Eleven thirty four.

Welcome, and I am so glad to see a lot of faces out there that I don't know.

Um, I think tonight's presentation will be fairly brief and fairly to the point, and you'll have an opportunity to tell us what services you might like to cut.

I make a joke of that only because I did that at Gulfport 2050.

I asked everybody to um tell me, you know, what services I think could be cut as we were projecting.

Actually, it was called Callport 2050.

And one person told me that he thought that we should um cut the number of ballparks that we have, and then I had about 12 people each tell me two or three things they thought we should add.

So I think I came out about two million up instead of anything down.

So you can imagine how that happens.

So this is a little, this is um going to be what we call a workshop, and we, you know, maybe doing these, you know, eight, ten times a year.

Opportunity to be a little bit less formal.

Um we will have a presentation from our city uh first.

Um, then the council will be able to ask questions and have discussion if they'd like.

We will be taking public comment.

For those of you that we're gonna attend, you know, public comment is not a question and answer period, it's an opportunity for you to go on the record and say whatever you want, and then if you leave your your contact information and you have a specific question, we can get back to you without a doubt.

I'm very very responsive on email.

Um, so with that, we're gonna kick it off.

Um first we're gonna do roll call and then we'll turn it over to our city manager.

Council member early, council member Donch here, Vice Mayor Shaw, present council member Webb, present, Mayor Love here, City Manager O'Reilly, yeah.

City Clerk Carico is present.

So one last housekeeping thing.

Um, number one, if you're any chance that your telephone is on, please make sure it's off.

And the second thing is if you you miss something and you need to have a discussion with the person next to you, just take it into the hallway.

We're like a fishbowl.

I hear every single whisper up there.

I might not hear what the person next to me is saying, but I can hear everything up there, and it's distracting.

So thank you so much.

And if you will, city manager, thank you, Mayor.

Mayor, um council and the public is very well aware of the legislative action that took place about two weeks ago in regards to expanding different versions of this, and this is why we're here tonight of what this is tax reform, save our homes, just all types of different variables that have been put out there.

Well, as the city, we have to do it from a factual standpoint.

One thing that you'll see attached to your agenda this evening is the actual joint bill that was adopted by the legislature.

That way, that's facts, and I'm gonna cover those points, those significant bullet points.

And I just to put this in framework, I just want to make two points.

We're talking about just advoam taxes this evening.

It's about 6.9 million dollars of a 21.8 million dollar general fund.

The city of Gulfport has not raised its millage rate since 2012.

We actually in 20 fiscal year 22, 23, we actually lowered it a bit.

So this has been consistent.

We've been in a range to where we are today at 4.0258.

From 3.66 over 16 almost 16 years ago, and that was legislative action that was taken to lower the millage rate based on reduction in revenue, and that was at a different property value.

Subsequent to that, the city lost great amount of property value and has gone through some inevitable swings.

So that those two things I think put this in context of how important this is to us as the city.

This isn't just this tax bill or homestead expansion bill.

There are the legislative actions that have been taken over the last two years or so that impact us also when we put the budget together.

House bill, House resolutions, joint resolution that we're talking about, the expansion of homesteading things to that effect, which is the bill attached to you to your package.

Property tax reform.

House bill is the local government finance budget transparency and reduction requirement.

What that does is require you to go through an exercise to reduce 10% of your budget.

Yes, ma'am.

It's an exercise to imagine what you would do, not actually doing it's an exercise.

I want to stress the word exercise.

You're not required to reduce your budget.

The next item is House Bill.

It's at Florida statutes actually now.

It's Florida Statute 166241, which basically prohibits you from reducing law enforcement spending more than five percent.

Now put those two together that when we do the exercise, law enforcement public safety are basically been provided for.

Now the bill only applies to law enforcement, but we've kind of grouped them together because the expense of public safety also fire and EMS.

This is also House Bill is where we can spend our money in regards to green policies, resiliency regulations, things to that effect.

And the reason that's on that list is we do participate with Duke Energy in a trade-off program with solar issue that we did.

That was one issue the mayor had brought up last year.