Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025, at 6:00 PM
Location: Gulfport City Hall, 2401 53rd Street South, Gulfport, FL
Ward Friszolowski, President, and Amy Bradlow, Senior Vice President of Harvard Jolly/PBK presented an update on the new senior center and theater expansion. Key changes from the 2017 design include:
Multiple residents expressed frustration with delays and inaccuracies in the permitting process and substantial damage determinations:
City Manager O’Reilly and Building Official Clark Streiker addressed the backlogs. Key points:
Council discussed three applicants: Kosi Jackson, Joel Fetterman, and a third (not named). Vice Mayor Fridovich and Councilmember Thanos supported Jackson; Councilmember Brown supported Fetterman. Mayor initially proposed opening applications for another week but the charter requires action within 30 days (deadline Feb 14). Council voted 4-0 to appoint Kosi Jackson to fill the Ward III seat until the March 2025 election.
Note: Meeting minutes were not available.
Welcome everyone to the February 4th regular city council meeting for Gulf Port Florida. Our invocation tonight's given by Vice Mayor Michael Fernovich, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join us in rising. This one's gonna be very short but appropriate. This is Earl Leg Ladreb, who's a um Indiana politician, uh Congressman during the Watergate uh area. And his fair famous quote is don't confuse me with the facts. All right, roll call, please, city clerk. Vice Mayor Fredovich. Councilmember Thanos here. Council Member Brown here. Mayor Henderson. Here. City Attorney Salzman. City Manager O'Reilly. Here. City Clerk Carico is present. All right. Leading off tonight, we have a presentation. We've got Ward Fresnowski president and Amy Bradlow, Senior Vice President of Harvard Jolly PBK giving us a senior center design update. Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Honorable Mayor and City Council members. I'm Ward Fresilaski with Harvard Jolly PBK Architecture. With me is Amy Bradlow, an architect and principal with the firm, and also with us is Felipe Delgado, uh a colleague of ours. So as you know, we've made uh a couple presentations in the past. Since then we've met with the public. Uh obviously work closely with Rachel and Tom and the rest of the staff, so we thought it would just be appropriate to give you a brief update. Fantastic. So Amy will kind of take us through a uh quick presentation. Thank you. So this is you all know is the site of the existing senior center and theater. And uh we oops. Uh we gave a presentation uh earlier last year to the public on the design that we did in 2017 for the new senior center and theater expansion. This was the plan. Um and it involved uh closing a portion of 27th Avenue in order to keep the existing senior center in operation during construction. I don't know what I'm doing here. Uh this was the original plan that we did in 2017, the first floor. Uh one thing you'll note is that the multi-purpose rooms in green at the top there are um separated uh with the kitchen and and associated spaces in between. Uh there was also um two entrances so that you can enter from either the uh the north side, uh which where the main parking is, or from the library side, and uh some offices and the snack bar. And the second floor had some more multi-purpose rooms, um with uh two there at the top of the screen, one down at the bottom, and a fitness center, and some additional offices. And these were the renderings that we created at that time and uh presented again for input last year. So we got a lot of great input from uh the people that attended the meeting. Um and some of the things that they asked for were an additional elevator, an escalator if possible, uh, to ensure that those uh multi-purpose flex rooms were outfitted to accommodate all the different programs that are offered and additional ones they'd like to have in the future. An indoor walking track. Um they like to it enlarge the size of the fitness center and uh a larger multi-purpose room. So uh we took all that into consideration and made a lot of changes to the design. Uh we were able to provide an additional elevator. We were not able to provide an escalator um due to cost and space uh uh considerations, but the additional elevator should help. And we also you'll see join those together so that they can provide a larger room or different smaller ones, various sizes, and offer a lot more flexibility for different types of programs. We did increase the size of the fitness center from 835 square feet to uh 1450 square feet, and we're able to provide uh an indoor walking track that was incorporated within the circulation around the building.