The Gulfport City Council met on Tuesday, January 21, 2025, at 6:00 PM to address ongoing hurricane recovery efforts, hear public concerns about substantial damage letters, receive updates on opioid and homeless outreach programs, and consider a series of resolutions for storm-related repairs. The meeting also included the resignation of Council Member Paul Ray (Ward 3) and initiation of the appointment process for his successor.
Many residents spoke during open public comment, primarily about frustration with the substantial damage letter process following Hurricanes Helene and Milton:
City Manager O’Reilly and Building Official Justin provided a detailed update:
Everyone to the regular city council meeting for Gulf Fort Florida. Rimication nights given by Vice Mayor Michael Frodovich, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join us in Rasmus. Monsters are real and ghosts are too are real too. They live inside of us. Sometimes they win. Vice Mayor Ferdovich? Councilmember Thanos? Here. Council Member Brown? Here. Mayor Henderson. Here. City Attorney Salzman. Here. City Manager O'Reilly? Here. City Clerk Carico is present. All right. Got a couple of presentations this evening. Our first one is Pinell's County Opioid Program's presentation. We've got Craig here from the director of uh EMS and Fire Administration. Thanks for being with us, sir. Yeah. Good evening, Mayor and Council members. Uh Craig here. I'm with uh Penells County and I serve as the director of EMS and Fire Administration. And uh guess there's a request for us to come down and just talk a little bit about opioid overdose and uh some of the efforts that are ongoing. Uh Michelle Salinski is our data analyst and uh is uh running our uh growth management programs uh for the county. Oh, sorry, I thought sorry, I thought it was picking up. Okay. I'll do a a recap of that really quick. Uh so my name is Craig here, I'm the director of the MS and Fire Administration for the county. And we were asked by counsel to come down and talk a little bit about opioid overdoses. And so uh over the last five years we've seen uh a decrease in the number of fentanyl overdoses um across the the county, so that's uh, you know, um good for us as a community. Uh still is a problem though. So in this last fiscal year, about fifty or so um overdoses in uh golf port. Um your police department does have uh Narcan that uh patrol is able to administer. Uh fire rescue when they arrive with the paramedics uh also has Narcan. And so um our job is that immediate, you know, stabilization of the patient, uh getting them transferred to the hospital. Um, but from there we have a couple of programs that uh really help us um, you know, support the community. One is Leave Behind Narcan, uh, giving Narcan uh kids out in community events, so that happens either at your community center or if you have your fire department uh uh out at an event. Or we also give them to patients or their families uh if they've had a call, or we think that there's you know a possibility that uh that may benefit them. And so that's a piece. Uh the county we're also uh the paramedics are directly referring uh patients of substance use disorder to Gulf Coast uh Jewish community family services, and they're able to get people into um Suboxone treatment uh for uh their overdose. So I had just a couple of slides uh here across the county. We've been uh pushing on getting uh leave behind Narcan uh kits out to the community, and you can see uh you know those numbers there. Once we've kind of saturated public events, uh you can see our numbers are are coming down a little bit. And then uh next slide. And you can see uh you know, by agency uh that uh that distribution.