Good evening everybody and welcome. We're really glad that you're here. This public hearing was designed to do exactly that.
Hear from the public on your thoughts and ideas about a presentation you are about to receive.
We've done a couple of different things that we'd like for you to participate in as well.
We've got some stickers that we're going to ask you to put on your preferred site at the end of the presentation.
There's also, as you were coming in, there's also a survey that we would appreciate you
filling out, and we'd like them back by the end of this month.
But without further ado, I just want to demonstrate to all of you how important your input is
in this decision-making process.
The Mayor and all four commissioners are here this evening.
Mayor Lund, Commissioner Kennedy, Commissioner Horak, Commissioner Payne, and Commissioner
Toff.
So they are in listen mode tonight.
So once we get the information out, we're trying to be as factual as possible.
We're going to open up the floor to your questions.
We are being both live-streamed and recorded for future publication because, believe it
not as great a turnout as this is, we've still had several people who wanted to
attend, but we're unable. So again, thank you very much for your participation in
this project, and thank you for taking the time out of your schedules in order
to be here. Let me introduce Harvard Jolly and Ward. I'll let you introduce your
team.
Thank you, Gary. Good evening, everybody. It's great to see a good
turnout here tonight. I'm Ward Frisalasky with Harvard Jolly
architecture. With me are two of my colleagues, Phil Trezza, is an architect
with Harvard Jolly and Amy Weber is an architect with Harvard Jolly.
We've got a pretty brief PowerPoint presentation.
It's going to be at 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes tops,
and then we're going to get right into questions and answers.
So we wanted to start on the first slide with a little bit of project background.
And the city buildings were constructed in the 1950s
when residential development started in Treasure Island.
The existing police and fire station are based on departments of only a few officers and volunteers at that time.
The population of Treasure Island has increased by 9,000% since 1950.
The buildings have been renovated several times, but no work has been done recently or substantially.
Approximately $680,000 is needed for repairs to bring the buildings up to a minimum acceptable standard.
but still would not address inefficient layouts, inadequate security, insufficient parking,
or meet FEMA flood requirements.
Not all necessary improvements could be done due to the FEMA substantial rule,
and I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with that 50% rule,
which is really hamper the ability to renovate to a certain extent.
A previous study done by Woodruff Corporation Architects in 1998
rated all of the buildings, other than the community center, fair to poor at that time, 20 years ago.
So we'll talk a little bit about the programming process and how we worked with the city staff to get to this point.
We toured all the existing buildings. We analyzed all the available documentation from over the years.
We did an inventory of the city vehicles and equipment to get a really good feel for what is currently on the ground.
We prepared an organizational chart of the city staff to understand the hierarchy relationships between departments,
because a lot of – we designed buildings organized a lot of times to meet the city needs,
so that helped us understand the city department structure.
We interviewed department leaders about their individual spaces and needs
and the future growth potential for each department.
Next slide.
Then we looked at the existing building conditions.
The buildings are currently at capacity in many cases.
Office is intended for only one person or shared by multiple employees.
Storage is severely lacking in all departments.
The layouts are inefficient and not conducive to a collaborative work atmosphere.
The department organization is confusing and creates security concerns
there is no real clear separation between the public and the staff areas.
The staff is doing a good job with what they have.
It's just that it's difficult to work within the physical limitations that they're dealing with.
There's a lack of adequate waiting space for the public, meeting rooms, and staff break areas.
There's poor ventilation with the HVAC systems.
And then there's frequent maintenance required, whether it's roof leaks or rodent infestation.
So the next slide shows kind of an overall analysis.
We looked at City Hall, Public Works, Police and Fire, and Community Center.
And on the left-hand side is their existing square footages.
And then the right-hand side was the proposed square footages.
So again, we try and kind of tabulate these spaces before we get into any graphic solutions.
So that's where we were at that time, which has since changed a little bit.
So Phil's going to walk us a little bit through more of the detail.
Okay, so looking at the next slide, we identified the programmatic elements or building portions or spaces within the project.
So you can see here we codified it and colorized them.
The yellow space denotes the city hall component.
The green is the public workspace.
space, police in fire naturally blue and red, and we consider those as one space as they
are now, or they're next to each other, but consider those as one block, then there's
the community center we colored that purple you can see and then potentially a parking
garage in gray. So those were our five or six pieces that we looked at and assigned
some spaces sizes to those but then we in conjunction with that we looked at
where these might be located within the city in the downtown area that's where
the next slide comes in and so we looked at a variety of sites the first one is a
site we're standing on right now the existing City Hall police fire public
workspace now that's probably one of the larger the sites just under just
a little over three and a half acres, site A at the top.
Site B is the community center site, probably the largest of the sites, 3.7 acres, rounding
up.
Third, we looked at the public parking area, site C down the bottom left-hand corner, probably
one of the smaller sites.
All three of those, by the way, are owned by the city, but we wanted to look at sites
beyond those just to kind of make sure we're exploring all the options. So we
looked at site D which is the Bank of America site. You can see that kind of in
the middle of that site plan. And we also looked at the odd-shaped site E that
you see next to B which is that sliver of land next to the wall greens and
the lightly shaded area which is a parking lot south of the wall greens
owned by Bill Moore.
So those were the options we looked at, the sites.
And then a little bit of history.
Earlier this year, we worked to develop options for citing those various components on the different sites.
Let's go to the next slide.
Based on that space needs analysis that were developed earlier last year.
And then by early March of this year, our team had narrowed it down to basically eight options.
We had actually developed a dozen or so options, but we culled it down to eight because there
were variations within the options, but got it down to about eight.
And then we worked up some cost estimates for those.
And when we got to those cost estimates, we realized they were really cost prohibitive.
So staff directed us at that point to reexamine the space needs analysis to bring the project
more into a more reasonable budget.
And this slide just talks about the various options where we looked at all the different combinations of where the different programmatic pieces could go.
City Hall, Public Works, Police Fire, if a community center was going to be redeveloped or added on to as well as a parking garage.
So you can see those various options.
Speaking of the parking garage, we worked with a consultant named Tim Haas.
And they went through an exhaustive measure.
They did on-site surveys.
They looked at how people were parking, where they were parking around the downtown area,
and did an analysis.
And basically the bottom line is it really wouldn't generate a net income
no matter which site it was going to be on.
And so in fact the garage would actually operate at a loss of half a million dollars a year.
