This time we'll call to order the May 18, 2026 meeting of the City of Clearwater Community Redevelopment Agency.

Move to item two point one of the agenda.

Approved the minutes at the April 20, 2026 CRA meeting.

Is there a motion to approve the minutes?

So moved.

Second.

Who's in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Unanimous.

Move to agenda item three.

Citizens to be heard regarding items not on today's CRA agenda.

So anyone to be heard on a uh CRA item that is not on today's agenda.

See none, we'll move to item 4.1.

Good afternoon.

Hey, Susanito, CRA executive director.

I'm going to introduce you to Miss Tasha Hadley, our CRA specialist to present this item.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Tasha Hatley, CRE specialist.

And today I'm pleased to recognize Downtown Pizza Bar and Grill as our 2026 business spotlight winner.

Located at 42A Cleveland Street in downtown Clearwater.

This restaurant is a popular destination for food, entertainment, and community gatherings within the district.

Co-owner Dan Mahoney acquired the restaurant in late 2024 and continues to bring new energy to the downtown Clearwater Clearwater dining scene.

This restaurant provides residents and visitors with a welcoming place together before and after events.

Throughout the week, guests can enjoy entertainment nights featuring music bingo, trivia, karaoke, and helping create a lively atmosphere on the Cleveland Street corridor.

A concert series alongside neighborhood neighboring businesses bringing live music to the 400 block.com.

Hi, my name is Dan Mahoney.

I'm the uh one of the co-owners and the manager of Downtown Pizza Sports Bar and Grill, which we acquired in November of 2024.

People feel comfortable coming to a concert, have a beer, watch a sports event, get ready to go to the sound.

We have trivia here on Wednesday night, karaoke on Thursday, music bingo on Tuesday, four merchants here on the street assembled Hello Cleveland Street concerts, which we've done quite successfully since January.

We've had about 10 of them located right outside across the street.

We think that those events are gonna really help foster a sense of community here.

They've been a lot of fun.

We are best known for our pizza.

It's a New York style thin crust pizza, which is really delicious.

Chicken wings, shrimp scampi, the chicken marsala, chicken picata, eggplant parmesan.

We really take a lot of time and care in preparing all the items that we serve.

We're open uh daily during the week from 11 o'clock till 10 at night, and then on the weekends on Friday and Saturday, or if there's a big sound or Capitol Theater concert, we'll go till 12 o'clock, sometimes beyond that.

Thanks.

Congratulations, Dan.

Thank you.

Um just leave the room.

Let's talk about it.

In three, two, one.

Three, two, one.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Congratulations, Dan.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Congratulations, Dan.

We hope uh downtown pizza continues to be as popular as it is today.

It's all already very popular.

Like say a word or two.

Yeah, I'll just uh quickly say it's been a pleasure to be a part of the downtown community, and I'm uh as was previously just stated, uh, trying to do my part to be making it as much of a destination as possible, and I can see the livelihood increasing uh you know daily monthly.

So I think it's it always is a team effort.

Um players pleased to be part of that team.

Thanks.

Thank you, move to the agenda item 4.2 downtown revitalization.

This is your particular item to discuss any items you wish to discuss, not on the agenda.

Okay.

Anyone can trustee have anything to discuss.

Go ahead.

Councilman Ronito.

Mayor, thank you.

I think uh we have some pretty big discussions coming up here relatively shortly in a week or so, so I don't want to uh beat this one up, but I know we're all very excited in Hopeville for the direction uh that we're going in our our downtown and the activation, uh not just on our county properties, but our uh city properties as well as um our downtown collaborating partners that are really uh activating downtown and the energy from the brand and consultants that we're here uh really tells uh tells that story and helps us tell it.

So exciting.

Thank you.

All right.

Move to item agenda item 4.3.

Mr.

Battle.

Sure, Mr.

Mayor and members of the council and they're on a day as we're going to defer this item, which is uh the results of the valuation committee results for uh property on um South MLK until June.

So just to ask if we uh can move that this item and we'll bring it back at that time.

Okay.

Any objection?

If not, then we'll move to uh item 5.4 CRA director's report for May 2026.

We can get the report up on the screen, please.

Thank you again.

Hey, Susan, do you know CRA director for the record?

Uh today's report is pretty exciting compared to uh the rest of the items you heard from the DB and earlier.

So this is for the director's report for May of 2026.

So we'll give you updates and for you for the public for downtown CRA updates, North Greenwood CRA updates, and property disposition updates.

So as far as for the downtown, we're excited to inform all of you in the public that Emily's family restaurant does have new ownership.

Mr.

Nicholas Pestis, if you haven't met him, I would encourage you to go say hello to him.

So from what I understand, he has plans to improve the visual aesthetics of the restaurant that's been there historically for many, many years and decades probably.

But staff has been in communication with them and to see what kind of assistance we can provide them, any type of grants we may have, or just general city assistance, just to have that business friendly atmosphere towards him.

For the Aceola Garage Parking Garage, it's going to be our next item for our May 28th for our May 26, 2026 community outreach meeting right here at the library chambers.

So for the community out there, this meeting will take place from 3 p.m.

to 4 p.m.

right here in the council chambers.

You're invited.

We also have city staff that's going to be there from Economic Development and Housing and Public Works to answer any questions.

These meetings do, they're starting to get more and more attendance from the community, so we really appreciate that.

That means that our staff is spreading the word more and more.

Staff is continuing to work diligently to move this item forward.

We do have two staff members, one from Amber from Arts and Culture, and one of our CRA staff members.

