Administrator update Arbor Day and homelessness

2:02:41I need about five minutes if that's okay. I know we're up against time. I I can. I'm it's up to the board.

2:02:49Would the board like to wait or hear for here for Mike now?

2:02:52I'm good with it.

2:02:53Go ahead.

2:02:53Go? Okay, here we go. Uh I'll move quick. First and foremost, uh April twenty fourth. Is National Arbor Day coming up in the um in the in the U.S. As I've learned there there's a Florida Arbor Day, but but regardless, I've spoken with our parks department and uh we would like to utilize ten thousand dollars of tree mitigation money in order to purchase trees to hand out to the public uh in celebration of National Arbor Day. Right now, I I can't do that with that. So I'd like a motion. to uh to take ten thousand dollars of tree mitigation

2:03:24funds to use it to expressly purchase trees that we would give away at at three parks actually cruise like two um

2:03:30second but make sure they're bigger than last year. Or I think we forgot last year.

2:03:51When it came to on put planting trees on public property. Since these are to give away to the public, they would not be planted on public property. Um okay, one one quick kudo to uh Dr. Bellis' team. As you may be aware, a few years ago, we adopted Lean Six Sigma principles, which is a private industry practice of property. improvement it's used in manufacturing healthcare worldwide as as a as a as a methodology to improve efficiency and in our processes I'm happy to say that our our team we we employ five maybe

2:04:21six six uh black belts work in the in the organization uh we received accreditation as a as a provider now so our programs for white belt yellow Yellow belt, green belt, and black belt have been nationally accredited. So we can actually train our folks in order to to do these these.

2:04:39Well we won't compete, I promise. But but we do it well. So kudos, kudos to Mark and his team for for for uh continuing to beat that drum. That's um again, that's just good good good government and and efficiency in my opinion. The last thing that I want to mention is in your uh our strategic plan, we talk about making homelessness rare. brief and non-recurrent. I'm happy to want to bring Kathy up here and and maybe James Walters to talk a little bit about an initiative that we that the team

2:05:09undertook last week as a move to you know improve the situation of homelessness in Pasco County.

2:05:16Kathy Pearson, Assistant County Ministry of Public Services. We heard you in January when we did our workshop on homelessness. We're moving the needle, even if it's one at a time. I'm proud to say that we partnered with Catholic charities. We had a sweep last week. We kept it sort of hush hush. Uh thank you to the Sheriff's Department who joined in with us. But James, I'm gonna give you two minutes and hopefully I don't know if we got some pictures we can show, but

2:05:44Presentations in the package. So uh James Walters, Administrator for Homeless Programs. Thank you for having me. And just real quickly, uh it was really a historic day in Pasco County, a combined effort among disciplines, among different agencies to come out and really move the needle. And uh we've identified seven areas we made contact in roughly 21 different locations in homeless camps and and moved seven folks off the streets and and into shelter in that one day. We're building that program and we'll bring

2:06:15more successes back to you as we proceed.

2:06:18Great job.

2:06:19Yeah.

2:06:22Okay. We'll send you we'll send you that presentation with some with some pictures there. Yeah, so I

2:06:26was just about to look for it. Is do we have it?

2:06:28It's it's not in the packet. It was it was sent uh separately and so we were gonna show them up there. So my my my my apologies for that. That's all I have, thank you.