City of Fort Pierce Minutes of a Regular Meeting

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Regular Postponed Meeting February 22, 2011 Road A1A Project. Mr. Jack Andrews, City Engineer, said the residents should start seeing some construction on the final phase of the A1A construction (Phase I - Bayshore Drive to Gulfstream Avenue, less Seaway/South Ocean Drive Roundabout). The utility relocation work has started. Their prime contractor, Dickerson Construction, is scheduled to start the first week in March and have their materials ordered now. So they are moving along, they will start seeing the work. ----- The next item on the Agenda was City Engineer update on City Marina Reconstruction Project. Mr. Ed Seissiger, Engineering Projects Coordinator, said City Staff is continuing to work with Tetra Tech on design, coming up with some total costs for mitigation, what the islands are going to cost, and come up with the whole package to go through the final review process with FEMA. He tried to contact FEMA today to find out if the final revised Environmental Assessment & Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) had been signed off. He knows it was sitting in Atlanta waiting for signature last week. Hopefully he will find out tomorrow. Commissioner Becht said when they met a couple of weeks ago on funding, Mr. Seissiger or Mr. Kubitschek had mentioned trying to get another outside entity to participate in the monitoring. Mr. Seissiger said they haven't gone that far yet. Commissioner Becht said a board member of that entity talked to him about it last Thursday. That was only one board member, but there was interest in following through for the benefit of that entity with it. Mr. Seissiger said that is one of the benefits they were looking to pursue, to get more public knowledge and use their project as an educational tool. Commissioner Becht said if he will call him tomorrow, then they can talk more about that. If they can move that board, then he thinks they will have a real good chance of getting that done. ----- The next item on the Agenda was Director of Urban Redevelopment discussion on CDBG Housing Replacement. Mr. Jon Ward, Director of Urban Redevelopment, said the reason he is before them this evening, he wanted to put something on the table. As they know, he is normally fairly focused; but he finds himself in a conundrum. The average allowance from the Federal Department of Housing & Urban Development's CDBG program is something in the neighborhood of $750,000 a year. Of course, that has several uses attached to it. They fund some grant programs and they have some economic development programs. But the primary thrust of the CDBG program is housing-based programming. They have found themselves in recent years with the aging housing stock in the community being faced with more and more, not minor rehabilitations, but major rehab work. 20 _________________________________________________________________________ Page 20 of 45 City of Fort Pierce Minutes of a Regular Meeting held on February 22, 2011 Copyright © 2011 City of Fort Pierce Florida
Regular Postponed Meeting February 22, 2011 Houses are falling apart literally. He wanted to bring something to their attention tonight. He took this Department over almost a year ago. As they have moved through some of these issues, he wanted to make this Commission as aware of those issues as he has become. For that purpose, he has brought with him tonight a fairly large notebook. This is the waiting list for housing rehabilitation work. Each one of these pages represents a person and a house. These are not large applications, these are the pre-application "I want to be in line" forms. There are 364 requests for service in this book. Many of these houses are in dire condition. Three folks in particular have come to see him recently that have been referred by Commissioners. One of those, his contractor went to see the house, set foot inside the door, the house shook like a bowl of jelly, and he was afraid it was going to fall down around him while he was standing there - so it is obviously desperate. There is a family who had a house fire and they are living in one part of this burned-out shell. There is a third family whose home is built on a raised foundation and the floor is so rotten it is about to fall out from under the house like a wet paper bag. So there are emergencies, folks that need help; but he has 364 folks in front of them. It is an operational problem and it is a political problem. It is an operational problem because it costs between $75,000 and $100,000 to completely rebuild a home. The City is required federally by statute... When they go into a house, they can't just put a coat of paint on it and leave, they have to bring it up to the Section 8 codes, federally mandated. So if they go in there to fix a leaking faucet and they see electrical problems or a roof leak or mold, they are mandated to fix those things; so once they are in it, they are in for a penney, in for a pound, in the truest sense of the word. His funding tells him he has enough to fix three houses. That means, of the 364 folks that are sitting here already in line - and this goes back to 2006 - if 2/3rds of them fall out for whatever reason, if the folks have passed on or the house fell down or whatever happened, if 2/3rds of these things go away, he will be able to address the folks on the waiting list in the next 30 to 50 years, the way the funding is going. So he is telling them, he has an operational problem. The political problem is, he is going to have to start telling folks that he can't help them. When they come to him, they are standing there at the front desk and telling him about their mama who lives in a house that is falling down... He has a young gentleman that is calling him three times a week and asking when is he going to go out and do something about it. The problem is, he cannot statutorily jump over the 364 folks in front of her to go address that issue. Because if he does, they other folks will feel they have been unfairly treated and obviously they have been because they have been waiting for all this time. They all want to know when he is going to get around to them too. Then he thought maybe he would have his contractors, these professionals who are working with him, all go out there and identify absolutely horrible fixing to fall down structures with real problems. He can't do that, because it might be the 7th, the 12th, or the 22nd on the list, and he would be jumping over people to do that. So he has a problem and he is not real sure what to do about it. 21 _________________________________________________________________________ Page 21 of 45 City of Fort Pierce Minutes of a Regular Meeting held on February 22, 2011 Copyright © 2011 City of Fort Pierce Florida
Page 1 and 2: MINUTES OF A REGULAR POSTPONED MEET
Page 3 and 4: Regular Postponed Meeting February
Page 19: Regular Postponed Meeting February
Page 45: Regular Postponed Meeting February

City of Fort Pierce Minutes of a Regular Meeting

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?