They're going to be traveling up to Philadelphia this week for the annual meeting for the 2026 American Alliance of Museums Conference.

So they're already actively trying to book individuals to just to interview or talk to to see if they have any interest in coming to Clearwater.

So hopefully they come back with a lot of information and a lot of good leads.

So for downtown engagement, we're starting to ramp up our efforts and as far as our community engagement.

And I'm using that word intentionally, community, because that means more than just the merchants.

It means pretty much anyone that resides, does business, or is in our downtown.

So we're staff conducted 26 engagements recently.

This was with merchants.

This one is a small little win, but we have been kind of working on this for a while.

This kind of started all because of the 40500 block Cleveland Street Activation Initiative.

So it kind of spread a little bit further than those two blocks.

So this is the installation of bicycle racks for the community to use from the 400 block all the way to the 700 block.

In addition, we also had some installed at the Mercado Park.

This is some of the projects that are coming, at least being advertised for our downtown.

I'm not going to get into a lot of detail, but this one has been out there in the media a lot, so I decided to share here as well.

This is for the $50 million entertainment destination plan for Clearwater or the Evo Entertainment.

And this is, and I also wanted to also highlight that there is demolition underway at the future site at the 700 block of Cleveland Street.

In addition to this, as you've already aware, there's demolition permits that will be improved for the 600 block of Cleveland Street.

Also, the Good Life Showroom opens at 331 Cleveland Street.

So if you need more information for the community out there watching, you can always go to the Cleveland StreetAlliance.com website to obtain additional information.

For North Greenwood, the update is that North Greenwood, the North Ford Elementary School, the roof wrap is already installed, so that'll prevent any additional leakage as far as from rainwater.

I apologize if this mic isn't completely up here.

I moved it around too much.

So we've already put the wrap up installed it over the elementary school, so that'll prevent any additional rain leaking into the building and causing any further damage.

So staff is also planning to do some type of community event out there.

I'm not sure if Mr.

Batter would like to say anything about that, but night at North Ward or whatever name we come up with.

So we're starting to plan that internally with Parks and Rec planning, economic development and housing.

Mr.

Battle's office and the lead will be Miss Audra Aha with Economic Development in partnership with the CRA staff.

And we'll bring you more details on that community event once we're kind of it's fully vetted out.

Did you want to add anything to that, Mr.

Battle?

You good to go?

Okay.

This is a little bit more statistics of what we're doing.

We're still in the pre-marketing phase, so staff is continuing to meet with individuals that might be interested in submitting a proposal when that window does open up.

And all the media coverage has just been extraordinary.

Uh Mr.

Battle, Audra, and a few other staff members have been interviewed as far as what we're doing with North Ward in the future.

As far as the North Green Greenwood Community Advisory Committee, we did have the special meeting that occurred to discuss the 706 North Missouri Avenue project, also known as the Armory.

And our next meeting is proposed to be Wednesday, June 3rd from 5 30 to 6 p.m.

at the North Greenwood Recreation Center, room one.

So anyone that's out there watching this, you're invited to attend.

As far as property disposition, as was noted earlier, the property of Washington Avenue and MLK site has been deferred to the next meeting.

And we'll make sure that all the developers are here to answer any questions if you may have them.

Other properties we're moving kind of through the process as far as moving certain properties from city ownership into CRA ownership, and once that's complete, we'll quick quickly start advertising and noticing some of those properties.

Some of the more prominent sites are out there are, for instance, the what we call the creative contractors site located at 618 Drew Street.

There's a lot of interest from developers right now in that particular property.

So once it is transferred over to the CRA, we'll quickly notice that particular property.

In addition, we have the site located at 115 MLK that's currently owned by the CRA.

And once our legal team gets a little bit more caught up, we're going to go ahead and as far as what they're doing with all our properties a lot of work.

It's a big list.

So once they're caught up a little bit, we're going to quickly release a notice of disposition for the 115 MLK property located there in the Prospect Lake District of downtown.

That concludes my presentation.

Open for any questions.

Questions for the director.

Councilman Tim back to the North Ward.

I see that you've um gotten some email email replies, telephone inquiries, some meetings were held, and some maybe two tight site tours.

What was the feedback that you got?

Any anything you'd like to share with us?

So as far as and I do have staff back here, so if you if you wish, you can come up as well.

But as far as some of the the you know, the the feedback we got, this is an extraordinary site, extraordinary building has a lot of potential for us, those individuals is what they're saying to come in here and potentially do something with the building.

Obviously, it is historic.

We would like to kind of preserve it as much as possible.

So that does throw in a little bit of extra cost, but right now we're hearing nothing but great things as far as the potential to redevelop that site.

One of the groups that toured it had significant interest at first, and they came back and told us that the cost to preserve it or for their project is just too expensive based on what they want to do.

So we're hearing excited about it, opportunities, but this particular user had a very specific function, and it would have required them to renovate it to a standard that cost more.

In other words, they wanted to do something that was educational based, not for profit-based, and didn't have necessarily a I would say a profit-driven approach to it, but more of a use potential with respect to the end user, whereas the other users that he's speaking about, most of the interest has been in the private development space for mixed use development in terms of how do you use the existing buildings and what can you build new or how can you build new new product on the site?

So just want to make that clarification because I think that's what you want to know is like what are they telling us in addition to hey, look, we like it, it's great.

Is it gonna be free?

Is it we're gonna have to pay for it?

But those that is kind of a little bit more specific feedback for for you to think about.

Yes, thank you.