Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Gulfport City Council met on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. at Gulfport City Hall, 2401 53rd Street South, Gulfport, Florida. The agenda centered on stormwater funding options, resident comments on the Flock automated license plate reader program, a police chief rebuttal, and discussion of the former Lions Club waterfront property. The council unanimously approved the consent agenda as read, approved a fire department reclassification, and reached consensus on renaming the property Tifton Landing.
Good evening. I call tonight's meeting to order October 6th, 2026. I do see some new faces out there. I forgot my microphone. I do see some new faces out there, so just if you don't know you want to make sure your telephone is turned off. We don't want to hear any phones here tonight. And I understand that there's a lot of stuff that'll be covered tonight. So if you want to have a side conversation with somebody, I understand it, but we ask you to take it to the hallway. Whether it's somebody up here or somebody out there, we only want one conversation going on at a time. Thank you. So with that, then our meeting will start tonight with an invocation given by council member Nancy Early, followed by the pledge, stand if you can. Thank you. I was unable to attend Yvonne Johnson's services last week, but I had a moment to myself. And she did some wonderful things here, and she would be very missed. Maya Angelou, tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Very good. Councilmember Early. Present. Council Member Dodge. Here. Vice Mayor Shaw present. Councilmember Webb? Present. Mayor Love. Here. City Attorney Salzman. Here. City Manager O'Reilly. City Clerk Keriko is present. Thank you. So recognizing that this council has made it perfectly clear that our number one goal and our number one focus is stormwater improvements. I can't think of any presentation that we're gonna have this year that's gonna be as important as this one is. So with that in mind, I'm gonna invite um Mr. Andrew Burnham from Stantec to come up and talk to us about different options that we could have for stormwater funding. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor, City Council members. I do feel a bit of pressure now with that opening. I must say. That wasn't intentional. No, um, I do have about um 20 slides today. There's some some information here that will be here for reference. There's a number of programs that will identify for grants and low interest loan opportunities that can be the subject of further follow-up. We can get you specifics on each of those programs, but today is kind of intended to be an overview of what's possible, some of the likely kind of uh matches for some of the projects from your watershed management plan, and then some recommendations on kind of how you could go forward with grants, kind of a couple of immediate steps to set you on a forward path to find some funding for the projects, and then a bit of sensitivity analysis too, to the extent that you know your priorities are urgent and you need to move forward, you may have to look beyond grants and loans and get into things such as other cost recovery mechanisms like rates and fees to try to address some are part of the need. So that's kind of a recap of what I have. So I'd like to just kind of jump in. I think today's a very appropriate day to be talking about stormwater. Going through the streets to get here, going through parking lots. I mean, we're seeing an intensity and an increased frequency of severity of storms, and we know that our infrastructure wasn't necessarily designed for today's conditions when it was put in place many, many decades ago. So we have infrastructure challenges, we have changes in the conditions that our infrastructure has to be able to accommodate, and then we also have changes in regulations around environmental conditions and water quality that impact what we have to do with that amount of runoff that our systems receive.