So it's expensive to build a parking garage.
And so for those reasons, we took it off the table, at least for this scope, to get the project going.
And so we reached these conclusions that you see here, these seven main conclusions.
The parking garage was cost-prohibitive and so that we took that off the table.
We realized that it really would be very efficient to co-locate as many of the city departments as possible
rather than to separate them into separate buildings on disparate sites.
If we could co-locate as many of those elements as possible, we could realize shared spaces,
efficient spaces like meeting rooms and things like that where you don't have to have a meeting
room for every single department if you have a handful of meeting rooms that, you know,
when public work needs it, they use it or when City Hall needs to have it or police
or fire, that kind of a thing.
We also basically looked at the community center as being the newest of all the
city buildings and some decent shape and so at this point we decided not to
incorporate any kind of new new space for that although we will try to again
through the co-locating of spaces look at space that the community
center could use within the combined component combined center number four
purchasing land is not cost-effective as I said you have two or three
properties that are already owned by the city, and so to purchase additional land just, it's not
Not cost effective. We also wanted to look at, as much as possible, pursuing an option that
would create, would only require one move. By that, we mean not having to move out of your
facilities into temporary quarters, which would obviously cost money to prep, to rent out,
and then move again into the new space once that's ready. So if we can come up with
an option that only requires you to move once, that would be ideal.
Number six, options that eliminate the city's available green space are less desirable.
We recognize the value that you take in your community space or green space.
And so if we don't eliminate that, that would be ideal.
And then lastly, reaching a target of about $20 million for the total project budget.
That's everything all in, hard and soft costs.
By that I mean hard costs, construction costs, soft costs, surveying, engineering, testing,
furniture and equipment, all those kinds of costs that you might not see if you're just looking at a construction cost.
So total project costs of about $20 million.
So the next thing we did is try to reduce the overall square footage to reach that $20 million target.
And we did a number of things to seriously cut down on the size of the building.
The first one is we eliminated meeting tables from the director level offices.
Those originally had a small meeting table in each office,
but as Phil said, we can share meeting rooms
and thought that was one way to save some square footage.
The next thing we did is provide open office areas with landscape furniture
instead of enclosed individual offices for all of the staff
with a few exceptions, departments like HR that need
acoustical separation and privacy.
We reduced the conference rooms and collaborative space,
like Phil mentioned, in favor of having just a few shared spaces
for all departments.
And we eliminated the office space that had been provided
for the commissioners and the city attorney,
knowing that they're not there all the time
and they can use the shared meeting rooms
when they need office space.
We also originally had had two sets of IT offices that was necessary when we were looking at a separate police and fire station versus City Hall.
And now that we're looking at all of those being combined, we can eliminate one set of those offices.
We eliminated a space that was provided for the historical fire truck and a truck washing bay for public works.
and also reduce public work storage areas because some of those can be kept
adjacent to the pump station here. Next slide please.
So with all those changes we
were able to reduce the overall square footage from the original building
program of about 75,000 square feet down to 44,000 square feet. That is very
close to what you have altogether now between these facilities but the new
building is going to be much more efficient. Next slide please.
It'll be
more functional, more collaborative, more flexible, better technology, and very
importantly it's going to be built above the floodplain and be hardened. Your
facility here is very susceptible to damage from storms, so it's going to
be important to have a building that can survive storms. So even though the
buildings are going to be about the same size, it will be a much better layout and more efficient.
So we went back to the original eight options that Phil showed you and moved forward with options
seven and eight because they're the only ones that use only city property, so there's no need to
purchase any land. They allow for building one building that's more economical, it's more
efficient for staff to have all those departments co-located and it'll allow
for more flexibility in the future because if departments grow and others
shrink if it's all together and the floor plan is you know open and not too
many structural walls breaking up the space departments can grow and shrink
and as they need to. So both options right now are about 21 million and
And as Phil mentioned, that includes construction costs, soft costs like fees and geotechnical
and surveys and all of those, furniture fixtures and equipment, AV, IT and security systems
and the demolition of the existing facilities.
That cost does not include moving costs or hazardous materials abatement because
we just don't know the extent of what may be required.
And it doesn't include temporary facilities, which would be required for option seven, but not for option eight.
So there is some additional costs there.
So option seven has the building located right here where it is now on the City Hall site.
And that has both options have the police sally port, the fire vehicle bays,
and the Public Works Vehicle Maintenance Bays as the first level.
There's no parking under the building.
And then the next three levels are all of the city departments.
So in this case, that's all located here on the city hall site.
The community center remains as it is on the community park site.
The pump station remains where it is,
and potentially any additional public works storage areas
is in the trash trucks and everything that remain right where they are right now.
Option 8 locates that building on the community park site and in this case the pump station
would remain and all of the trash and public work storage would be located in that same
location but separated and fenced off from a possible waterfront park.
We know that it's a concern to take away the city's green space.
So if this option was selected, we would have the opportunity
to provide some new green space right on the waterfront,
which could be a great thing.
So the two options differ a bit.
The first one did preserve, of course, the community park,
and all the city facilities are on this site, which is familiar,
and everyone's used to that, and it does not require space for stormwater retention.
On the other hand, this site, it allows for two ways in and out for police and fire,
which what we mean by that is the first site, you only have access to 108th Avenue from the site,
whereas in this case you have access to Park Place and 104th Avenue and 105th Avenue,
which just makes it easier for the police and fire to get out in an emergency.
It also allows for all single moves, as Phil mentioned, so you can
build the new facility on the community park site, and
staff can remain in these buildings while it's under construction, and then
just move once over to community park, whereas in the other case
you would have to have temporary facilities, which is an extra expense.
This one does allow the new building
to be co-located with the community center so although we're not building a new community
center there will be some space available for recreation in the new building and it'll be
much more convenient if they're co-located on the same site and it allows for a possible
waterfront park.
So in terms of next steps we're doing the public input meeting right now
and there are surveys available on the city's website along with this presentation and other
presentations in the past about this project and the staff will present the public input
on the different alternatives and what comes up in today's meeting at the Commission meeting
on August 7th and then request final site approval.
So you should have been provided with a sticker which you can place on the option that you
prefer and will be available to answer questions also.
Good. Thank you, Amy. Phil's going to have the microphone here. We'll open it up for questions.
If you want to raise your hand, Phil, why don't you walk over and maybe we'll take someone right over here.
