This special meeting of the Gulfport City Council was held on February 5, 2026, to provide neutral explanations of the ten charter amendment questions that will appear on the upcoming ballot. City Clerk Carico walked through each question, clarifying the meaning of a "yes" or "no" vote. Council members and the public were permitted to ask clarifying questions, but the meeting was not a debate or a forum for expressing voting recommendations. The meeting began with a roll call, noting Councilmember Jackson was excused.
Do we have mics or am I just yelling? We have mics. Okay. I couldn't tell. All right. So I say good evening and thanks for coming out on this cold lustery night. Uh this is not a workshop in terms of um the city council discussing things. That's what's happened in the last we've had eight meetings about this following and presentations from the Charter Review Committee, and this process started way back in April, and now it's just um ready to come onto the referendum uh in onto the ballot, excuse me. So um in any case it's a little bit different. We're gonna get a roll call and then um our city clerk's gonna kind of walk us through each question that's on the ballot, and hopefully all of you picked up a ballot in the back, and you can write notes to yourself. Um after she does one, you know, she's gonna make it clear it means this. Vote yes if that this is what you want, vote no if this is we're never gonna tell our opinions, we're never gonna make any suggestions on how anybody should vote, because that's not what this meeting tonight is just to make sure that everybody is clear so that they in fact get to vote the way they want to vote for the outcome that they particularly want. Um so with that, oh, and and during her presentation, what she's gonna do is she'll talk about a bill, then she'll see if there's any um uh clarifying questions or any anything that we want to say, and then she'll also there will be an opportunity for you to come up on each bill if you choose. If you have any additional questions, if it's something that w we're not comfortable that our city clerk can answer, we do have attorney Evans here tonight to um do that for us, okay? Everybody understand the procedure. And again, preferably one conversation at a time, always to whoever has the mic and is doing the presentation. So with that, roll call, please. Councilmember Early present. Vice Mayor Thanos? Here. Councilmember Shaw. Present. Mayor Love here. Attorney Evans? Here. Councilman or excuse me, City Manager O'Reilly. Here. City Clerk Carico is present. Uh Councilmember Jackson has asked to be excused. Okay, so we'll go right into this this evening. Uh so tonight this is just going to be the what the questions are, and this is directly from the ballot that is located at the back of the room. I do want to say uh if you cannot see the the screens, I do have this on my website for the city clerk already. Uh so if you needed to pull it up on your laptop or your iPad, you you can do so if you cannot see the screens here. Uh so we're gonna go on into page one. And there are seats up front too. If you would like to come closer to see the screens. Uh this is a very small, this just outlines what is on my my city clerk web page because this is where you're going to find all of all of the election information, such as the candidate information, the ballot, uh, and uh the council members are excuse me, the candidates' financial reports, all of that is on the city clerk city clerk's website. I do have the web site up in the top right-hand corner for you if you need to write it down. Um how did we get to this point today? So this process began back when our new council was uh put in place in April of 2025. One of the first things that they actually tasked us with with was to uh get a charter review committee put together and start reviewing parts of the charter. Uh so May 6th is when that uh began. City council actually appointed their charter review members, and they were Deborah Adkins, Aaron W. Beaman, Josefa Gonzalez Hastings, and Joe Gunther and Robert Rubin. Uh May 15th, they had their first meeting and they met consecutively. Um excuse me, they met bi-weekly for 12 meetings through October 15th. September 3rd, City Council reviewed the charters uh recommendations. The committee members were here. Uh there was no formal presentation made, but that was our first discussion that council had after seeing some of the recommendations that the committee had submitted. Uh then October 21st, Charter Review Committee formally presented its recommendations to uh for the city charter changes to city council.