency to hit these locations to prohibit that type of clogging that, in fact, transpires. The 40-some, 50-some-odd parcels of land, if you apply the maximum density, if those folks were to endeavor to rezone those lands -- some of them are so small an assemblage would have to be accommodated. But if you applied a maximum density with the affordable housing density bonuses, we're talking about, round numbers, around 5,000 total units on those -- if my -- if my math is correct. There's 9,000 right there, and we haven't got into the rural villages that are already approved to the east, the rural villages coming up on Immokalee Road. I would rather we focus our energies on prioritizing the available infra- -- the available tax dollars for the infrastructure for the folks that we already have, and that's the improvement of the grid system in the east. That's the opening of I-75 and Everglades Boulevard. That's the four-laning of Everglades Boulevard farther to the east from Oil Well down to Golden Gate Boulevard to give alternative routes. There was an accident tonight. While I was sitting here, one of my friends sent me a text not too awful far from where you folks live out there at Ventana, and there was an accident there and traffic's stopped up, head-on. All you need's one accident, and we're all sitting there talking to one another. You can't -- you know, there's not enough signage to control people to make good decisions while they're driving, but January 23, 2024 Page 181 enforcement's an important component that I think we need to be having in order for us to address the immediacy of the need to have better traffic flow within our community. I'm totally in support of the advancing of the funding for the diverging diamond at I-75. I really want to get specifics, because you flipped through your chart -- I'm looking at Trinity. She's hiding from me on the other side over there. I really want to see the dates that were out there, because the proposition for the eight-laning of I-75, the diverging diamond at 951/Collier Boulevard, Pine Ridge Road, those are going to be huge, huge components for the mobility of our community at large. And I'd like to see the date-certains on those. So I've said enough for a minute. CHAIRMAN HALL: Commissioner Saunders. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple questions for the County Attorney. Commissioner McDaniel said that he was concerned about litigation. My understanding is when we're dealing with a comprehensive land-use change, that's a legislative function of government, and we can say yay or nay to a legislative function like changing a Comp Plan with a reason or with no reason. Is there liability -- potential liability in saying no to a comprehensive land-use change? MR. KLATZKOW: Provided you're not being arbitrary and capricious, no; you can say no. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Well, that doesn't quite answer the question. MR. KLATZKOW: Well, arbitrary and capricious is -- I would say, okay, we're not going to vote for this because we don't like you. It has nothing to do the merits of your proposal. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: So if there are concerns of traffic and that sort of thing -- January 23, 2024 Page 182 MR. KLATZKOW: Concerns of traffic, concerns of density, concerns of compatibility, all are fine reasons to turn down a Comprehensive Plan amendment request. