Okay.

Good morning.

Welcome to the September 2nd, 2025 City Commissioner Workshop.

We're going to call the meeting to order.

We're going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance by Jen, our city attorney.

I pledge allegiance.

Okay, we do not have any presentations today, so we're gonna go to Citizen Input.

Does anyone in the audience wish to speak on a topic that is not on the agenda?

Okay, seeing no one, we're gonna push through, and we're gonna go to our workshop items.

And the first one is 2025 City of Dunedin Business Survey Results, and I will turn it over to Nicole.

Good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Commissioners, Nicole Delfino, Strategy and Sustainability Manager here with Dr.

Neely, who is joining us by Zoom to present the 2025 uh business survey.

So I'm gonna take you through the first uh few slides here.

Uh we'll talk about a little bit about logistics, our communication plan, our survey results, um, and then recommendations.

I saw I saw his name pop up.

There he is.

Um, of course, uh, you all are familiar by now with Dr.

Neely, uh, a renowned uh survey uh researcher that will be presenting uh the results here today on the business survey.

He also conducted both our employee survey and our citizen survey.

As far as logistics goes, uh the survey was opened on April 21st.

It stayed open until May 8th.

Uh it had about 37 questions and six demographic questions.

Uh again, there was some uh duplicative language from years past so that we had a good comparison year over year.

And then as far as our response rate goes, uh we did see quite an increase from 2023 to 25, up to 279 responses.

And then for the communication plan, this was uh handled internally uh with staff.

Uh it include graphics like the graphic you see here, and rack rack cards and flyers, uh, a direct email campaign, uh not only through the Dunedin News, uh, but also to our business tax receipt, uh lit this uh distribution list.

Uh we also had social media posting, and then I'm calling Boots on the Ground, we'll talk about in one moment.

Uh here's just a look at some of our social media posting.

It was also shared by the chamber as well as made the uh Dunedin beacon.

As far as boots on the ground goes, um, those rack cards or those postcards that you saw, I engaged staff uh to walk around uh many areas of our our of our of our city um to hand out uh directly hand out both postcards to businesses.

So we went along Broadway, we had all the stars indicate all the plazas and the businesses that we hit um all along 580, the Walmart Plaza, the Lake Haven Plaza, the Wind Dixie Plaza, the Publix Plaza, um, along Patricia, all the areas across from the bowling alley, and then adjacent the bowling alley, um, along Douglas, of course, the causeway, uh also along Bay Shore, north of MLK.

Uh, we went into the industrial areas there uh to get their feedback, and then also Pinehurst, and then of course, we recruited Trevor Davis to impact or hand them all out in downtown.

So, Dr.

Neely, are you there?

I am.

Perfect.

So I don't know if you want to give any introduction or you want me to just jump right into the first slide, which is on the key themes.

So on queue, I'd like to give a couple of caveats as we get started, but if I could.

This is a unique project for me.

I always always love the opportunity to work with Dunedin, appreciate how seriously you take your survey, your community and business surveys.

This was a unique one for me.

It's a little different than what we've done together in the past.

And so it took a little time to adjust to the nature of the survey, the number of open-ended comments that are available.

So you'll see some of how we address that in the report.

Um, and hopefully should have a list of all the open-ended responses.

But I want to note that you know, with that 279 responses, it's a nice jump in growth.

Um, Nicole and her team did a lot of work to get that growth.

But I want to I want to make sure I emphasize that not all 279 respondents completed the entire survey.

Um, as a from a research perspective, once you get into asking people for a lot of open-ended feedback, there are some ethical concerns then with cutting their responses if they don't answer every question.

Um, because they did provide you know personal feedback in a way that goes beyond answering a couple multiple choices and then quitting.

So there's varying levels of completeness to the responses, and I just want to emphasize that because you're gonna see in the report at some places that instead of listing a percentage, I listed the number who gave an answer.

I wanted to give you a kind of proportionate representation of the responses without um without implying that all 279 people intended to answer the question.

I hope that makes sense.

If there if there are questions on that, please let me know.

Um I also want to emphasize I know we're gonna talk about a bunch of numbers, and sometimes these presentations we throw a whole bunch of numbers at you and it can be dizzying.

So what I'd like to do is tell you the big story up front, and then we can talk about some of the numbers that support that story.

Um the big story is that much like your citizen survey, your business community loves Dunedin, and what they love about Dunedin is that it's Dunedin.

Um the uniqueness of the community, the charm, the walkability and charm of the downtown, the festivals and events, the the sense of safety and belonging they have there, those are the things that stand out.

Um I see a business community here that is not opposed to growth, but wary of the impacts that growth will have on those things that make Dunedin unique.

And what I see them asking for a lot in the comments is um not to not to not for the city not to grow, but for the city to grow intentionally in a way that is geared toward maintaining those things that make Dunedin unique and special.