The Gulfport City Council convened on December 16, 2025, for a holiday-season meeting marked by the passing of former Councilmember Michael Frodovich. The session featured a significant state grant award for stormwater mitigation, extensive public testimony regarding business signage, homelessness, and the de-annexation of Lincoln Cemetery, and strategic discussions on traffic safety, zoning changes, and tree inventory technology. The Council unanimously approved resolutions for the potable water storm mitigation project, municipal telephone system upgrades, and a new street sweeping contract with the City of St. Petersburg. Key outcomes included directing staff to research potential density increases in residential zones and establishing a timeline for a public forum with stakeholders regarding the cemetery dispute.
Good evening, everybody. Thank you for attending. Let's see, today is December 16th City Council meeting. Um, I do see a couple of faces out there that I don't know, so I would suggest that you check your phone, make sure that the uh it's turned off or in airplane mode, so we don't have any phones going off. Um besides that, we'll go ahead and we'll get started with our meeting. Tonight, uh, we will be starting with an invocation given by Marlene Shaw, and it will be followed by um a moment of silence as well. So councilmember Shaw. Optimism doesn't mean you are blind to the reality of the situation, it means you remain motivated to seek a solution to whatever problems arise. The Dalai Lama. So before we proceed this evening, I'd like to take a moment to honor the life and service of former council member Michael Frodovich, who passed away this past Sunday. Michael served our community with dedication from March twelfth, two thousand thirteen through twenty twenty-three, and he once again answered the call to serve when he returned to fill a vacant council seat from December twenty twenty twenty twenty-four through March twenty twenty-five. He also served in Vietnam, so he really did commit a lot of his life to serving our country. Please join us in a moment of silence as we remember Michael Fredovich and honor his service. May he rest peacefully. Councilmember Early Present. Here, Mayor Love. Present. City Attorney Salzman. Here. City Manager O'Reilly. Here. City Clerk Carico is present. Councilmember Jackson has asked to be excused. Alrighty, so we're gonna go right into presentations then. We're very fortunate. We've got a very busy lady here with us tonight, and it took a long time to get her here. But we're very glad that she is here. So if you would, um State Representative Linda Cheney's here to kind of tell us what's going on. Thank you. Well, I thought, Mayor, if it's okay, I would start with the big money. Handing you all 1.3 million dollars for your portable water uh storm mitigation project. So congratulations. Thank you so much. We just finished having um our our stormwater study done, and so we're very much aware of what things cost these days. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Well, you welcome, and uh, if anybody was paying attention to the news for last session, this is nothing short of a miracle that you got any funding at all. It was quite a battle up there. Um the budget was 107.4 billion, the final signed budget. Uh 567 million dollars in projects were vetoed. You escaped the veto pen. So congratulations on that. Um, and this is the second consecutive year of year over year state spending at that level. So in Tallahassee, we do everything we can to be as responsible as possible with taxpayer dollars, and uh you you see we're going through these exercises again continuously. We have 15.7 billion in reserves, so we can face our inevitable hurricanes in a positive way. We've paid off nearly 50 percent of our debt, and we passed a bill last session that required 250 million be put into the budget every year. So that's right off the top. We're gonna put some money away for our rainy day fund. And we have stayed focused year over. This is my going into my fifth year, um, and we have stayed focused on increasing teacher pay, uh, record per pupil funding, law enforcement, uh, the environment.