Let's go back to slide 7 and 8. Go back a few slides.
A lot of things might be hard to do with them looking at the lights, but okay.
Let's start in the front row and then I'll work my way back.
I'm kind of new to this area, however, on that street that goes by the community center is 104.
This is where I live.
There's a lot of traffic that comes down through there and goes around by the public.
And even crossing the street, you just about get ran over.
Now, the other question is, no one owns that big old building on the other side where it was a bank.
Do you know that big old glass building?
The one across from the parking, it's across from the beach parking thing and across from Publix.
Yeah, there's nobody not owning it, it's empty.
It's high and empty, it's glass.
Yeah, I think, I might be able to address that.
I believe you're referring to the Allied building,
and that's not for sale as far as we're concerned.
We did the city to ask us to look into that in the beginning.
We don't believe that's available right now.
But your other question, I think, was concerned about traffic, both cars and pedestrians.
Okay, so we will, right now this is early on in the study,
And so we will be looking into traffic trip generation with our civil engineer,
and we'll be looking at pedestrian pathways.
We'll have to take all those things into account.
Those are good comments.
What happened here in this area?
Well, it depends on which option the City Commission does.
One option is to put the facilities here.
The other option is to put it over at the Community Center Park.
If it's over at the Community Center Park, then that opens up opportunities.
One of them is perhaps a Green Park, Waterfront Park.
We're going to move on to another question. I see this gentleman here.
Thank you. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to present our views and for this presentation that you're doing.
I'm curious on a couple, there's a couple of things I want to mention.
The one is the original proposal for 77,000 square feet at 20 million
has been reduced to 44,000 square feet at 21 million.
I don't get the math.
I could answer it real quickly.
The first scheme was a lot more than 20 million,
and so we reduced the square footage to get it down to that 20 million mark.
The second thing I wanted to mention was that
This is a very pedestrian, using the park as this lady already mentioned,
it's a very pedestrian oriented area.
A lot of people from hotels and the surrounding area on foot,
dogs and so on being walked.
And I think personally that locating a facility like you're indicating,
especially with emergency vehicles, in that area is a hazard
as well as a bad use of prime real estate.
The city does have real estate
where they've got the tennis courts and golf course down that area.
The police are anyway in their vehicles, so it shouldn't impact them.
And I think that would take away a lot of the pressure
of the noise and the hazard
of having the type of facility that you're describing
right smack bang in the heart of the tourist area
as well as it may not be aesthetically pleasing
but that's another story.
So I would suggest that if the city is looking at building
on its own property, other options they could consider
was selling some of that owned property
which is not being put to any good use as I can tell
and maybe acquiring you with the funds that they could raise from selling off
some of that real estate, acquiring another location that would have less
impact in the parkland area, if I can call it that, the park area. Thank you very
much. Thank you. Let's come over here.
Thank you for your presentation. I'd like
to know where are we going to come up with the funds to, okay, yes I'm sorry, where are
we going to come up with the funds to for this project? Where are we going to come up
with the 20 million? Okay, we're going to be, this is the first step, so we wanted
public input, City Commission wants public input to decide on the site, the site will
have ramifications on the cost, will then be able to move to the next steps
to hone in on more, this is an estimate right now, and we'll be working closely
with the city to look at different options for cost, so that's yet to come, but that's
obviously going to be an important part of the follow-up after this.
Great.
Can I ask, are they consider what this might do to property values on 104th if they stick
a police station in our park, fire engines, and a big municipal complex?
I mean, a lot of people live there because of the park.
Why would they do that when they have enough space here?
What about our property values?
Right now, I can't answer that specifically because, again, this is a study to look at options,
but we were tasked to look at multiple options, and so now we're getting public input. Thank you.
I was a little disheartened to find out that we only have choice one or choice two.
What about multi-locations dividing our facilities up? St. Pete Beach does it.
Madeira Beach does it. I mean, I don't understand why you want your trash and everything together.
your recreation center all in one big lump. That's not safe. It's not sanitary. It's
confusing. It adds to the traffic congestion.
We have other properties we can use. Treasure Bay over there is not being utilized.
We can move our whole rec center over there.
We could develop our community center. We could develop this.
Why does everything have to be in one big block and only have choice one or choice two?
I think we really need to look at multiple locations and above all we need to preserve our park.
Our park is precious. You'll find 100 people here, 100%.
Nobody is going to let you sacrifice our park. It's our identity.
It's what gives our presence and our character to Treasure Island.
Please save our park, look at other options. They're there.
Site one and two, it's just too short-sighted. We have other facilities.
Divide it out a little bit. It just makes sense.
Okay. Thank you.
Just before we take the next question, we did look at multiple sites.
As Phil and Amy mentioned, it was a lot more costly to build a bunch of individual projects.
But again, we're all hearing what you're saying, and we appreciate your comments.
Before I ask some more questions, I want to say one thing to that lady who just talked.
I live in Isle of Palms, and we're right now fighting to keep our Triangle Park,
so I hate to see us even considering losing another park.
So y'all need to think real long and hard about your parks.
But I want to say a couple of things.
First of all, I'm an engineer and I know I don't like when people say certain things to me,
but I'm going to say to you guys your plans lack creativity.
You don't have enough different options for you to really consider what is best for the city.
I know FEMA issue is a problem, but there are buildings here that could potentially be rehabbed,
need the FEMA requirements and not have to go through these high expense,
tear some of them down, maybe change some of them, do some other creative things,
and use the property that we have today.
The other thing is you had some numbers that have just confused me on the square footage.
You're saying there's some efficiencies, Amy, in the layout.
But that takes us to where?
Today? Where are we going to be in 10 years?
Where are we going to be in 15 years?
How far out have you guys considered all of this?
you need more creativity as you go through this and think about this. Number
three, the park. You're going to have to, everybody saw on there, there's a little
blob over there, it's a pond. Okay, it's a storm water pond. So I know what you
have to do in order to put the building there. You're wasting valuable open
space in our park just so you can handle storm water while it can be
handled here without a pond. Everybody needs to understand what's on those
drawings.
How long is this going to take to build so we all understand what the
cost ramifications are? Is this a two-year project and we're going to
spend $20 million over two years? Why is a one-stop or one move so
important? Because if it's going to take two or three years to build and do all
this, you're going to have to have temporary anyways. So let's do one that
makes sense and has creativity involved with it so that everybody can
continue to do their jobs around here and we can also pay for this over a more
reasonable time period because we're the tax pay we're the ones going to get
stuck with the bill.
