Commissioner miscellaneous and hurricane recovery update
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, Oct 11, 2022
The published PDF, as served by the county. This item is one entry in it.
The county’s minutes for Board of County Commissioners, Oct 11, 2022
The published PDF, as served by the county. This item is one entry in it.
What was said
Machine transcription of 7m of recording, with speaker names inferred from voice matching. 100% of 43 lines carry a name. It shows what was said, not what was decided, and both the words and the names can be wrong.
Um so we are not we are still under um Commissioner Miscellaneous, sorry. Um I just took care of my issue. Jack, do you have any items under Commissioner Oak
I'm gonna do mine next meeting, but I would like to know I want the e I need extra time. Of the three two meetings in a row now I'm not getting them down.
I
know
I didn't do mine last week.
Commissioner, I mean uh not Commissioner, Administrator Karbala.
Now just real quick I wanted to thank the team publicly as well as our constitutional partners for the response during Hurricane Ian and that we've sent uh several team members down south to help out in Lee County. Um and then we've also successfully transitioned the jail on October first. There's still a few little minor items that are coming up, but uh the team did a phenomenal job with that uh across the board. So thank you.
Uh Madam Chairman if I could just throw those pictures for down in the Fort Myers Beach. Uh I just want you I just want you to say I went down there yesterday. My I Rotary Club the uh all the r the districts of sixty nine fifty went down from Citrus all the way to Palm Arbor, went down there. Four truckloads and a trailer load going through. Oh wow. This is a picture of a house in a channel. The little green house out there past that little marker? That's a house.
This could have been us.
This could have been us. Take a look at the next picture. Could have been. Look at the destruction. This is across the waterway now from where the island is. That's inland.
More destruction than the right-of-way. Is it raining, Commissioner Mariano?
That's Troy Stevenson right there. Uh go ahead, keep going. See that marker right there? There's a car underneath it. They've got to mark where the car is before they can get the car out. And float into the water. Go ahead. Uh you see an there's a boat upside down in its Mm uh Cavera there.
Is it and this is Fort Myers?
This is Fort Myers Beach, yeah.
My son was lucky.
Keep
going.
Uh you know the other one? Alright, I'll I'll show more pictures next week. Okay. You can actually it's almost it's almost like snow piles on the side of the road with dirt. Yeah. That's gone through.
I saw pictures of uh Fort Myers area with huge yachts, boats piled up on shore.
Yeah. It was uh and I'll tell you what, our
Yeah.
Uh our our Sheriff's deputies were down there. What a phenomenal job they were doing. Conditions were working on. We'll talk about that. Um fired fire team heard they were down there. And um did she have the work they're doing and the conditions. Like you saw the rain? Did you have a There's like twenty of them protecting the island? People coming in, checkpoints coming in and out. protecting it and in the rain under just tarps. Yeah, doing their work. They're sleeping under bleachers down there.
You know when we said mandatory evacuation zone A? Um we absolutely did the right thing. Oh we did. Oh we did. We thought that was coming here. And I can tell you Yeah. I um I told my neighbors don't stay here. And I had so many m ma uh neighbors who were still gonna stay. And I said, your house is gonna be to your roof rafters in your roof. And they were uh still gonna say and I I hope
this is a lesson for those who were gonna stay home in zone eight.
You know, some I said this before, but Kurt Browning, when we first had our first stakeholder meeting, I thought he was tremendous. Yeah. When he said right away, I'll make the schools available so that people in the A, B, or C with their pets could make it there. it gave us the freedom to go mandatory and all the way through. So I think we c we've learned a lot and from what I saw with this, those base flood elevations. Formal idea? Saint Pete actually goes like three feet higher. from the base. We're like a foot higher. So they're doing some things that are great and
I think the lessons learned from that is if we do have something like this coming, When we evacuate the A zone We shut off the water with the sewer, the lights, and get them all out.
Ooh.
That makes them get out.
That
and then
you get back. We'll we'll talk about later on. But I'm telling you, I was so impacted by what I saw.
But uh if you saw the sixty minutes piece on the hurricane and you saw Sid Kitsen speaking from Babcock Ranch, you saw it? And I asked Katie to send you all this email. They didn't lose power. They didn't lose uh uh they might have lost a branch. They have the biggest solar field in the state of Florida with Florida uh power and light. They didn't lose one solar panel and you know why they didn't lose any electricity? Everything's underground.
And in the in the in the in this article that was in the paper Um Uh Tico is putting their lines They're important lines underground. And I just think in Pasco County we should be I mean we've had this great opportunity to have our lines go underground and have our people not lose power. But we don't require it. Well I think we should. And I think we should. I think we need to talk about it. Um because I mean people died
because they didn't have electricity. So uh this uh in Miami after Andrew because my brother went through Andrew. All the lines are underground and they don't have this issue. So I hope that we can have that that conversation too. Um no one else has any commissioner items. I just want to thank our staff for um coming out for the community cleanup in um in the holiday area. We got thirty six tons of trash out of out of one of this done that area. Um
And um I d I did want to mention that at my last FAC conference Uh I had this th they were having this conversation and I said You know, I don't think we've done that. I don't think we've done one septic Conversion in Pasco County and none of the other counties could believe it. And when we're a county that has three rivers going through it and flooding everywhere, and we haven't done one septic to sewer conversion when there's federal money and state money, we're
not getting the job done.
We're
not getting the job done.
And Seapines is okay to do it. They they approved like the project.
Well we there's money out there.
Yeah.
And I asked the administrator to go find out how other places are doing it 'cause they're using federal money and they're using grants and we should be doing it too. So um I'll go over some other fact stuff later. No.
Colleen's on it.