The Dunedin City Commission met on July 3, 2025, at 6:00 PM at City Hall. The meeting included a special presentation from Sheriff Gualtieri regarding a $600,000 scam that victimized the city, citizen testimony on the Weybridge bridge closure, approvals of repair and inspection contracts, and a discussion of upcoming agenda items. The meeting adjourned at 7:44 PM.
City Manager Response: The bridge was closed due to golf cart damage that made it structurally unsafe. Staff will investigate illegal crossing. Design for repair or replacement is scheduled for FY2027 and construction for FY2028. The city is working with the condo association on an easement for public access on the Curlew Trails side. Underneath the bridge are a 2-inch wastewater force main and a 6-inch water main that would need to be moved. The timeline may be discussed during budget talks.
Good evening and welcome to the July 3rd, 2025 City Commission meeting. I'm going to call the meeting to order, and we're going to start with invocation and pledge of allegiance, our City Attorney Tin. Let us begin this meeting by taking a brief moment of silence and reflection as we enter this holiday weekend in celebration of our independence. Amen. Okay. And uh I'm going to turn this over to the city manager to actually introduce him and why he's here. Thank you very much, Mayor. Vice Mayor and Commissioners, uh, good evening. The um, as as all of you know, and I'm sure many many members of our general public know, we were the victims of a crime, actually two crimes, two thefts, over the past year. Um it has been uh uh mentioned quite a bit on social media and in the newspaper as well. Uh we uh put out a statement saying we had no comment. It's an ongoing investigation and being prepared tonight for our first public meeting uh since a lot of this occurred. Um I reached out to the sheriff this this afternoon to ascertain what it is I could say and should not say in a public forum. And uh thankfully, gratefully for me, the sheriff offered to come this evening to address the commission uh and our residents himself uh to give you the details that uh he would know much more than I that he can give regarding the theft uh and what happened. And then thereafter, Mayor, I'd like to uh circle back and talk to you a little bit about what we put in place uh uh since then to ensure this does not happen again. Thank you, Mayor. Sheriff Galtieri. Thank you, Sheriff, for being here. Good evening, everybody. So uh it and just a simplified. I'm gonna give you a brief overview and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. But in the simplest form, the city was the victim of a scam, uh, something we see unfortunately all the time. And you know, just questions have come up about this. There is absolutely zero indication at all, and this is a very extensive investigation over the last year. Of course, this happened in June of 2024. Uh we recently made an arresting case, but there's absolutely zero indication that there's anybody uh within the city or anybody on the quote inside that had absolutely anything to do with this. This happens when people are able to, through the dark web uh and through uh a variety of other ways, get access to people's emails to get access to the content of communications, find out who's doing business with others, and there's all kinds of ways they do this, especially through the dark web. And this started because you all have uh a business relationship or had I don't know if you still do, I assume you do, with this paving company. And one of your city employees uh received a communication, an email asking that you change how you do business with this paving company and how you'd always done business with this paving company is you provide them old school with a paper check. And they said, Oh no, we don't want to do that anymore. We now want an electronic fund transfer. And the employees said, because it's common these days, sure, and so cut to the chase of it. They set that up and put that in place. Um they used to communicate with us, the scammer used to communicate with us, is email addresses that were fraudulent. But at first glance, nobody would even pick out that they were fraudulent because they were very simply juxtaposing uh letters uh within those legit emails. So, as an example, when the scammer was communicating and uh sending to the paving company uh what was purported to be a communication from a city employee at that time, and I think the city manager will uh talk about how changes have been made in that. But the uh Dunneaton City email domain domain name was Dunneiden FL.net. Well, they used Dunedin LF.net. So unless somebody's really paying attention to that, nobody would. You're not gonna see that. So um all these communications went back and forth. And what happened, uh, and it was about six hundred thousand dollars plus that was due, and they sent them uh bank account number at Bank of America and a routing number. And so the city uh what did the electronic fund transfer and transferred it to this Bank of America account number and routing number. Well, even the scammers sometimes uh mess up and they get it wrong. Well, they didn't use the right, and I put that in quotes because it's all wrong. They didn't use the right uh routing number and account number. They used a rowdy number and an account number of some guy by the name of George Barlow, uh, who lived uh until we arrested him and dragged his uh tail end back here uh out in Utah. And George Barlow uh thought he won the lottery, but the problem is he didn't buy a lottery ticket. And the $600,000 of the city's money ended up in George Barlow's uh bank account out in Utah, and he took all that money and began to spend it. Uh he bought a $70,000 truck that he ran into a ditch, and uh he bought just all kinds of stuff with it.