The October 15th, 2024 regular council meeting for the city of Gulfport, Florida.

Our invocation nights given by Vice Mayor Ian O'Hara, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

Please join us in rising.

Begin at the beginning, and the king said very gravely, and go on till you come to the end, and then stop.

C.S.

Lewis.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, individual with liberty and justice.

All right, thanks for being here with us tonight.

Roll Cold Police City Clerk.

Vice Mayor O'Hara.

Here.

Council Member Thanos.

Council Member Brown.

Here.

Councilmember Ray?

Here.

Mayor Henderson.

Here.

City Attorney Salzman.

Here.

City Manager O'Reilly.

Here.

City Clerk Keriko is present.

All right.

We did have a presentation schedule for tonight, but in lieu of you know some of the things that have been going on around town, we decided to postpone that.

But we because of that, we're gonna take this opportunity to go ahead and put what was going to be part of the city manager's report up at the front of the meeting.

So we're gonna have some of our uh police fire chief uh public works, uh maybe some other folks give us kind of an update where we're at post-storm, uh, what's been done, and maybe it'll answer some of the questions you might have had in public comment anyway.

Uh so with that in mind, I'm just gonna go and turn it over to you.

Okay, I I've got report also up, mayor I'll get later, but um if I could ask Chief Vincent and Chief Fernandez to come up and just briefly tell you their activities, and then uh I'd like to ask Mr.

Nichols, and I also want to recognize one of the big aspects of the last two weeks, three weeks, is uh the efforts of David Mather and Justin Shea with messaging and running everything from the citizens' call center to every message we're putting out all day long, three days every day, Chief.

So uh obviously this was uh a big couple of well, a few weeks for us.

Um Patrick just asked if we've been really busy, and I actually honestly answered no, we haven't been very busy.

Uh people have been behaving themselves, and people are surprisingly they know what to do when they come up to a traffic light that's out.

So we haven't really had too many issues with people stealing or people being violent or traffic crashes or anything like that.

But what we have been doing, just how we prepared, and I think most of you have seen it.

Um for Milton on October 7th, we canceled everybody's leave, made sure anybody that was had vacation scheduled wasn't going anywhere.

We wanted to make sure everyone was here before that storm landed.

Uh and we decided that we were gonna move our operations up to Boca Sega High School, the entire building's gener on a generator, it's well outside of any flood area, and we still drive for the most part sedan that can't get through deep water.

Uh on October 8th, we made all of the evacuation notifications in person to the businesses in the evacuation areas, and then on the PA systems on our patrol cars.

And then on October 9th, all of the police department members mustered at Boca Sega High School at noon, had a briefing at noon.

I'm sorry, at one put them on day and night shift rotation.

Then at uh that moment, the day shift went out.

Uh they put all their patrol cars on the cruise mode.

So that meant two normal squads.

So that would have been eight patrol cars and two supervisors out in primarily in the evacuation areas, and we were very strict.

We didn't have to arrest anybody, but everyone we came across in that area.

If they didn't live there, we made them leave.

And they cooperated.

We didn't have anybody try to get in the way of that.

Um we brought everyone in when the wind started getting really high, sometime after 7 p.m.

And then we stayed in the building and we suspended our operations till about three o'clock in the morning.

About three o'clock in the morning, we sent a scout team out.

They went first to uh Beachway Mobile Home Park to see if everyone there was okay.

Uh word was everyone went to the clubhouse and sheltered in there.

We made sure they were all right.

Then we went to town shores looking to see if there was anybody down there who needed help.

Once we decided there weren't any immediate rescue needs, uh, then we went out and checked for stop signs down, traffic lights out, that sort of thing, areas where we needed to put up stop signs at the traffic lights and alert public work, so they had a list of what to work on the next day.

Uh we really didn't have much to do after that, so we went right back to our normal schedule, sent the uh night shift people home as soon as they were done.

So between both storms, uh, I had our analysts pull up the numbers today.