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: So I think that that's what they call kind of a red herring in terms of legitimate reasons for a particular position. We don't have a liability issue by imposing a moratorium for one year. We don't have a liability issue if we vote no on a comprehensive land-use change as long as it's not totally arbitrary. I don't like the color of the tie you're wearing today so, therefore, I'm going to vote against this. So I don't think that that is a particularly legitimate concern. You said, Commissioner McDaniel, that if you did the sort of the math, maybe it's 5,000 units. That's still a lot of traffic. That's still a lot of units. And all I'm asking the Board to do tonight -- and I'm going to make the motion. I'm going to make it now -- that we direct the County Attorney to advertise a public hearing for a moratorium as outlined in the executive summary and for that public hearing to be advertised and brought back to this board. We don't have to do that at a 5 o'clock hearing if there's three votes to do that. But let's just go ahead and get that issue off the table, because I do want to talk about these improvements. So I'll make that motion. If that passes, fine. If not, I'm going to -- I've got the subsequent motion on these improvements. So, Mr. Chairman, that's the motion. CHAIRMAN HALL: So we have a motion to move the moratorium to a public hearing. Is there a second? (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: Motion fails on lack of a second. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Then let me make a second motion, Mr. Chairman, and that is to take the projects that were January 23, 2024 Page 183 outlined by Trinity Scott, especially the diverging diamond project, but also the project on Vanderbilt Beach Road and Logan and there were several others, the re-striping and those sort of things -- I'd like to make a motion that the Board is committing the funding to those projects and direct staff to work with DOT to advance those projects. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Can I -- I'll second the motion if I can talk to the motion maker. CHAIRMAN HALL: Sure. Go ahead. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: I'd like the motion maker to give consideration to the input from the community tonight and have that as part of that hearing with regard to locales throughout the community. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Yeah. So certainly staff needs to -- I don't have any problem adding that to the motion. Trinity -- Ms. Scott has already told me that she's keeping copious notes and will be implementing some of those suggestions, so that's certainly part of the motion. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. And I'll second. CHAIRMAN HALL: Okay. I have a question. If we -- I'm all about it. I love the fact that we can get this rolling because it's needed. But where's that money going to come from? MS. SCOTT: So, Commissioner, once again, Trinity Scott. Our first step in this will be going back to the Florida Department of Transportation and having them sharpen their pencil and get the final numbers and the timing for that, and then we will come back and we will work with the County Manager's Office, our Office of Management and Budget, and our Finance Committee. Most likely it will come through some sort of loan is my guess and -- to be paid for. This is an impact-fee-eligible improvement, so they will work through our budget office and our Finance Committee, and we will be bringing back those details, because there will be January 23, 2024 Page 184 agreements that will be necessary with the Florida Department of Transportation and, like I said, a lot of that's going to come down to timing. They're not going to ask for $40 million, that we give that to them in three months. That will most likely at least be 12 months away and could be upward -- could be two separate payments, if you will. So we need them to sharpen their pencil, and we will work on the funding strategies and come back to the Board for that. Amy, did you want to -- sorry. County Manager, did you want to add anything else? MS. PATTERSON: No. Thank you. CHAIRMAN HALL: All right. So we have a motion and a second. