Water safety and swimming lessons

2:23:43Okay. Any questions for staff about anything we've gone through? Okay. I want to bring an idea up off the floor that this could not only affect this year's budget but next year's budget, but I want to bring it up. Uh dealing with water safety. Uh in twenty twenty four we had Reports of Mike and you can help me with the data? Sure. What was 24,

2:24:0625, 26? Yeah, uh one of the things that we talked about, you talked about water safety. I I reached out to our public safety partners, probably 152 uh calls for drownings between 24, 25, and then currently you're today.

2:24:27Okay. So one of the things on our first bullet on strategic priorities that started this off is maintaining public health health and safety. So I know the county is doing a very good job with the scholarships that that does offer Atlanda Lakes and and Hudson. Um Land O' Lakes is a heated pool uh which is a good thing if you wanted to expand the treatment uh uh the the s the Swimming lessons, Hudson would probably need to be upgraded to do the same thing. I think we're good till November to get that done. Um YMCA

2:24:58does swimming lessons. I don't know if the Newport Ritchie Aquatic Center does, but I did reach out to a company called the Seal Swim School. Uh Erin Seal um Grande runs it. I actually called her this morning. Um they would love to get involved with us for water safety. I'm sure Newport Ritchie and the YMC would as well. Um

2:25:22You may not realize but we have four thousand over four thousand s uh students just starting kindergarten this year. No, I've got a three year old grandson which I don't know why he hasn't attended the lessons yet, but he's ready. So I think for we should be looking to s actually teaching kids from let's say three years on up. Um and and get them familiar. My wife told me that used they used to do several programs where they would actually have a mommy and me type program where even a little little age, they're getting the kids used to water and

2:25:52I think that's great too. So I would love to have the parks department kind of work With the groups I've just mentioned. Come up with a plan of what we can do to try to move this program quickly. And I think maybe I I talked to Chuck Lane this morning. So Chuck Lane, bring you up for a second. My think it is uh DR has s the C D B G D R program has certain programs that help for low income families. I know we're talking from eighty to one hundred and twenty percent, AMI. Mike doesn't

2:26:22think this is an expensive program,

2:26:24right? Yeah, not on not off not off the cuff and I I think with just what you're what you're proposing, Commissioner, is trying to uh increase our touch points in the into the community on on teaching kids how to swim, quite honestly. Now we uh we do do have some programs right now at our veterans and and Land O' Lakes pools. We've run about a thousand we've run in the past year and a half about a thousand kids uh through that. They're they're they're cheaper, they're about forty bucks. Uh for a six-week course. We do offer scholarships, but uh we have had community partners say, hey, we want to do a little

2:26:54bit more. And I mean this uh I would like the opportunity to sit with staff and kind of brainstorm on on how we can expand that footprint. As I said, Land O' Lakes, that's all just during the summer, right? If you you start doing year-round in a heated pool, there's there's probably some opportunities there. I think there is certainly a nexus with our public safety, even our response times. Uh Uh you know, a hundred and fifty calls, it's a hundred and fifty less calls to probably what is uh number one preventable death in children. Um that that can be that could be approached. But uh Chuck, uh I know you probably had some.

2:27:25So I wanna say something about SEAL Swim School. One they can start at under three years old and they focus on life. life saving. So at the end of the class, because all my kids went through SEAL, they will have them fully dressed in sneakers going into the pool. So it's not just about teaching how to swim, it's about survival. So when the kids are swimming, if they get tired, they teach them to float on their back. So I can't say enough about SEAL Swim School and I I will just say that you can

2:27:55even start earlier than than three. So any way we can partner with them to make this happen would be great. Another thing is if they do ha um are low income and they have a pool, you know, maybe we can do some type of with this the the money like fencing a baby gate around the pool too. That might be something we explore. So thank you Chair for bringing that up because it really would be amazing if we could do that.

2:28:22Uh Chuck Lane, Office of Disaster Recovery Resources. My compliance team did uh take a quick look at this after I talked to the Chairman this morning and and we do believe we could do we could set up something countywide. I'd like to run that by my my HUD rep. At minimum we could do it in storm in storm-affected areas. There are numerous grants out there uh across the board for this type of thing. My team can look into that and I think we can find a way, if not exclusively C D B G G R we can find a way to to patch it together and fund it. I'd like like you said, uh Mike, I don't think it'd be

2:28:52exp an expensive task. And and because of that I don't think we'd have to worry too much about the low mod benefit um because we can cover that. It just won't

2:29:00Yeah. So we'll we'll take that under under action with our public services team and report back to the board um ASAP. All right, O Chiego?

2:29:08Uh maybe, you know, even if there's funding um, you know, for life jackets or something like that, you know, anything to help assist the families um giving away free life jackets.

2:29:19We'll look into all aspects of it. Yes, thank you.

2:29:21All right, good. I think this I think this would be a great program for us for the future to just uh make it better for our citizens and I think it's definitely what we want to do. Thank you so much for being a good program.

2:29:32Yeah.