Chairman Mariano report Metropolitan Ministries and Zimmerman project
What the county recorded
This item is not from the published agenda
It is a stretch of the recording that this archive identified as a separate matter — a call to order, a recess, or something taken up that the agenda does not list. There is no official title, no staff recommendation and no disposition, because the county never recorded one. Everything below is inferred.
The source document
The county’s agenda for Board of County Commissioners, May 19, 2026
The published PDF, as served by the county. This item is one entry in it.
The county’s minutes for Board of County Commissioners, May 19, 2026
The published PDF, as served by the county. This item is one entry in it.
What was said
Machine transcription of 4m of recording, with speaker names inferred from voice matching. 100% of 20 lines carry a name. It shows what was said, not what was decided, and both the words and the names can be wrong.
Okay. Uh Gene, got a couple of slides for me? So that was our uh Tours of a banquet was great. Um the speaker was awesome, Connor was awesome, did a great job. What a great story from struggles, success, struggles, and bouncing back, and what what a fine young man.
Olympic BMX writer, right? Yeah,
champion.
Champion, Olympia. Yeah, Olympian B Olympian BMX. Uh I don't know if you all know that Keith Wiley was a competitive BMX guy.
I didn't know that. Yeah. Okay. Uh next slide. So I I was down at Metropolitan Ministries, had a great tour. Um And it was really cool seeing what they've done down there and how it actually operates. And it's something I think we should look to even try to model and I'm gonna say I know we'll there's a lot of DR things and I've got a ton of suggestions in there too. But I'll tell you the the campus down there, they had it from infants at one year old. All the way to like four. And then have a room in
there, the kids were playing, doing whatever, learning as they were going along. Let's face it, the the better they learn, the earlier they are, the better off it is. Um Up at Hudson, they've got a whole program that's up there that they're affiliated with. And I'm going to go tour with them because from what they're doing up there, I think there's a possibility to put one of these buildings, that Creative Learning Center, in there. Maybe it needs to be bigger, whatever it may be, but I think it'd be a great addition uh to help in this county. between the daycare
opportunity that's there and the quality of learning for the kids, I think it's a b lot it's a good discussion to have coming up. But anyway they they're doing a great job down there. It was nice to see and nice to get the tour. Next slide. That's just pictures of the resource center that's up in Hudson, okay. And uh oh yeah, my sli uh so this slide here so I wanna say it was like about four weeks, uh probably like three months ago maybe, that I met with uh our staff Penos and uh Penny? There he is. All right. So
I met with Pandas and Patricia and we talked about the Zimmerman project. It's a project's been in the county MPL list for about, I'll say probably twenty something years. Probably m minus minus twenty-five. And we could never get the road funded. Safe route to schools is now going to take Ranch Road, all the way up Zimmerman to fifty two and allow people at Gulf Highlands Elementary to go to school safely. One of the problems with this was with this road was going to be designed, it was going really close to the roadway out there. Back on the other side
is a Portuguese American club. And I'll tell you these guys were great. They hosted us when we did the FGA for aqua utilities years ago. What a beautiful building. They've done great renovations in there. Matter of fact, it may become a a future site for voting coming up as we found out. But I told them we just needed to take part of their backland, which they weren't using. It is fenced. There's some trees that could be landscaped. Which they actually like the idea, Commissioner Starkey. So we're gonna try to work with that on them. But we needed just a sliver of land that's there. The value with
the fifteen percent included from the property appraiser site came to about thirty five hundred dollars. In less than two weeks they called a meeting and over forty people showed up. We did a presentation that called the meeting to order within ten minutes from calling the meeting to order. We had everybody and I think the they got another picture in there? Oh go go back to the previous picture.
Where where is this?
This is a this is on the port in Gulf Highlands off Zimmerman, which is north of Ranch Rose.
Zimmerman um it's about uh quarter of mile, half a mile north of uh Ranch Road.
But
so you it's uh the club is to the back part of it.
Summerman and Ranch?
It's north of Z it's north it's on Zimmerman just north of the ranch.
Okay. And
the where the road comes up it bends real hard and the road the sidewalk was going out to the edge really close. I thought it was dangerous. There was this club right there. Now by actually coming in there, we can move that road off to the side that were very acceptable to it. And uh like I did s a few years ago, Tim Broke's trying to get everybody's thumbs up for the golf course renovation we're gonna do. Yeah, all the all the drainage. Everybody in the room put a thumbs up for uh approval of the project. So Panos, you and Patricia were phenomenal. Thank you for listening. Thanks for going out there. What you did was
great to set the whole conversation up and made it real easy. So thank you.