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Can I ask a quick question? When are you going to come back with those numbers? Because it's important. I mean, I'm all -- I'm all about supporting moving those initiatives forward, but we need to be able to have some timelines as to where the money's going to be able to come from to be able to make that commitment. MS. SCOTT: I want to be back before our budget hearings. I'm going to light the fire under FDOT to sharpen their pencils as soon as they can. I'll be contacting Secretary Nandam first thing in the morning. I don't think he wants me to call him tonight. But I'll give him a call first thing in the morning and have him set his people on their sprint so they can get the information back to us. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: And did I understand we're having a workshop on February 6th for the AUIR and the budget -- budget initiatives? MS. PATTERSON: Yes, sir. Strategic planning, the AUIR, and then it is a precursor to budget guidance. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Okay. January 23, 2024 Page 185 CHAIRMAN HALL: Okay. Any other questions, comments? (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: A motion and a second. All in favor to move it forward, say aye. COMMISSIONER McDANIEL: Aye. COMMISSIONER LoCASTRO: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: Aye. COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Aye. COMMISSIONER KOWAL: Aye. CHAIRMAN HALL: All opposed? (No response.) CHAIRMAN HALL: None. County Manager? MS. PATTERSON: Sir, that's -- Commissioner Saunders -- COMMISSIONER SAUNDERS: Yeah. I just want to thank our staff for -- especially Transportation tonight in terms of putting together this program and the work that they've been doing for the last, literally, almost two months to come up with some potential solutions. I want to thank the people that were here this evening to express their positions. I think it was a very good hearing. I'm disappointed in the outcome, but we'll move on. Thank you. MS. PATTERSON: That's all we have, Commissioner. That concludes our agenda for tonight. CHAIRMAN HALL: Have a good evening. Safe travels. We're finished. ***** January 23, 2024 Page 186 ****Commissioner McDaniel moved, seconded by Commissioner LoCastro and carried that the following items under the consent and summary agendas be approved and/or adopted**** Item #16A1 STAFF TO ADVERTISE AND BRING BACK AN ORDINANCE AMENDING THE LAND DEVELOPMENT CODE TO CLARIFY THE REGULATIONS PERTAINING TO MOBILE HOMES LOCATED IN THE COASTAL HIGH HAZARD AREA AND TO REMOVE DUPLICATIVE FLOODPLAIN PROTECTION REGULATIONS THAT ARE CODIFIED IN THE COLLIER COUNTY CODE OF LAWS OF ORDINANCES OR WITH THE FLORIDA BUILDING CODE Item #16A2 STAFF TO ADVERTISE AND BRING BACK FOR A PUBLIC HEARING AN ORDINANCE AMENDING THE LAND DEVELOPMENT CODE, TO UPDATE CITATIONS AND CORRECT SCRIVENER'S ERRORS Item #16A3 RELEASE OF A CODE ENFORCEMENT LIEN WITH AN ACCRUED VALUE OF $46,800 FOR A REDUCED PAYMENT OF $1,704 IN THE CODE ENFORCEMENT ACTION