Good evening.

At this time, we're going to go ahead and get started with this regular commission meeting for Monday, August 4th, 2025.

And if I can please have the city clerk call the rule.

Commissioner Villasquez.

Present.

Commissioner Callwell.

Commissioner Howington?

Yeah.

Commissioner Lulley.

President.

Vice Mayor Harriet.

Here.

All

right.

At this time, I will turn it over to Vice Mayor Harriet so he can do the invocation pledge.

All right, we'll start with the pledge, and then I'll ask Commissioner King to come up and do the invitation.

And

to the republic

for which it stands.

If everybody would stay standing, we'll

just request to speak and I'll turn it on.

The button on the right hand side.

Let's pray.

Father God, we come before you this evening.

We ask your blessings upon this meeting.

We ask that the business that is discussed here will be favorable to you.

And all that come into this city and out of this city.

Thank you for your blessings.

Thank you for your help.

Above all gods.

And we thank you and we praise you.

And we ask this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

So we have additions and deletions.

We're gonna go to presentations, rewards, and reports.

Uh 5A presentation from Volusia County Stand Down 2026 Veterans Event.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, commissioners, mayor, vice mayor.

My name is Scott Olsen, and I am the Veterans Services Director for Volusia County.

And I would like to thank everybody for their time this evening and thank everybody for taking the time to hear our request to host our veterans annual stand down at the center in Deltona in 2026.

So just a little bit about our veteran population here in Volusia County.

Volusia County County currently has over 50,000 veterans that reside here.

There's an estimated 8,000 plus veterans in the Greater Del Tona area.

We opened up a veteran services office in July of 2023.

And since then, I'm happy to announce and let everybody know that we've served almost 6,000 veterans out of that office.

The veteran population is continuing to grow here in the state of Florida.

Florida is becoming the second largest veteran populated state.

We have slowly surpassed California, so it goes Texas, Florida, and then the state of California.

So as the uh veteran population continues to grow here in the state, it'll continue to grow here in Volusia County and in the city of Deltona.

So a little bit about our event.

The stand down event, we gather several different resources to one location to assist the veteran community.

The primary mission of the stand down is to provide essential services to homeless veterans and veterans that are at risk of becoming homeless.

The secondary mission of the stand down is to foster community and camaraderie in the veteran community by providing them a place to gather, connect, share stories, and access vital resources that they're entitled to because of their sacrifices during their military service.

So there's a few different ways the community can get involved.

They could purchase a sponsorship, they can make a donation for the next stand down.

Our website is uh linked there through that QR code.

We also ask you know the community to get involved by um helping out volunteering for the event.

We reach out to local businesses and ask them to donate uh meals so that way we could feed veterans during the event, and we're always looking for community members and organizations to help with the transport of veterans who can't make it because they don't have transportation to the stand down.

So some of our key highlights and successes from the event that happened earlier this year at the Ocean Center is we had 55 different resources on site that were able to assist our veterans.

We had 21 volunteers.

We had 668 veterans sign into the event between the two days.