Good afternoon, everyone.

We're gonna get started.

Let me introduce you to our OESBD director, Maribel Feliciano.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Woo!

Welcome.

It's great to be in person, right?

Yeah, we've done a few of the workshops virtual, a few in person, but we love in person.

So I want to thank all of you for being here today.

It is my first surtax workshop as the director.

So we're really excited to have you here.

We have some great information that we want to share with all of you.

First, I want to start with saying we have funding.

Let me say that again.

We have funding that is dedicated to CERTAX transportation infrastructure for the next 23 plus years.

Many of you have already been part of projects, either as primes or CBEs.

And it's not every day that you can say there is a dedicated source of funding for projects.

So we're really fortunate in Broward County that we have the commitment of our residents of our county commission, our municipalities to continue to advance the mobility investment program in Broward.

But not only that, because we know that on its own results in job creation results in economic impact.

We have also made a commitment to hire our local small businesses.

And that's really important, right?

90% of Broward County businesses are small, 20 employees or less.

That's 90%.

So we want to make sure, and our county commission and our municipalities want to make sure that we continue to support our local businesses in Broward.

And today you're going to learn from many of the cities that are working with the county to continue to advance these investments and these transportation projects.

And they have been very successful working with our local primes, our large companies.

Some of them are national companies, some of them are state companies that are here in the state, in other counties, or in Broward County, that are hiring our local certified small businesses to be part of the team.

And another success story that I love sharing is sometimes our local small businesses are participating as primes on some of these contracts and being successful.

One really good example is we just did the ribbon cutting and grand opening of the convention center expansion and the connector bypass road.

And the prime for that project was the Broward County Certified Small Business, and two of the subs were Broward County Certified Small Businesses.

So we have many success stories to share how our large companies are working successfully with our local small businesses to advance these projects to advance economic development in Broward County.

So again, we're really proud of the work that we're doing in collaboration with the SERTAX team, in collaboration with all the municipalities in Broward and many of our community partners.

So I want to welcome all of you.

We want you to take this opportunity to learn about the upcoming projects, but also to network with the people that are here today.

Okay.

So these are my certified small businesses.

Many of these projects, Certex projects have 30% goals.

Some of them may have higher goals, some of them may have lower goals.

But these are my certified small businesses.

So I want all my certified small businesses to connect with the other businesses that are here today at the end of the program as part of the networking, because this is

what

economic development is all about, right?

We want to make sure we're all successful working together to advance not only our projects, but also hiring locally and supporting our local economy.

And with that, I would like to pass the next part of the program to the Mobility Advancement Program Administrator, and that's Gretchen Cassini.

Gretcha.

Thank you so much, Maribel.

What an incredible turnout.

And I see a lot of familiar faces, people that I've had a chance to meet with and work with over the last uh eight or nine years.

And as Mirabel mentioned, one of the most exciting aspects of this program, it's the gift that this community gave itself, is to have a local dedicated source of revenue that we can utilize to generate economic mobility in Broward County.

Many of you already know the story of this transportation surtax program.

And Maribel covered the fact that our county commission had the wisdom to even before the program started.

So before we even put something on the ballot, the county commission back in 2018 said, if we're going to do this, we're going to keep these revenues local.

We're going to generate revenue and keep it here in our economy and build our local businesses.

So that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Right now, we have Surtax funded projects in our public works and environmental services department in Broward County Transit.

You're going to hear from those folks just in a little bit.

And we have now have 30 of our 31 municipalities participating.

And you're going to be hearing from a couple of those folks also.

These are the main goals of the 30-year program.

So as you can see, goal five economic development and benefits.