TITLED BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS V. LEONEL GARZA, ET AL., IN CODE ENFORCEMENT BOARD CASE NO. CEPM20090017577, RELATING TO PROPERTY LOCATED AT 111 S. 7TH ST., COLLIER January 23, 2024 Page 187 COUNTY, FLORIDA – FOR FINES THAT ACCRUED FOR 234 DAYS Item #16A4 FINAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE POTABLE WATER AND SEWER UTILITY FACILITIES AND ACCEPT THE CONVEYANCE OF A PORTION OF THE POTABLE WATER AND SEWER UTILITY FACILITIES FOR FOXFIRE CLUBHOUSE, PL20230015698 – FINAL INSPECTION BY STAFF FOUND THESE FACILITIES SATISFACTORY AND ACCEPTABLE ON NOVEMBER 15, 2023 Item #16A5 FINAL ACCEPTANCE AND ACCEPT THE CONVEYANCE OF THE POTABLE WATER AND SEWER UTILITY FACILITIES FOR GROVES AT ORANGE BLOSSOM PHASE 2A, PL20230014003 - FINAL INSPECTION BY STAFF FOUND THESE FACILITIES SATISFACTORY AND ACCEPTABLE ON NOVEMBER 17, 2023 Item #16A6 RESOLUTION 2024-10: A RESOLUTION FOR FINAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE PRIVATE ROADWAY AND DRAINAGE IMPROVEMENTS AND ACCEPTANCE OF THE PLAT DEDICATIONS FOR THE FINAL PLAT OF WILLOUGHBY PRESERVE, APPLICATION NUMBER PL20150000872 (PPL), AND PL20160003121 (PPLA), AND AUTHORIZE THE RELEASE OF THE MAINTENANCE January 23, 2024 Page 188 SECURITY IN THE AMOUNT OF $142,023.82 Item #16A7 – Moved to Item #11C (Per Agenda Change Sheet) Item #16A8 THE CONSERVATION COLLIER CAMP KEAIS PRESERVE INTERIM MANAGEMENT PLAN 2-YEAR UPDATE UNDER THE CONSERVATION COLLIER PROGRAM – NO SUBSTANTIAL REVISIONS HAVE BEEN MADE BY THE CCLAAC Item #16B1 AMENDMENT NO. 1 TO AGREEMENT NO. 20-7818, “DESIGN SERVICES FOR UPPER GORDON RIVER IMPROVEMENTS,” WITH JOHNSON ENGINEERING, INC., TO ADD DESIGN SERVICES FOR SECTION A OF THE UPPER GORDON RIVER PROJECT SCOPE OF SERVICES IN THE AMOUNT OF $387,477.32, TO EXTEND THE TERM OF THE AGREEMENT BY 1,441 DAYS, AND AUTHORIZE THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN THE ATTACHED AMENDMENT (PROJECT #60102) – FOR ENGINEERING SERVICES DESIGN OF SEVERAL STRUCTURES AND ACTIONS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CLEARING EXOTIC VEGETATION, BUILDING A MAINTENANCE ACCESS TRAVEL WAY, DREDGING THE RIVER CHANNEL, REINFORCING THE BANKS, AND REPLACING AN EXISTING ROCK WEIR W/AUTOMATED CONCRETE GATED WEIR Item #16B2 – Moved to Item #17C (Correct Placement Per Agenda January 23, 2024 Page 189 Change Sheet) Item #16B3 THE CHAIRMAN TO EXECUTE AMENDMENT NO. 2 TO AGREEMENT 20CO3 WITH THE FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION BUREAU OF BEACHES AND COASTAL SYSTEMS, BEACH MANAGEMENT FUNDING ASSISTANCE PROGRAM, FOR DREDGING OF WIGGINS PASS AND MAKE A FINDING THAT THIS ITEM PROMOTES TOURISM – EXTENDING THE AMENDMENT TO DECEMBER 31, 2024 Item #16C1 THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, AS EX-OFFICIO THE GOVERNING BOARD OF THE COLLIER COUNTY WATER-SEWER DISTRICT, APPROVE A WORK ORDER TO HASKINS, INC., PURSUANT TO A REQUEST FOR QUOTATION (“RFQ”) UNDER AGREEMENT NO. 20-7800 FOR THE “GLADES IQ PUMP STATION AND TANK IMPROVEMENTS” PROJECT, IN THE AMOUNT OF $680,145.56, AND AUTHORIZE THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN THE WORK ORDER (PROJECT NO. 70166.12) – THIS ITEM IS CONSISTENT WITH THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ASSET MANAGEMENT ELEMENT OF THE COLLIER COUNTY STRATEGIC PLAN OBJECTIVES Item #16C2 THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, AS THE EX- January 23, 2024 Page 190 OFFICIO GOVERNING BOARD OF THE COLLIER COUNTY WATER-SEWER DISTRICT, AWARD REQUEST FOR QUOTATION (“RFQ”) UNDER AGREEMENT NO. 20-7800, THE “ANNUAL AGREEMENT FOR UNDERGROUND