I'm just curious I think a lot of us are here because we
found out about this when we saw a 20 million dollar complex being built in
Treasure Island is there like a breakdown of the estimate how did we
come up with 20 million dollars are we just supposed to you know do we have
anything to look at reference the price? Yes the answer is yes we have a
breakdown we'd be happy to provide that we provided to the city you know at this
level there's not a lot of detail so we're looking at construction costs on
a cost per square foot basis for the building for site work and has already
been mentioned for all of the other soft costs so we do a lot of these
types of projects we have recent bid numbers and so we feel pretty
comfortable with cost. We're trying to be a little bit on the conservative side, but
yes, there's a breakdown.
We've provided to the city if the city wants, we can make sure
that it's nice, clear, easy to read format.
There's another question back here.
Has anybody commissioned a study for the future growth of Treasure Island and how
that might impact these proposals?
Well, that was part of our task was to look at that, and we worked closely with the city
and department heads to look at growth. We looked at past growth, we're looking at future growth,
trying to understand how growth really affects departments because it affects some departments
more than others. So that was all factored into it. We're also trying to be economical.
So, you know, as we looked at trying to tighten the square footage up to be more economical.
So it's a little bit of a balancing act looking to make sure that we not only meet today's needs,
but meet some reasonable projections for the future, but also that we're concerned about taxpayer dollars.
So we put all of those into the mix when we come up with these ideas.
I saw a comment on this side of the room.
So just a quick question and a statement.
So you proposed that it could be an additional park, a waterfront park.
I'd just like to make sure we're all clear.
It could also be additional business, additional condos and complexes.
Is that correct and true?
It could be either one of those, yes?
You know, the City Commission will ultimately decide, based on input, where the building is going to go
and what happens with the other land.
I can't really answer.
I understand that question.
Well, then my next statement is to the City Commissioners and the Mayor.
Thank you very much for this forum.
I think you're seeing some of the viewpoints that the residents are having.
And one thing I just want to say, on the slide that said number seven, losing our green space is a less than desirable approach.
I think if you listen to what we're saying, it's a number one desirable approach right now.
We do not want to lose our green space. We don't want more businesses and more condos coming in.
So I hope you hear this and thank you very much.
I would like to thank all the citizens that are here to support, you know, whatever the city decides to do, but I do appreciate you being here.
And I don't want to be crass when I say this but it looks like the city was trying to just kind of
Steamroll this thing right underneath all the citizens
You saw a little blurb in the beacon if you didn't read that and I personally walked in city hall
I asked the gentleman young lady at the desk. I said, what's this meeting about a new city hall neither one
I knew anything about it and
I asked we sent an email to Gary
He did put it on the board finally up until last week. There wasn't a single notice on the board
This park has been here. I've been coming down here since I'm six years old, folks.
That's a long time. This park has been there as long as I can remember.
I had some friends in town last weekend. They said, man, you've got a great park.
This park in Treasure Island, we're known for that. It's green space.
Once it's gone, it's gone. Let me tell you, when they put a retention pond
for all that business and all these houses, oh boy, yeah, yeah.
You're not going to like what you get. My home was built in the 50s.
Over the last five years, I remodel it.
I'm very happy with it.
I say we remodel and move on.
Thank you.
Well, Phil is going over to that next speaker.
I just wanted to clarify something, the gentleman previously asking about this,
changing to something else, condominiums or those.
That would take a city referendum.
So there is certain control that the citizens still have in that process.
So I just wanted to clarify that.
This gentleman just touched on something that I don't think we've had any discussion about,
and that's an option three.
what about just renovating what we have?
I mean, nobody talked about renovating,
and that could be considerably less expensive than building new buildings.
Yeah, we have, but that was our first option that we looked at,
and there were previous architectural studies,
even prior to us, that have looked at that over the years.
Unfortunately, there's a few things that are happening.
One is the FEMA flood elevation.
Do you have to take a look?
For those of you, I'm sure probably most of you are familiar with 50% rule.
You value the structure's value, not the land value, just the structure's value.
And you can't put more than 50% into that building before you have to raise the building and start over.
So we looked at those issues as well as what would that do, even if we could do it, even if FEMA allowed us to do it.
You're still going to now put money into a building that's very susceptible to flooding.
I mean a Category 1, maybe not even a Category 1 would flood.
You don't have efficient layouts. You don't have all of those things.
So that's what kind of led to this, to where we're at right now with studies.
But we did look at it long and hard.
I saw a comment over here.
My question was the position that Publix has taken.
Because of 104th, there's a lot of congestion already,
and I just wondered if you had gotten any input from Publix.
We have not gotten any input from Publix.
You know, the process so far was to work with city staff to a point, bring it to the city commission.
We did that, and then we want public input.
So after that, you know, based on information tonight and talking with the city manager staff and the city commission,
you know, we'll take the next steps.
But we thought it was more appropriate to talk to the commission and then to you before we talk to anybody else at this point.
Let's go over here.
But thank you.
I mean, there'll be other people, stakeholders, that'll be important to talk to.
Thank
you for taking my question.
Tonight is the first time we've heard of Harvey Jolly, so I was wondering if they were contracted pursuant to an RFP.
If so, when did the RFP go out? In other words, how long has this been in the planning stages?
Secondly, what is the criteria for a referendum?
The first question, Harvey Jolly, we're a local architectural firm.
We're based out of St. Petersburg. We've been in business for 80 years.
And so we went through the RFP process.
There were multiple different architectural firms that submitted.
We went through that process of submitting a book.
You know, I can't remember exactly, but then it was been a kind of diligent process of collecting all of the data,
going through the programming, looking at site options.
And ultimately, we've made several presentations to the City Commission.
city commissions prior to this city commission.
So we've been working closely with the city for a year.
Over a year.
But multiple different city commission meetings.
The criteria for a referendum, okay, and I'm not an expert at your charter,
so I don't know if Gary wants to help out,
but I know one thing is clear that you cannot sell city property,
waterfront property, without a referendum.
So I was trying to answer that gentleman's question a little bit more directly.
That was the trigger point. The trigger point was the gentleman was concerned about something here.
The gentleman was concerned about something going on here that isn't necessarily park land that the city would sell it.
