This time we'll call the order, January fifteenth, twenty twenty-five meeting of the Clearwater City Council.

This time we'll move to item uh two on the agenda, and tonight I'd like to call forward Father Bob Swift from Saint Francis of the CC.

To listen to understanding the good will.

And to speak with charity and restraint.

Remind them always that they are stewards of your authority.

And Father, we ask that you renew within these good people the strength of your presence and the joy of helping to build a community truly worthy of your the human person.

And dear Lord, help us all to better understand that the common good isn't measured merely by material social well-being, but more deeply by the measure of your chair, our charity to those in need.

And kindness to all of our neighbors.

We ask all this in your name, Father.

Amen.

Thank you, Father.

Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America.

Before we continue further into our meeting agenda, I'd like to introduce our gayest tonight.

To my far left is our deputy city clerk, Nicole Sprague.

To her right is our city clerk, Rosemary Cole.

Good evening.

To her right is our city attorney David Margolis.

Good evening.

To his right is Councilmember Ryan Cotton.

Hello.

To his right is Councilmember Mike Manino.

Good evening.

To my right is Councilmember David Albright.

Good evening.

To his right is Vice Mayor Tcherham.

Good evening.

To her right is the city manager Jennifer Porrio.

Good evening.

To her right is Assistant City Manager Dan Slaughter.

And to his right is Assistant City Manager Al Battle.

That will move to item 4.1 on the agenda.

And I'd like to call forward the reigning city of Clearwater Employee of the Month.

And Kelsey Johnson from the Parks and Recreation Department to give us a report on the volunteer program and a recap of the activities in 2025.

Sam.

Thank you for the shout out there, Mayor.

And it's an honor to be employee of the month this month.

My name is Kelsey Johnson.

I'm the volunteer specialist here with the City of Clearwater's Parks and Rec department.

And I'm here to present to you our fiscal year 2025 recap.

This is going to be an overview because volunteers do a lot in the city.

Okay.

So first up, we'll just take a little look at the overall numbers.

In 2025, we engaged 4,630 volunteers.

That's overall, not unique volunteers.

These volunteers gave to the city 14,879.15 hours.

Volunteers do a lot in the city, and we'll show you that throughout the presentation.

But one of the things that they do is collect litter from our parks, streets, trails, and beaches during volunteer litter cleanups.

In the year 2025, they cleaned up 63,455.14 pounds of litter.

That's equivalent to a 31.73 tons.

And that does include the post-storm cleanups.

To give a simple calculation of the value that volunteers provide to the city, we'll just take the amount of hours that they gave by a simple wage of 16 an hour.

And that is equal to 238,066 and 40 cents.

Of course, if you try to quantify the spirit that they bring, that's just priceless.

Volunteers cultivate a culture of service, civic engagement, environmental stewardship, and community within the city of Clearwater.

A couple of other quick stats here.

The events with the greatest number of volunteers in hours in 2025 were the big cleanup clearwater with 776 volunteers over the course of one week.

Alright, now for the fun part I'm going to take you through, you're gonna get to look at these pretty pictures while I talk to you about what volunteers do in the city of Clearwater.

Volunteers participated in important environmental and beautification projects throughout the city in 2025.

You'll see here a variety of those kinds of projects from volunteers collecting recyclable items at the Sea Blues Festival in that uh top left corner there to adopt um program cleanups, um invasive plant removals, weeding, gardening, um, volunteers, even clean stickers and graffiti from the fixtures along the beach.