The Fort Lauderdale City Commission held a conference meeting on September 3, 2025, at 1:30 PM in the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. The meeting covered a wide range of topics including a performance audit of fuel consumption, proposed anchoring regulations, the Fortify Lauderdale stormwater management program, updates on the new police headquarters, a special obligation bond for infrastructure, the 2026 meeting calendar, the city attorney search, and a proposed ordinance governing public-private partnerships. Mayor Dean J. Trantalis presided.
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the City Commission conference meeting this September 3rd, 2025. Beautiful sunny afternoon, except when it's raining, but uh anyway, thank you all for being here today. We have a number of important topics to discuss this afternoon. We appreciate your patience in uh the beginning of our meeting. Uh Commissioner Herbst has indicated he'll be late. Uh and so um I waited a few minutes thinking he might arrive, but I guess he'll be a little bit longer. Um, we usually start out our um our meetings with the communications. So uh before uh we'll start with our communications. We'll start with the uh Affordable Housing Advisory Committee. The Charter Review Board, um, Mr. Weiss has indicated that he is going to be a few minutes late coming to this meeting. So if he is not here when we get to that, we'll kind of put put that off until uh he arrives. So starting with the um the affordable housing advisory committee, is there somebody here on the board that's gonna make a presentation? May I I almost I just want to ask staff about this. This almost seems a little bit out of at a step because they are talking about something in April here, but we met with them June 30th and sort of dealt with all these issues that they are asking us to talk about. So what is it so uh Chris? Good afternoon, Mayor Commissioner, Chris Cooper, Assistant City Manager. So the uh Affordable Housing Advisory Committee is just asking for an update on the three items that were the topics of your quarterly meeting with them in June. So we are prepared to share an update with them at their September 8th meeting, I believe, next week, and we will see if they want any follow-up past that. But we'll also be scheduling their next quarterly joint meeting with you uh soon. Okay, so there's really nothing to discuss today. Right. Okay, very good. Thank you. So we'll jump to the next agenda item and wait for Mr. Um uh wise to appear. So why don't we start with CF1 performance audit of fuel consumption and billing? Mr. Riley. Patrick Riley, City Auditor. Good afternoon, honorable mayor, vice, well, not the vice mayor yet, and uh commissioners. The city auditor's office completed a performance audit of fuel consumption and billing. This audit was part of our annual audit plan. This audit represents part two of the fuel operations audit. Part one, which was brought to you back in October, mainly dealt with uh internal evaluations of of the operation. This uh audit really focuses on substantive testing of fuel consumption and billing. The objective was to conduct a detailed examination of the city's fuel operations, which with an emphasis on verifying the accuracy of fuel consumption and fuel billing processes. Within the public works department is the sustainability division, which includes fleet services. They are responsible for the fuel operations and the technology. They have five fueling stations that they provide unlighted and diesel fuel to um the city's personnel. There's approximately 1,970 vehicles and other units. Fleet services uh utilizes two methods to control access to fuel, the canceiver device and the fuel fobs. The canceiver, just real quick, I don't want to get too too far into it, is is a device that's plugged into the vehicles onboard diagnostic port that uh provides information. And the the FOBs also do that uh with uh a different type of uh community electronic communication. In fiscal year 2024, the fleet services dispense approximately 1.3 million gallons of fuel at a cost of approximately four million dollars to the city's departments and other and authorized users. Fleet services rely on two primary systems to manage track fuel and vehicle performance. This is the EJ Ward uh view system and the Samsera software. EJ Ward enables precise control over fuel access by allowing users to set specific restrictions on the fueling asset level. For example, uh restricting the number of times you could fuel in a given day as a control. The Samsera uh provides fleet management with insight into vehicle performance, fuel consumption, idling, route efficiency, and uh driver behavior.