We couldn't do that without going back to the population for a referendum.
That was the criteria I was talking about.
We would need a referendum to do anything other than what we're doing on it now.
Thank you, Gary.
Did you have a question?
My question was simple.
It was reference to something some may else ask.
This building's been here since 1950, correct?
1950.
The building's been here since 1950.
I believe that's correct.
Yeah.
How many times has it had to be repaired from hurricane damage?
Or has it flooded in the years that it's been here?
Because it's still here.
Yeah.
We haven't been hit by a hurricane.
The last hurricane in this area is 1921.
So, you know, it's anybody's guess as to, well, we didn't have Hurricane Force winds here,
thankfully.
Somebody else?
And I'm new to Treasure Island, so this is all kind of new to me, and I appreciate everybody being here and the insights.
But has anybody looked east of here for sites, for possible sites?
I mean, why are we taking, maybe we're talking about the two prime spots in a very small area.
We're talking about taking two prime spots for government buildings.
Is there no other real estate east of here, across the bridge, that could be utilized?
I spent 15 years as a consultant working for Walmart, and in Bentonville,
they run a $600 billion company out of old warehouses.
I mean, it just seems like we're trying to build a Taj Mahal, and it just seems like
there's some other alternatives that we haven't even looked at for the office, as I would think.
I'm just curious if, you know, have we looked at doing something else with leaving the park where it is?
I mean, you could sell this land that we're setting on and go buy a whole lot of, you know,
if that was really what you wanted to do.
You could sell this to developers and go buy any kind of land to actually build office space on.
Thank you.
We looked at the sites that were in the presentation.
That was kind of our task with the City Commission at that time.
We looked at the sites that were on the diagram.
If you're referring to sites out of town, east of here?
No, we did not.
Yeah, I mean, do the government offices have to be right on sort of the island in the prime real estate?
I guess that's the question.
I
would like to know who has the final say in this decision, the residents or the commission.
Will the city commission ultimately...
Well, ultimately, city commission is going to make a decision. How they're going to involve the public, that's really up to the city commission. That's not for us to answer.
But this is great. The turnout here is great. This is exactly what we expect. It's early in the process. You're giving us feedback. And this is, as architects, is exactly what we would expect.
and I'm sure the mayor and the commissioners thrilled that you had this turn out.
We appreciate you taking the time to come out here.
Let's keep it moving around and then we'll come back to Elvis.
This is going to be very, very quick.
I'm Dolores Grangeman. I've lived here since 62, raised by children here.
Now my grandchildren come. They love this area. They love it. They love it. They love it.
And I just, I'm not Mr. Jolly. Is that your name, Jolly?
No, but that's our, one of our founding partners, Lancer Jolly.
This is a deference to the engineer who mentioned creativity and foresight.
Wasn't it Harvard Jolly that did the pier downtown, which destroyed the charm of the old St. Petersburg on the pier?
And that building is gone. And then I do remember a few years ago, I believe it was your firm,
that wanted to put a commercial attraction down at that beautiful Fort De Soto.
It was an English city or some kind of a thing, and it was voted down.
So that's the only thing I do respect, the engineer mentioning creativity and foresight.
If you follow the news, parks are being just spoken of so beautifully all over the country
now, and as a gentleman said, when the green space is gone, it's gone.
We have talked about just those two locations, and someone brought up another location.
And as anybody looked at the, I hate to say this,
but the club at TI over there,
that's a huge piece of property with an existing building.
And it certainly could accommodate all this
and be added on to and still have park space over there
with tennis courts.
I don't know whether, I think Bill Edwards owns it.
I don't know whether he would sell it,
but everything is for sale.
And it would require an addition and probably fire and police out by the street,
but it still would be a prime piece of property that's underused right now.
I personally don't like having just two choices and I have a little beam that I got to put on one or the other.
I think we should have started this discussion a year ago and got all the input before we spent all the money getting all this done.
I think we need at least two more choices.
One of them, Heidi, has done a beautiful plan
to use both spaces, leaving open space all over town.
So it might be a couple more things we want to look at before we get
through A or B.
Okay. Thank you.
In the back of the room here?
I don't know if this was already asked, because I missed the beginning of it.
But do we think about maybe just going up with this building and just having a second floor
and that way, you know, it would help with the flooding if that would happen and then just build up?
I mean, has that been looked at?
This building was not designed to go up vertically, so that's not possible to do that.
If it was, that would be an option.
Thank you.
Can I hold it?
Oh, well, okay.
Oh, I'm not used to it.
If I recall, didn't we have a referendum,
I don't know what year it was recently,
where we, they wanted a new city hall then,
because everybody down the beaches
was getting a brand new building
so they could have their computer to work at.
You know, the most things we need
are out in the community for our trash pickup,
our fire and our police department
that we still have, by the way.
A lot of people got rid of the police department and went with the sheriff's department.
Then our fire department also buddied up with Madeira Beach.
They work hand in hand.
Because we shot down the density.
Because the higher you go in the buildings, you've got to have a taller ladder
to go save the people up top if they have a fire.
I don't like having the choices we have either.
And, you know, you see, you don't know who's going to pay for it.
Well, tomorrow and the next day, there's some kind of budget meetings I read online.
It's already something, you already have some data, I presume.
You don't say, well, I'm just going to build this, or I'm going to dream this,
and then I'm going to figure out how to pay for it,
because that's not fair to the people of the society we live in, the community.
And I love the engineer there about the creativity.
Well, if it's not built, tear part of the building down and make it go up.
The lady, the commissioner, Horace, is that her name, Horace?
Horac. Horac.
I was concerned about lack of space, but did I see we were going down to the square footage to equal this just about?
She said, we had lack of space, no seating areas for waiting for people like you're in
a hospital, you have to wait in a waiting room, no seating area, no office space, and everybody,
the sick syndrome.
Did somebody come in, and say, you got to shut down because people can't breathe right
here?
Being a nurse, you know, I find that, you know, my house could be bad if I don't
So I think we need to revisit this whole thing and not just get a new building.
Maybe tear part of it down and build up or something.
I yield back to this engineer gentleman he wanted to speak.
I yield back to you, sir.
I just want to reiterate what she's saying here.
I mean FEMA does not, the FEMA rule does not need to be the end-all.
You showed square footage, you want to go up in square footage by probably less than 10%,
But FEMA allows you to do a 50% rule.