UTILITIES” TO THE LOWEST BIDDER, KYLE CONSTRUCTION, INC., AND AUTHORIZE THE ISSUANCE OF A WORK ORDER IN THE AMOUNT OF $746,000.00 FOR THE PUMP STATION 308.09 REHABILITATION PROJECT. (PROJECT NUMBER 70240.4.11) – THIS ITEM IS CONSISTENT WITH THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ASSET MANAGEMENT ELEMENT OF THE COLLIER COUNTY STRATEGIC PLAN OBJECTIVES Item #16C3 CHANGE ORDER NO. 2, PROVIDING FOR A TIME EXTENSION OF 30 DAYS UNDER CONSTRUCTION AGREEMENT NO. 23-8058, WITH ACCURATE DRILLING SYSTEMS, INC., FOR THE “GOLDEN GATE CITY TRANSMISSION WATER MAIN IMPROVEMENTS – PHASE 1A – GOLF COURSE” PROJECT, AND AUTHORIZE THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN THE ATTACHED CHANGE ORDER (PROJECT NO. 70253) – EXTENDING THE FINAL COMPLETION DATE TO APRIL 5, 2024 Item #16C4 TO 1) APPROVE AN AFTER-THE-FACT PAYMENT OF PAY APPLICATION 1 IN THE AMOUNT OF $16,636.00 FOR BOND WORK COMPLETED, 2) APPROVE THE MASTER PUMP STATION GENERATOR REPLACEMENT PROJECTS FOR MPS 112.00 AND 121.00 FOR PURCHASE AND INSTALLATION OF January 23, 2024 Page 191 TWO (2) GENERATORS DAMAGED FROM HURRICANE IAN WHICH ERRONEOUSLY DID NOT HAVE PROPER BOARD APPROVAL, AS REQUIRED UNDER AGREEMENT #19-7527 ELECTRICAL CONTRACTORS WITH PUBLIC UTILITIES SPECIALIZATION, 3) APPROVE PURCHASE ORDER 4500228495 TO SIMMONDS ELECTRICAL, INC. IN THE AMOUNT OF $475,324.56, AND 4) DEEM THE EXPENDITURES HAVE A VALID PUBLIC PURPOSE (#50280.6.5/#50280.6.6) – RECTIFYING THE CONTRACT SITUATION FOR WORK THAT BEGUN WITHOUT FIRST RECEIVING BOARD APPROVAL AND PAY FOR WORK ALREADY RECEIVED Item #16D1 TO ACCEPT TWO (2) NON-RESTRICTED LIBRARY GRANT DONATIONS IN THE AMOUNT OF $200 TO PROVIDE OPERATIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE COLLIER COUNTY SOUTH LIBRARY, FROM THE KIRSCH MCLAUGHLIN TRUST THROUGH THE FIDELITY CHARITABLE GRANT PROGRAM IN THE AMOUNT OF $100, AND FROM THE EILEEN AND CONO FUSCO FUND THROUGH THE FIDELITY CHARITABLE GRANT PROGRAM IN THE AMOUNT OF $100, AND AUTHORIZE THE NECESSARY BUDGET AMENDMENTS (PUBLIC SERVICES GRANT FUND 1839) – BOTH DONATIONS WILL BE USED TO SUPPORT GENERAL LIBRARY OPERATIONS Item #16D2 THE DOMESTIC ANIMAL SERVICES DIVISION TO PARTICIPATE IN FEE-WAIVED ADOPTION PROGRAM January 23, 2024 Page 192 PARTNERSHIPS AND AUTHORIZE THE COUNTY MANAGER OR DESIGNEE TO EXECUTE ANY AND ALL DOCUMENTS TO EFFECTUATE PARTICIPATION IN FEE-WAIVED ADOPTION PROGRAM PARTNERSHIPS – TO HELP REDUCE THE ANIMAL POPULATION AT THE SHELTER AND REDUCE OVERALL COSTS TO THE GENERAL FUND Item #13D3 RESOLUTION 2024-11: THE REMOVAL OF UNCOLLECTABLE ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLES IN THE AMOUNT OF $45,711 FROM THE FINANCIAL RECORDS OF THE COLLIER COUNTY DOMESTIC ANIMAL SERVICES DIVISION IN ACCORDANCE WITH RESOLUTION NO. 2006- 252, MAKE A DETERMINATION THIS ADJUSTMENT IS IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE COUNTY, AND AUTHORIZE THE CHAIRMAN TO EXECUTE THE ATTACHED RESOLUTION Item #16D4 THE CURRENT COLLIER COUNTY SHERIFF’S INMATE PROGRAM AT DOMESTIC ANIMAL SERVICES THAT INCLUDES THE INMATE PROGRAM, COURT ORDERED WEEKEND WORKER’S PROGRAM, AND COURT ORDERED COMMUNITY SERVICE PROGRAM – THEY PREFORM SERVICES SUCH AS CLEANING THE LIVESTOCK/BARN AND OTHER ANIMAL AREAS, SUCH AS KENNELS HELPING TO FREE UP SPECIALISTS TO FOCUS ON ADOPTIONS AND OTHER ANIMAL CARE FUNCTIONS January 23, 2024 Page 193 Item #16D5 RESOLUTION 2024-12: A RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE TEMPORARY CLOSING OF A PORTION OF STATE ROAD 29 AND DETERMINING THAT THE CLOSURE IS NECESSARY FOR THE COLLIER COUNTY MUSEUMS’ ANNUAL IMMOKALEE CATTLE