And City

Hall for a joint special city commission CRA board meeting.

Good to see uh the board members here, the city commissioners here, and uh all the executive staff that are here in attendance as well as the city manager and city attorney.

Let's all please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

And of course, uh, no objection to Commissioner Hernandez participating uh remotely.

Um, let's go ahead now to our regular agenda.

We have two items today.

Uh, one is the resolution authorizing the city to execute an amendment to the employment agreement between the city manager and the city.

Uh, I'd like to, of course, uh, hear from the city manager uh now about uh six months or so uh into uh the position, and I know that uh you uh aspire to achieve a lot, Ray Lynn, and you're already in motion with a lot.

And so if you could please uh share with us your uh report about where you are and how you feel about things.

Uh good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Commissioners.

Uh, fiscal year twenty twenty-six, as you all know, was an important inflection point for the city.

We wrapped up our centennial year and uh moved into our second century.

We also transitioned the day-to-day leadership of the city on my own behalf, and I think I also speak for our overall administration and our employees when I say that we deeply appreciated uh the smooth transition between city managers that the commission really provided with my appointment.

The overlap that occurred as the prior city manager prepared to retire, provided something that's really often rare in government, uh, the opportunity to continue to seamlessly move forward on many priorities, projects, and programs.

I do want to clarify that while I've been in the city manager role for just under six months.

It's not technically time for an annual review, but the annual reviews of the city manager, CRA executive director, city attorney uh and CRA General Counsel are always held in October.

And so we scheduled this review to align with that practice.

As such, I am not seeking uh any raise uh or increase to my salary with this review.

All of our employees have received, including our management employees, have received a cost of living increase of 2%.

If the commission would so desire, I would be pleased for that cost of living increase to be applied to my salary at the year anniversary mark in May of 2027.

With that, I'd like to talk about some of the significant accomplishments that we had in 2026.

Each year, we put out our accomplishments book.

Uh, this gets posted uh to the city website, and it really is uh, I think something that represents the the city administration as well as our 1,500 plus full and part-time employees uh really well.

Uh

this year we saw the execution of new multi-year collective bargaining agreements with all five of our bargaining units representing the majority of our city employees, including the implementation of additional retirement options for our AFSME employees, which means that the city now offers a traditional pension or defined benefit plan as well as defined contribution plan and a hybrid plan.

The completion and opening of the largest Go Bond projects, including the Art and Culture Center expansion, the Hollywood Beach Golf Course and Community Center, and of course, most notably our new state-of-the-art Hollywood police headquarters occurred in this fiscal year.

Resiliency and infrastructure initiatives took center stage.

The NORESCO Energy Efficiency Project was completed this year.

The first phase of the tidal flooding and shoreline protection project has uh been completed, the undergrounding of utility lines in the North Beach area, the implementation of the stormwater master plan, the adoption of Waterworks 2050, and the long-term improvements over the next 25 years that are critically needed to the city's water and wastewater facilities and infrastructure, including, of course, the phased conversion of septic systems to city sewer system to city

sewer service, rather.

2026 also saw the launch of an important initiative.

Uh, the second phase of the Acela permitting and development review platform.

This will allow, really does allow for the integration of all of our building permits, our development orders, our code compliance activity to be streamlined into a single solution.

Uh ultimately, this will eliminate the inefficient manual transfers of data being received in by email and then having to be uploaded individually into a system uh that creates opportunities for mistakes.

So we feel very good about getting that launched, and it took a Herculean effort on the part of a lot of folks in our development services uh department.

Our CMED team also coordinated with every single office and department across the city to complete a website redesign and digital modernization project.

This included ADA compliant document conversion and enhanced customer service tools for an overall improved web experience.

IT made modernization and technology enhancements across uh all of our ERP solutions from timekeeping and payroll integration modules to the reduction of manual data entry to the overall migration to the Oracle integration cloud for performance and scalability.

We all uh took several classes in cybersecurity, and of course, that really also went hand in hand with our cybersecurity endpoint protection tools uh and ongoing vulnerability assessments.

We've seen this become critically important in local government, and we've seen what happens when local governments are not prepared.

We welcomed a new director of design and construction management, and he's already implemented the Monday.com project management platform in which we are able to improve tracking and reporting while saving staff time on keeping track of where all projects are.

With our new HPD headquarters, we've made significant enhancements to our real-time crime intelligence center capabilities through both CCTV and ALPR technologies.

We've seen some incredible statistics, including continued decline in all areas of crime.

Our homicide unit achieved a 100% clearance rate, and our street crimes team made 140 felony arrests, these 263,000, 24 firearms, and 57 pounds of narcotics.

And that's in addition, those are just a few highlights.

That's in addition to the great work done every day by our regular patrol officers and neighborhood team leaders.

We completed upgrades over in our emergency operations center to the technology and communications infrastructure over there, which fortunately we have not needed this hurricane season, knock on wood.

But this readiness is essential to our disaster response capabilities.

We saw the completion this year of multiple long-range planning studies, including the overhaul of the city's comprehensive plan, which is still pending adoption, the Washington Park Industrial Area Strategic Plan, the Housing Master Plan, and the Hollywood Beach Feasibility Study and Overlay Plan, along with a kickoff of a multi-year effort to comprehensively update and conform our city's zoning and land development regulations, adopt new urban design guidelines, and create a public art master plan.

There was record reinvestment in the city's housing stock through the newly elevated Office of Housing and Community Development, which has assisted with GAAP financing during fiscal year 2026 for the construction of nearly 400 new high-quality affordable and workforce housing units in our city.

The HCATHCM team has also worked directly to improve the lives of residents facing homelessness, housing instability, food insecurity, and financial hardship with financial assistance provided through our partners to more than 450 individuals experiencing homelessness, 25 households receiving tenant-based rental assistance to help with their monthly rent, and more than 1,300 individuals benefited from benefiting from city-funded food assistance programs.

We've also said had some significant successes this year with our grants.

Those major awards included things like 9.9 million for roadway, sidewalk, traffic calming and resiliencing projects, 9.1 million for transportation mobility, bridge replacement and microtransit initiatives, 1.7 million to expand youth and senior and cultural programming, more than 700,000 for our fire rescue mobile integrated health programs, 750,000 for Keating Park, and our police department secured 13 grants totaling nearly a million dollars for various specialized operations and public safety initiatives.

This year, the Hollywood Community Redevelopment Agency continued to advance some critical infrastructure upgrades, both in the beach and downtown districts.

Substantial progress was made.

We're about to the halfway point, I think Sarita would say, with the multi-year $90 plus million dollar phase four street end beautification, roadway harmonization, and resiliency project that's taking place over on the beach.

The six plus million investment in the renewal of the Harrison Street Streetscape was launched and is now nearing completion, along with the enhanced sidewalks, security

ballards, the lighting and the landscaping.

Nearly 760 million dollars in just the past five years, averaging more than 150 million a year.