I believe if you use some creativity you can find a way to use this particular area we have right now today.
Make some modifications and make it work and give these people a great place.
I love this city hall area here.
I come down here for building permits all the time and stuff and the people are so friendly.
It's just a nice little hometown feel and we need to maintain it.
And I hate to see you go into some Taj Mahal thing that's going to ruin that.
And I know you want to make it to where it's a one move, but I don't think it has to be
I don't think FEMA has rule has to be an end-all and I don't think a one move has to be the end-all
I think you just go back to the drawing board and think a little bit about it
We don't want to lose a part. I think that makes more sense than everybody else can rule however you want to rule in my mind
That's a better deal and just use some creativity and try to make these buildings work
Or maybe you tear one of them down and make it better while you expand on the other one the police and the fire
you show the smallest square footage increased by them and I can drive by
here every day and I see that parking lot on the other side of the police
station half full. So I know there's square footage that you could probably get
over there. Just use your your minds and your creativity and make a work.
Thank
you.
It appears that everybody doesn't want to give up green space but if I'm
making a decision on this I'd like to have more than two choices. I'd like
to see, I'm not going to say four or five, but it could be multiple locations and what's
wrong with using the space in Treasure Bay, and that's my opinion.
Thank you.
Let's go to the back.
Hi,
thank you.
I just had a couple of questions on cost.
Excuse me, if we could, she's trying to speak, if we could kind of have it quiet.
We're going to stay around at the end if people want to kind of come up to us individually
if you want to talk, but thank you.
I wondered in your, in the budgeting,
did the options, considering, thank you,
considering redoing the roads anywhere in there
because you won't be able to handle the traffic,
that intersection at 104th and Gulf Boulevard
is the second busiest,
the other one being central or 107th and Gulf Boulevard,
which is smack in this right in the middle
of the two busiest intersections we have.
So in your budgeting, have you allotted any money for redoing the roads
and does that require for the roads to be widened to handle the extra?
Because if you've got police coming out in a hurry
and fire trucks coming out in a hurry on a small two-lane road
with pedestrian crosswalks within 10 feet on one side
and 25 yards on the other side
and multiple pedestrian crosswalks with these large vehicles coming in and out in emergency situations,
I would assume you would have to do something else with the roads.
And I wondered if that was included in the budget.
My second question is the cost of the park that we may have included in the budget for moving it over to,
If it's moved to the TI, the current TI park is the cost of this park included in what we're paying.
Also, looking under your bullets of the things that you think would be best, your best choices,
I noticed that, okay, losing the park was one that was not desirable.
Having your everything in one location was desirable for obvious reasons.
I agree for obvious reasons.
However, you are separating out all of your public works and all of that is being separated out,
which also would be of limited appeal at a waterfront part to be surrounded by dump trucks
and garbage trucks and the pumping station.
I had another question also on the retention ponds.
I've been listening, that's why I waited.
on the retention ponds.
Will the retention ponds always have water in them
or only storm water?
And what happens to all the soggy mess that kind of happens?
I know Greg has lived at the tides for quite some time.
He's new to Treasure Island. He's not new to the area.
He's lived at the tides for quite some time
and they have them at the tides
and they create a great problem there.
There's, as you know, a marshy area smells and draws insects, mainly mosquitoes.
Even though when the water is in there, it is being aerated.
But when there's not enough water to be aerated and it's only flat on the bottom in puddles and spots,
that does draw mosquitoes and insects.
And lastly, it's not your job to tell us how the funds will be raised,
but I'm sure that our city manager or mayor or commissioners have had conversation about this
before they spent all the money over 18 months ago, started all this project,
and could they perhaps give us an idea of what their plans are?
Okay, you have lots of questions there, so let me try and remember one at a time.
No, I may ask you to do that if I need some help.
Starting out with site costs, we have site costs included.
We don't have any off-site costs included.
We didn't want to get too far down the road without meeting with the public,
meeting with the commission trying to determine where we're at.
So we will take a look at that and see if there are any other off-site costs.
We have a civil engineer, so we'll follow up with that.
Yes, with the roads. Yes, yes, ma'am.
So all the other costs are in there, site costs are in there.
In terms of accounting for cause for the park here,
if it were to move over to the community center,
we have not done that only because we weren't sure the level of detail.
So right now we're just showing it as a green field, so to speak.
But we also didn't show if it was built on this property
the requirements for temporary moving space.
So we do have to ultimately, when there's a certain direction to go in,
we have homework to do no matter which option is looked at.
We're going to do geotechnical engineering, understand what that is.
We have a civil engineer, so we'll come up with stormwater that's appropriate.
I don't have an exact answer on that, but we'll be working in those details
as we move forward with any option that there is, because we have to deal with stormwater.
We do have some stormwater credits on this property,
and that's why it was referred to as not having to do as much stormwater on this property
as the other one, although we still have to think about flooding,
just because you don't have to deal with stormwater, it doesn't mean that it doesn't go someplace
as to go someplace.
So did I answer all of them?
There
is no water in them at some times.
Is that correct?
Well, we would strive to have them dry, but it all depends on the testing that we do,
where the groundwater table is, how we handle it.
There's a lot of different ways to handle stormwater.
So I just don't have any.
We're not at that level of detail yet, but we will be addressing it.
And there'll be more meetings, so hopefully we'll get a good turnout like this again.
We'll have the final vote on the plan that's been presented tonight.
The commission has, but ultimately in the city the commission has authority.
So the people here will not have a final vote on it or say so?
Yeah, I'm not saying that. I don't know that.
The reason I said, we appreciate all you people turning out here,
and I'm not a member of the city council at all,
but I would say there's probably a hundred people in here.
And if each, as you just hear sirens go down the street, fire trucks and ambulances,
And if each person here lost $50,000 in home value at 100 people here, in my estimation
in calculating this, that's a $5 million loss just in real estate property.
I hope the council takes all this into consideration.
I'm sure you will because you have a lot of intelligent people on this committee.
Okay, to consider these flows here because they have a tremendous investment.
You have a great community here.
Let's try to keep it.
Thank you.
Why the City Council isn't up there next to you and answering some of these questions?
There will be City Commission meetings where they will have plenty of time.
Right now I believe they see it as a forum for the public to speak and they're listening.
And I appreciate them being here. I'm sure all of you do too.
Has there been a date set that they will make a decision to the City Council on what site that they will choose?