DRIVE & JAMBOREE ON MARCH 9, 2024, TO FULFILL A FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (FDOT) TEMPORARY ROAD CLOSURE PERMIT APPLICATION REQUIREMENT Item #16D6 THE SUBMITTAL OF THREE (3) ELECTRONIC LIEN AND TITLE SATISFACTIONS WITH THE STATE OF FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF HIGHWAY SAFETY AND MOTOR VEHICLES FOR THE STATE HOUSING INITIATIVES PARTNERSHIP DEMOLITION AND REPLACEMENT OF MANUFACTURED HOME PROGRAM (SHIP GRANT FUND 1053) – ENCOURAGING THE REVITALIZATION AND INCREASE THE SUPPLY OF SAFE, DECENT, AND SANITARY HOUSING Item #16D7 THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN ONE (1) MORTGAGE SATISFACTION FOLLOWING FULL PRINCIPAL PAYMENT OF $320,000 AND WAIVE ANY UNPAID INTEREST OWED STAFF BELIEVES THE BOARD ‘S INTENT WAS TO FORGIVE THE ENTIRE LOAN SINCE THE REPAYMENT WAS RECEIVED BY THE MARCH 9, 2021, BCC MEETING January 23, 2024 Page 194 Item #16D8 THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN TWO (2) RAPID RE-HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS PREVENTION PROGRAM LANDLORD PAYMENT AGREEMENTS BETWEEN COLLIER COUNTY AND (1) SAMEER PODDAR AND (2) SPRINGHURST PROPERTIES, LLC, TO PROVIDE GRANT-FUNDED RENTAL ASSISTANCE TO INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES WHO MAY BE IMPACTED BY HURRICANE IAN AND WHO MAY ALSO BE HOMELESS OR AT RISK OF HOMELESSNESS IN COLLIER COUNTY Item #16D9 AFTER-THE-FACT APPROVAL FOR THE ADOPTION FEES WAIVED BY THE DIVISION DIRECTOR OF DOMESTIC ANIMAL SERVICES FOR THE PERIOD OF AUGUST 30, 2021, THROUGH DECEMBER 31, 2023, IN THE AMOUNT OF $57,730, THAT WERE NOT IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROCEDURES SET FORTH IN RESOLUTION NO. 2018-106 Item #16F1 THE CHAIR TO EXECUTE TWENTY-ONE (21) DEED CERTIFICATES FOR PURCHASED BURIAL RIGHTS AT LAKE TRAFFORD MEMORIAL GARDENS CEMETERY AND AUTHORIZE THE COUNTY MANAGER OR DESIGNEE TO TAKE ALL ACTIONS NECESSARY TO RECORD THE DEED CERTIFICATES WITH THE CLERK OF THE COURT’S RECORDING DEPARTMENT January 23, 2024 Page 195 Item #16F2 THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN THE REVISED MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE FLORIDA DIVISION OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT OFFERED TO THE COUNTY TO ACCEPT AND HOUSE A 250-KILOWATT TOWABLE GENERATOR FOR SHARED USE – SUPPORTING NURSING HOMES, SKILLED NURSING, ASSISTED LIVING AND OTHER EXTENDED CARE FACILITIES, MEDICAL FACILITIES, CONGREGATE, NON-CONGREGATE SHELTERS, AND OTHER ESSENTIAL FACILITIES Item #16F3 RESOLUTION 2024-13: A RESOLUTION APPROVING AMENDMENTS (APPROPRIATING GRANTS, DONATIONS, CONTRIBUTIONS, OR INSURANCE PROCEEDS) TO THE FISCAL YEAR 2023-24 ADOPTED BUDGET. (THE BUDGET AMENDMENTS IN THE ATTACHED RESOLUTION HAVE BEEN REVIEWED AND APPROVED BY THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS VIA SEPARATE EXECUTIVE SUMMARIES) Item #16F4 CHANGE ORDER NO. 1, ADDING 16 DAYS AND UTILIZING $47,484 OF THE OWNER’S ALLOWANCE FOR PURCHASE ORDER NO. 4500223994 UNDER AGREEMENT NO. 19-7539 WITH ADVANCED ROOFING, INC., THE “CCSO JAIL (BUILDING J2) ROOF REPLACEMENT” PROJECT, FOR January 23, 2024 Page 196 ROOFING REPLACEMENT AT THE COLLIER COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE JAIL (BUILDING J2), AND AUTHORIZE THE CHAIRMAN TO SIGN THE ATTACHED CHANGE ORDER. (PROJECT NO. 50229) – MAKING THE REVISED DATE JANUARY 14, 2024 Item #16H1 TO APPEAL THE HEARING EXAMINER’S DECISION IN HEARING EXAMINER DECISION NO. 2024-05, GRANTING A VARIANCE FROM LDC 5.05.09.G.2, WHICH REQUIRES THE BASE OF A COMMUNICATIONS TOWER TO BE SET BACK FROM THE PROPERTY LINE