The Gulfport City Council met on Tuesday, October 17, 2023, at 6:00 PM at City Hall. The meeting included presentations on urban forestry and a watershed management plan, approval of consent items and multiple resolutions, second readings of two pension ordinances, and a detailed discussion on amending the tree ordinance. All votes and decisions were taken after public comment periods.
Welcome everyone to the october 17th, 2023, regular council meetings for the golf port. Our invocation tonight is given by Councilman Ian O'Hara, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join us in rising. You never fail until you stop trying an ISNIN. Nice. All right, roll call, please, City Clerk. Councilmember O'Hara. Here. Councilmember Thanos. Here. Councilmember Brown. Here. Vice Mayor Ray? Here. Mayor Henderson. Here. Infra City Attorney Salzman, Attorney Murchy. Here. City Manager O'Reilly. City Clerk Carico present. All right. I've got a couple of presentations this evening, starting with Dean Hay from the ISA board certified. Uh he's a ISA board certified master arborist, senior urban forestry specialist for the city of St. Petersburg. Thanks for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Is there if I pull my presentation on the screen here? Yeah, absolutely. The uh analysis right here is already open on the bottom there. So my name uh is Dean Hay. I am an ISA board certified arborist. Um I live here in Gulfport. My address is 5618 13th Avenue South. Um, I'm fairly new to uh to Gulfport. I moved down here a couple years ago and have been in the uh forestry industry for about 25 years now. I prepared this presentation because it's part of a discussion that we've been having at uh internally with some residents to talk more specifically about um how we might preserve the character of the neighborhoods that we have right now and what that process may look like going forward. This is just the first step of what we had uh discussed. So we can see that okay. Um tree loss is has become a large part of urbanization as uh development, lack of tree preservation, and senescence, which is the aging out of a of a tree, um, has become more prevalent. Uh this is as significant as the replacement species offer uh often offer little to no community benefits in coping with the ever-changing effects that we're seeing in our local and global climate. Uh without benchmarking or planning uh around the uh existing forest asset, individual residence cost of living increases, human health coping mechanisms fade, and community resilience remains elusive. Trees begin producing benefits that exceed their planting uh establishment and maintenance costs at about uh 20 years of age. Many of our trees can last as many as uh 20, or sorry, 200 to 300 years old when cared for and planted correctly. The most study and most reliable economic tree benefit models are in the sequestration of carbon, the production of shade uh for energy efficiency, storm water, and air quality. As you can see on the right-hand side, uh I've taken uh a fictitious uh 25-inch diameter live oak, which is very common in our uh in our community, and it shows what the annual benefits um uh are as well as what the expected benefits are over the next 20 years, and you can see that's thousands of dollars. Um a single live oak can produce thousands of dollars in annual community benefits in these areas, benefits accumulate annually as beneficial trees are planted and preserved in a network, and a network can be as small as a park area, a business district, a residential area, or the entire city of Gulfport. Why is it not in the answer? There we go. Dramatic losses in tree populations in U.S.