I believe that they're looking in around September, but a date has not been set yet.
Yes, but I think since that was posted, I think they're thinking that they might want a little bit more time
and make sure people are back from summer vacations and things like that.
So I think from what I'm hearing tonight, they want to give ample time to be able to make that decision.
Thank you for noticing that.
Is this the question that can be put through a referendum?
I'm sorry, the question again?
Is this a question that could be put to a referendum?
You know, I don't know. We're architects, so we're coming up with ideas and solutions,
and we're going to work with the city, but I can't answer that question.
Hi. My wife and I have lived here since 95. We love it.
But from our perspective, the way this has been presented to us is a choice between
an amputation or a sharp stick in the eye.
I would like to think there's a better solution utilizing a portion of these buildings that they have not presented us with.
Anybody here from Publix, and there needs to be, because Publix, every day I see at least five big trucks coming down 104th.
The only way they can deliver their food is to pull into Park Place, which to me would be over just a block.
There's no other way for them to back in there and deliver their groceries.
And they're huge trucks, and I'll make sure that we get a hold of Publix.
Because this is ridiculous.
a
firetruck or even around one of those trucks, those public trucks, a firetruck or a policeman.
Thank you. Given the sentiment and the views of everybody expressed here, there seems to be a unanimity about having limited choices
and I'd like to propose that we do not vote tonight. We do not use these blue stickers and we table that for another meeting.
I
just want to, I forgot the person in the front who mentioned about widening your streets.
TAP is going through a major study right now because of that terrible tragedy on Bayshark Boulevard
where a woman and child were killed, and that's what four lanes now four or five.
And what I heard is that the more lanes you put on residential streets,
the danger of increased speed occurs and so Tampa is going through a major
study now of their streets so I don't think you want to consider adding lanes
to your residential streets. Thank you.
Bob Menning I am the most recent ex-mayor
of the town and it's great to see the wonderful turnout that's here this
evening and people voicing their opinions believe me it's since I was
involved in the in the city. I don't think I've seen an audience this large for anything so my
congratulations to all of you for doing that. If I could just have a show of hands, how many people
here are in the vicinity of 104th and the community center. Okay, now I understand why the the
interest. How many people here are from Paradise Island? Okay, I would venture to say that if
If the proposal was to build the facility over at the rec center, that this room would probably
be just as crowded or just as well attended by folks from that area.
My point in saying all this is you have to recognize that not everybody is going to be
happy with whatever decision is made.
It just doesn't work that way.
Please.
Hey, wait a minute.
I'm speaking.
No, I'm not, sir.
Let's let him speak.
Can I speak please?
You've had your time. I give my time.
Thank you.
The folks here have expressed different opinions about different alternatives.
They've also expressed opinions about the studies that were done were not in-depth studies and were not sufficiently creative to look at all the alternatives.
I don't agree with that.
Harvard Jolly has done an excellent job.
The City Department of Public Works has done an excellent job.
As well as the residents, this project has been ongoing for at least two years, even longer.
And so there's been plenty of opportunity with the meetings that we've had at the Commission
for input from the residents throughout this process.
However, it is nice to see everybody here invoicing an opinion.
But I again stand by my word that as this thing boils down, let me say one more thing.
In terms of growth, Treasure Island is built out.
What you see going on in Treasure Island is residents being torn down or redeveloped,
and if they're being redeveloped, they're being redeveloped to the FEMA regulations.
We are constrained as a city by the FEMA regulations.
We've said it umpteen times this evening.
If that doesn't suffice, I suggest that you try and take a look at the FEMA regulations,
apply them to what we're discussing this evening,
and see if there's some creative way and opportunity to utilize the facilities we had.
The City Commission two years ago made the decision, rather than put $700,000 into this building,
that we retired of putting money down a rat hole.
And it was time to look at and confess to the fact that this building is antiquated,
it's outdated, it's not in compliance with FEMA, it's not hardened,
And it really doesn't meet the needs of a city as we move forward.
So with that said, I again stand by it.
Some of the folks will be happy with the decision wherever it is,
and some of the folks in the city will not be happy. Thank you.
Thank you.
The only comment I would like to have to make is I go to 99% of all commission meetings.
If there is three people in the commission meeting, that's a crowd.
This has been advertised when they had it twice in front of the commissioners in the last couple months.
You can go online, look at the agenda, and if you think you would like to talk about that particular item,
you have every opportunity to.
And I don't think maybe I recognize two or three people in this whole audience.
Someone I heard, someone said, how come we didn't know about it?
Well, here is your key word, 6-4-4.
That is the government channel.
You can watch reruns.
You have to be able to get it because that's part of the community government spectrum.
I use the word spectrum.
You have to have the box.
You have to be able to get channel 644.
And if you don't know about that, shame on you all.
So, look at, when you go home, go look at 644.
This, one of the meetings for the commissioners about the site plan might already be rescheduled.
And we're going to have recycling issues.
There's a lot of issues.
So if you want to be involved, don't be involved at the ninth hour, the twelfth hour.
Go to the commission meetings. Thank you.
I
appreciate your comment on that.
And if this has been going on for two years, shame on me.
But I get a text message and a phone call every time the bridge is broken.
Can I not get something on a $20 million project in my local community telling me that this is happening?
I'm sorry, I still work.
I can't, I don't monitor all the different channels or can't go to every meeting.
But I just found out about this and I live here.
So I don't know why we can't communicate better when I seriously get a text every week for something that's going on around here.
I'm sorry I don't hear your name, but did you not mention that this was in the very early stages of development and that you were looking for public input?
That doesn't sound like the ninth hour to me.
Yeah, there I think what she was referring to is we had previous meetings with the city commission to report on the condition of existing buildings, programming, leading up to site analysis and now.
So there's still a long way to go, but she is correct. There have been multiple different city commission meetings over the last year to two years.
What brought about the necessity of having a whole new building of $20 million worth?
Because from what I read, and like I heard about it from somebody on Madeira Beach too,
I didn't hear about it anywhere else either and shame on me and I live here,
because I remember when they wanted to build a new city hall a couple years ago
and the land density thing again.
And as far as I know, you're rushing this now through,
and then a commissioner meeting is August 7th.
Is that correct?
That's what the website said.
And then the final site approval is August 21st.
So where are we?
And tomorrow there's meetings with the,
the meetings about the budget.
So you don't know already about the building?
