The Gulfport City Council held a workshop on July 22, 2025, at 6:00 PM to review lessons from the three 2024 storms (Hurricanes Debby, Helene, and Milton) and discuss legislative changes, particularly Senate Bill 180. City Manager Jim O'Reilly and department heads presented a comprehensive seven-category analysis covering damage assessments, permitting, code enforcement, public safety, debris removal, communications, and community recovery. The meeting included two public comment periods and extensive council discussion.
Good evening. Good evening and welcome to let's see, this would be the second workshop of twenty twenty-five. Yeah, so we're gonna go ahead and get started today. Um we will start with an invocation by Vice Mayor April Thanos, and then that'll be followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. So please stand if you will. This is a one of the few times you have to do it three times in a month. Um so we can't become what we need to be by remaining what we are, and that was from Oprah. Um roll call city manager, city clerk, excuse me. Councilmember Shaw. Councilmember Early President. Here City Manager O'Reilly. City Clerk Carico is present. Councilmember Jackson has asked to be excused. All right, so um just wanted to give you just a real quick overview before our city manager starts us off with presentations tonight. Um I think the first question I just wanted to answer was why? Why are we having this meeting? And they just covered every detail of everything, and they acknowledged the things that they didn't do too well, but they spent way more time uh dwelling on the changes that had already been made and also explaining to a small city like Gulfport as well as a county like Pinellas the rules that we're gonna be coming down um down the line that we're gonna change dramatically, so some of the things in the way we did um in the last storms, hopefully we never have to deal with it at all ever in our lifetime again. But if we do everything that we did one way for one set of rules may not be the same for this next set of rules, so I kind of wanted to uh touch on that. Um so there's tonight uh our city manager has taken and broke broken this up into seven different categories, okay. So th this is way more than just about permitting, but we're definitely gonna uh address permitting the way it was the way we expect it to be down the road. We're gonna address some of the uh new county and state procedures and requirements. Um we learned a lot about uh and we've talked a little bit about um Bill 180, but it wasn't passed at that time. Well, now it has, and uh, we've had some time to read it and can actually tell you how some of the things will actually apply to us. Um second one of the year, it's not like we have a long history of the rules, so this is the way it's gonna work tonight, okay. Um Jim's gonna do um our city manager is gonna do his presentation. He's gonna come up for air periodically, and definitely at any point during this presentation. If you didn't hear something or something wasn't clear, it's absolutely okay to ask for clarification on that point right then and there. As he finishes each category, and he'll outline the categories in a minute. It will be absolutely okay for the council to ask additional questions or comments about the category that he just spoke of. Um and then at the end, we will have council comments again, okay. Um after the first two categories, one will be dealing with permitting and that whole process, and another with the Bill 180. After those two categories, we will have public comment, and then we will have public comment when he finishes when we finish the other five as well. So there will be two opportunities for you to talk, and then we will do public, we will do our council comments after the public has spoken so that if we wanted to address something they said we could. Everybody good? All right, and we're being recorded, so we want to make sure that we talk into our mics. And I think everyone knows this is not a basic council meeting. This will be a little less formal, a little bit more discussion because we're all here to learn and make sure we understand how things are going to be moving forward. Mayor Council, thank you for this evening. Um just wanted to just briefly touch on some background issues before we get started and talk about the three storms that we had last year. Um of the issues that we're facing is, and we talk about it within three storms, two occurring within two weeks of each other, and each of them were different. Hurricane Debbie, we talk about that we had severe rainfalls, we had marine issues. We talk about that later on. I believe we removed 14 vessels. So we after that we learned our lesson there was for the police department and Justin folks to put together an information brochure, they took out to all the vessels. Second was Hurricane Aline. Obviously, I don't have to discuss the love of devastation and flooding, and it wasn't here. It was still a hundred and excuse me, a hundred and ten miles, 105 miles offshore. That's a big point of this. That that did not hit here. It was not once again, it was not a direct hit.