Bradford resiliency grants and seniors award

2:11:35Yeah, Mr. Chair. Actually just just really one one good news item, you know, is we try to Get more grants into the county to leverage tax money that uh our citizens have already paid into. Uh we had a wonderful event and I'd like just to have uh Dr. Bellis come up and speak for maybe thirty seconds to a minute about it, about the federal agency funding workshop we held uh a few weeks back.

2:11:58Thank you. Good afternoon commissioners. Have you ever heard me say anything in thirty seconds?

2:12:02No.

2:12:02No, okay. Just a hair more. Uh So, yeah, this uh we uh you established this uh about a month and a half ago, so some very big uh bodies of work are going on that just want to share with you real quickly here. Uh one is that our vulnerability assessment that has been going on for about a year now is wrapping up, which is going to cover the entire county. I think I've mentioned that to you before. It's it's gonna point out areas that we may already uh think or know are vulnerable, but it's gonna point

2:12:32out some blind spots too. Uh and concurrently with that, and we're gonna share the results with each of you. Concurrently We are working in our new team to network and create relationships with local, state, and federal agencies and funders. And we've had great meetings already with folks like the Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA. We actually had the AG group from the feds that we talked to the other day, which was kind of a surprise for us. But we're trying to build a good network, good relationships. Part of that was on

2:13:03the 22nd we did hold an event in uh in cooperation with the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council and uh we had expected to have a a couple of funders come in, a few people attend, and uh see we go from there. Well it turns out uh it was a pretty good event. We had 109 people show up. We had 16 state and federal funders there, all of them sharing their inside secrets on what they were funding and what they needed from us. we uh literally put Pasco on the map. During that same time we were able to we were able to hand them twenty three

2:13:33project sheets of things that were already going on in the county because Although we're new to this A lot of folks in the county have been working on this stuff for a long time, really without a lot of support. They now have the ear of these funders and we're following all of that up. So a real good start for us. It's just the beginning. These two peak big pieces are going to come together very soon. So all the information we know about what's happening in the county, the information from the vulnerability assessment, and all the relationships we now have with the funders to build an adaptation plan which

2:14:03will prioritize all of the actions and activities we start moving forward. forward to uh guarantee the future of Pasco County. So that's uh that's our update.

2:14:14I want to tell you uh at Regional Planning Council they were raving about how great the meeting was. Awesome. Uh up and down. Um so it it definitely had an effect. Uh at the Restore Council we had a great meeting. Uh Mr. Thomas is doing a phenomenal job for us. Yes. Very excited that he's gonna try to do all the leveraging again as well. And uh One more thing as far as resiliency goes as you're talking about it. Uh May 910 I believe is the uh summit for Regional Planning Council for the resiliency. Um I will tell you I looked at the agenda. There's a few really good things on there.

2:14:44There's a few things that kind of I'm not crazy about and we'll deal with those things down the road, but it is the summit that's coming up there for resiliency. If you can make it uh it would be real good. And one thing with Regional Planning Council too We had our audit done. You know, the executive director resigned a little bit ago. Um, nothing was found out of the ordinary, it just kind of uh he did need to go from his own family reason, et cetera. So there was nothing found, the audits done, everything's clean, everything's in good shape down there. Great partnership with the thing.

2:15:14Cool. Thank you for your support. Thank you.

2:15:16Uh the only other item, sir, I would plus like to add is a shout out to Kathy Pearson's uh Senior Services Group. They were recognized uh by Congressman Gus Bilarakis' office with the 2024 Heroes Among Us Award uh for for taking over a number of programs that affected up to four hundred of our vulnerable seniors. So just a shout out to them for the great body of work that they do for our seniors day in and day out. That's all I have.

2:15:39Very good.

2:15:43All right.

2:15:45Mr. Seisdown? Oh wait, you've got something?