BY A DISTANCE OF TWO AND ONE-HALF TIMES THE HEIGHT OF THE TOWER, TO REDUCE THE SETBACKS FROM 375 FEET TO 72 FEET ON THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN PROPERTY LINES AND 375 FEET TO 220.7 FEET ON THE EASTERN PROPERTY LINE, FOR PROPERTY LOCATED AT 2560 39TH ST. SW, ALSO KNOWN AS GOLDEN GATE ESTATES UNIT 28 NORTH 150 FEET OF TRACT 144, IN SECTION 26, TOWNSHIP 49 SOUTH, RANGE 26 EAST, COLLIER COUNTY, FLORIDA (PETITION NO. PL20220003012) Item #16J1 TO RECORD IN THE MINUTES OF THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, THE CHECK NUMBER (OR OTHER PAYMENT METHOD), AMOUNT, PAYEE, AND PURPOSE FOR WHICH THE REFERENCED DISBURSEMENTS IN THE AMOUNT OF $84,002,773.75 WERE DRAWN FOR THE PERIODS BETWEEN DECEMBER 28, 2023, AND JANUARY 10, January 23, 2024 Page 197 2024, PURSUANT TO FLORIDA STATUTE 136.06 Item #16J2 REQUEST THAT THE BOARD APPROVE AND DETERMINE VALID PUBLIC PURPOSE FOR INVOICES PAYABLE AND PURCHASING CARD TRANSACTIONS AS OF JANUARY 17, 2024 Item #16K1 RESOLUTION 2024-14: TO REAPPOINT TWO (2) MEMBERS TO THE COLLIER COUNTY CODE ENFORCEMENT BOARD - REAPPOINTING ROBERT KAUFMAN AND JOHN FUENTES BOTH W/TERMS EXPIRING ON FEBRUARY 14, 2027 Item #16K2 RESOLUTION 2024-15: TO REAPPOINT TWO (2) MEMBERS TO THE LAND ACQUISITION ADVISORY COMMITTEE – REAPPOINTING GARY BROMLEY AND KARYN ALLMAN BOTH W/TERMS EXPIRING ON FEBRUARY 11, 2027 Item #16K3 RESOLUTION 2024-16: TO APPOINT THREE (3) MEMBERS TO THE PARKS AND RECREATION ADVISORY BOARD – APPOINTING ERIC KELLY W/TERM EXPIRING ON DECEMBER 31, 2025, AND REAPPOINTING REBECCA GIBSON-LAEMEL AND JOSHUA FRUTH BOTH W/TERMS EXPIRING ON DECEMBER 31, 2027 January 23, 2024 Page 198 Item #16K4 AN INSURANCE SETTLEMENT WHEREBY THE COUNTY WILL RECEIVE $10,000 TO SETTLE AND RELEASE ITS CLAIM AGAINST JAMES FORTUNATO FOR COSTS INCURRED TO REPAIR BRIDGE DAMAGE, AND TO AUTHORIZE THE COUNTY MANAGER OR DESIGNEE TO EXECUTE THE RELEASE – FROM A VEHICLE INCIDENT THAT OCCURRED ON NOVEMBER 10, 2020 Item #16L1 TO TERMINATE FOR CONVENIENCE AGREEMENT NO. 23- 8144 FOR “HOLIDAY LIGHTS AND DECORATION RENTAL AND INSTALLATION SERVICES” WITH LIGHT ‘ER UP LLC – DUE TO INVENTORY DAMAGE AND STAFFING ISSUES Item #17A RESOLUTION 2024-17: A RESOLUTION APPROVING AMENDMENTS (APPROPRIATING CARRY FORWARD, TRANSFERS, AND SUPPLEMENTAL REVENUE) TO THE FY23-24 ADOPTED BUDGET. (THE BUDGET AMENDMENTS IN THE ATTACHED RESOLUTION HAVE BEEN REVIEWED AND APPROVED BY THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS VIA SEPARATE EXECUTIVE SUMMARIES) Item #17B AN ORDINANCE AMENDING THE COLLIER COUNTY LAND January 23, 2024 Page 199 DEVELOPMENT CODE, TO UPDATE THE PROVISIONS RELATED TO WIRELESS COMMUNICATION FACILITIES. [PL20230013966] (FIRST OF TWO HEARINGS) ITEM #17C ORDINANCE 2024-02: THE BOARD APPROVE A PROPOSED ORDINANCE MODIFICATION TO COLLIER COUNTY ORDINANCE NO. 2006-56, THE ROCK ROAD IMPROVEMENT MUNICIPAL SERVICE TAXING UNIT (MSTU), TO REESTABLISH AN ADVISORY COMMITTEE TO PROVIDE INPUT TO THE COUNTY ON MATTERS RELATED TO THE MSTU. (DISTRICT 3) January 23, 2024 There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of the Chair at 7:5 5 p.m. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS BOARD OF ZONING APPEALS/EX OFFICIO GOVERNING BOARD(S) OF SPECIAL DISTRICTS UNDER ITS CONTROL CHRI ALL, CHAI AN ATTEST . n�, CRYSTAL K. TEL, CLERK •`-AttestastoC` r, These minute's.apii oved by the Board on -g- d.Oat as presented 1,/ or as corrected TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF FORT MYERS COURT REPORTING BY TERRI L. LEWIS, REGISTERED PROFESSIONAL COURT REPORTER, FPR-C, AND NOTARY PUBLIC. Page 224