Some things are wrong.
I believe every city commission now is going through budget hearings.
I don't know in overall budget hearings.
So that's probably what you're referring to in the next few days.
I'm not aware. We're not attending those meetings.
I don't know what the discussion is on this building.
But the process we go through is looking at existing buildings,
looking at whether you should renovate or add on or build new.
It's a typical process we go through.
Look at how much space you need.
And not until you get to this point, can you really tell what the costs are?
The costs are still, an estimate, still preliminary.
So the City Commission is just grappling with this.
As you're hearing it, you're dealing with those things when it kind of decide site selection,
where are we going from here, where we can help fine-tune those costs.
What you presented that I think I saw, and you had to scale it down from 77,000 square feet to 44,000.
And this is 43,000 according to your chart.
The overall city facilities.
Yes, 43,000, and so you're going to go up another 1,000 for 20-some million dollars.
It would be all new.
Because they need more space. There's a lack of space for storage.
Okay. As we presented, these are inefficient buildings. With a new building, you do a few things.
You not only build it to FEMA regulations, so you don't have to worry about storms as much.
Hardened building, efficient building, and all of those types of things.
A new comment back here.
I think Madera Beach just built an entire new complex very similar to what we're proposing.
Do you know how much that costs them because we can look at that in a completed project
and relate to a cost of?
Do you know how much?
I don't have the exact numbers, but we are using some of those numbers
and trying to find out what the construction costs were interpolate.
Of course, that was done at a different time
when costs were different.
a little bit cheaper. Right now construction costs are going up, so we have to factor that
in, but we are looking at that complex and even talking with the contractor that built
that
To try and interpolate those costs and how they compare to these costs, so we are doing
that.
Nobody is saying that nobody here knows how much they spent in total.
We did have those numbers. I don't have them at my fingertips.
Was it 20 million?
I don't believe it was 20 million because I don't think their facilities were as big.
I don't believe that they didn't have to deal with police. They dealt with City Hall
fire station so we're dealing with more components but we are looking at that
we obviously look at that yeah we're looking at all different would be a
good frame of reference for everybody who's interested in Treasure Island to
drive over there I've been over there just once but I wasn't aware of it and
it would be if that cost 18 million we get a comparison just by walking
through it yeah we're looking at that as well as other buildings that we've
built so we and you have to interpolate.
Yeah, just to piggyback on the comment of the residents not being informed, I
think the relevant point is we're here now. There's a general consensus of our
concerns and the problems that we face. I think you really need to listen to
us now. This is not the ninth hour. We have a consensus of concerns, the
park utilizing other spaces. So please listen to us. You know, let's back
up. Let's go slow. Let's look at other choices. We're here now. We're
speaking up. Please listen. We are and we appreciate you being here.
Can you hear in the back?
How much more congested do you want 104th and 106th Avenue to become?
It's difficult to get out of your own driveway now with the traffic.
Can you residents tolerate more noise from the police, fire, and ambulance 24 hours a day
in addition to the present existing noise? The sirens can be tolerated
from 108th Avenue, but not 104th Avenue.
104th Avenue is a residential area.
It will be extremely noisy and busy 24 hours a day.
It will look terrible to have the buildings fill the park
and also inappropriate.
I
have a couple of architectural questions
rather than government questions.
What are... I need to get an idea
of how big this building is going to be.
So can you give me if it 100 by 200 and we're going up to stories or what for that?
It's the first level would be
Bays what we call base so so you have the the firetruck bays
You have a bay for police which called the Sally port and you have a vehicle maintenance bay for public works
Above that would be three levels. Okay, but the actual building dimensions
Not counting going up, but the surface the land area not the aerial but the land area
Is it like a hundred by two hundred or what is that dimension for one?
You know we haven't designed that yet now you can see to scale you could see
Approximately how it is on that piece of land, but that box could be skinnier and longer
If we have to design a building yet the building has not been designed. That's a conceptual footprint that is generally
actually denotes a floor plate. It's not been designed, it's just a plate board.
But it is to scale on that property.
For what the scale was. Because if we take in consideration what the citizens are saying, and I have to admit, I'm one that's for green space too.
But that's something internal, that's not your problem.
What I would like to know, if we were to build on this site,
is there any way that we could segment our three stories up
and do so much so that maybe we wouldn't have to displace employees for so long,
and then you tear down a building and then you can keep on adding on to it
so that maybe the moves wouldn't be quite as bad,
because moves are very disruptive to personnel.
And I want to be I want to be sympathetic about that, but I want to do the most cost-effective way
And I'd also like to keep green space, but if we've got 42,000 43 or 44,000 square feet
And we're gonna put that over three
floors
That gives us X number square feet
So roughly I guess I'll have to go to my calculator and figure out
If I was going to make it a rectangle, what it would be, I was just trying to see how big
this building really is going to be because we don't have any idea of that.
And I just wanted to kind of go that direction.
Is there any way, what would be the feasibility of doing partial and then adding on to it
so we don't have displacement as much?
Good, all good questions.
So the footprint is conceptual, as Phil said.
I mean, if you want to do the math, I don't have a calculator,
but you take the 44,000 square feet, divide it by 3,
and then do the square root of that, you'd have the exact,
you'd have a square, right?
So it's anyways to scale, it has to be designed.
You have some great questions in terms of phasing,
what we call phasing,
because there are a lot of things already on this site.
So it was difficult for us to try and figure out,
okay, if we were to build a building in this parking lot,
What could we do? We didn't want to disrupt City Hall, didn't want to disrupt police and fire or public works.
We looked at all of those different things, and it was very tough to do that on this site.
Doing a partial building and then adding on over time just drove the cost up.
And so,
no, yes, the same thing.
So if you have our pylings in here to get us up to our FEMA, and we're going to do 15 across,
What would be the thing can we put seven more across in four or six months?
Yeah, the answer is I think we could do that, but it would drive the cost up.
What a contractor wants to do is come in and build it once and leave.
I mean, time is money to them.
Every time you bring a trade in and out, in and out, in and out, it just drives the cost up.
But good questions, because it actually drove a lot of our decisions that whole phase.
Thank you.
Okay, we're going to stick around and answer any individual questions that you have.
We really appreciate you being here.
I think I can speak on behalf of the city that we appreciate you taking the time out to come out.
And there will be more meetings and follow-up meetings.
Thank you. Good night.