The Gulfport City Council held a regular meeting on July 18, 2023, at 6:00 PM at Gulfport City Hall. The meeting included presentations on utility rates and sidewalk conditions, public comments, reports, consideration of several ordinances and resolutions, and a discussion of the proposed FY2024 budget. All votes were unanimous unless otherwise noted.
All right, welcome everyone to the regular city council meeting for Gulfport, Florida for July 18th, 2023. Our invocation tonight is given by Councilmember April Fannis, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join us in standing. So trees exhale for us so that we can inhale them to stay alive. Can we forget that? Let us love trees with every breath we take until we perish. And that was from Moonia Khan, who's a U.S. poet. And then there's another one. You know me. I think there ought to be a big old tree right there. And let's give him a friend. Everybody needs a friend. That's Bob Ross, a U.S. painter. Pledge allegiance to the play of the United States. One nation under God, individual with liberty related. All right, roll call, please, city clerk. Councilmember Thanos? Here. Councilmember Brown. Here. Vice Mayor Ray. Here. Council Member O'Hara. Here. Mayor Henderson. Here. City Attorney Salzman. Here. City Manager O'Reilly. Here. City Clerk Carico present. All right. We have a couple of presentations this evening. One on the utility rate sufficiency study and one on the citywide sidewalk inventory. So we'll welcome Mr. Andrew Burnham, Vice President of Stantech Consulting Services. Thanks for coming back with us. Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Mayor and Council. Let me get a brief presentation open for you. It's rather brief today, only about 10 minutes of time is all that's needed as we're going through just an update with where we sit this year versus where we thought we'd be. So by way of a bit of a refresher for not only yourselves but also for the public. Last fiscal year there was not a rate increase for the water and sewer rates as well as stormwater rates in the community. You made a decision to hold rates flat and then also make some rate structure modifications last year that removed the allowance and created a very low tier so that people would pay for what they used, but did so without any change and increase in the level of the rates. And so in fact, for many of your lower volume users, they actually saw a small reduction in their bill last year as part of the rate conversation. And so as part of that, we also looked at updating some of the miscellaneous fees that you have just to make sure that we're charging for the cost of providing services, such as activating accounts, turning on or turning off services, those sorts of things. And so we made sure that we were charging what it costs to actually go and provide those specific services. And so those come into play as an offsetting revenue that minimize how much we have to capture in our rates.