The Fort Lauderdale City Commission held a conference meeting on April 15, 2025, at 1:30 PM (with a closed-door session scheduled for 4:30 PM). The agenda included the introduction of a new business intelligence tool (SizeUp FTL), a detailed update on the Fortify Lauderdale stormwater program, commissioner reports, and a subsequent Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) board meeting. Key decisions involved approval of methodology for ranking Phase 2 stormwater projects, consensus on repurposing District 4 park impact fees, and multiple CRA resolutions.
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the City Commission conference meeting this April 15th, 2024. I want to thank you all for being here. I know everyone's excited about being here today. So we have uh a relatively short agenda this afternoon, so uh we might might as well begin now. We'll start with business one. Uh this is an introduction to the size up FTL business tool. So who's gonna be talking to us about that? It's me again. Hello, Daphne. Daphne Sainville, public affairs manager for the city of Fort Lauderdale, uh, mayor, vice mayor, commissioners. I am very pleased to present Size Up FTL, which is a new business intelligent initiative designed to support small business growth and economic development in the city, and this online tool will be available at no cost to the public. Um, here we go. So, because it's a new business development tool, we want to show you a quick video and how it works. Hi, I'm J.R. Charles, Customer Success Manager for Size Up. While we know that any business of any size and any industry can benefit from Size Up, I want to take just a few short minutes to walk you through a use case for local business. I wanted to also say Mr. Charles, um, our representative and the the president's CEO is on a Zoom to talk about if you have any questions after the video. Okay. And who is this gentleman? Mr. J.R. Charles. Okay. Our representative. So it's a pre it's a pre-planned, it's a pre recorded video. I understand that, but can we put on a bigger screen? Ah, okay. Yeah, that's not video for recording. Oh, okay. All righty. Hi, I'm J.R. Charles, Customer Success Manager for Size Up. While we know that any business of any size and any industry can benefit from Size Up, I want to take just a few short minutes to walk you through a use case for a local business that can really benefit from size up's data. Small businesses traditionally don't have access to this type of data. This is usually reserved for Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmart, and larger corporations. But let's look at an example of a small coffee shop that could really benefit from this type of information. Now, I've pre-filled out information in the interest of time, but the results will be the same. Let's take a look at a coffee shop that's making about $2 million. We can see that's a little above average for a typical coffee shop in Fort Lauderdale, but not completely out of bounds. The map will show us the darker areas where coffee shops make between 1.8 to 2 million dollars. And that's what sizeup is going to give you. Specific information about your specific business. Size Up will also give you a trend line of businesses that are opening up here across the nation, state, and metro area. We can even see salaries here, as well as specific salaries for specific positions here in this case, hosts, cooks, and food servers. We can also look at the number of employees that business has. This coffee shop has high revenue, but it's also a big coffee shop. We can see that there are nearly twice as many people at this coffee shop than the regional ones. We can all agree that 20 people is a small business, but this coffee shop is larger than the typical coffee shop in the city. That's gonna result in a cost effectiveness calculation that size up provides to you.