Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves covered several topics at his weekly press conference this morning:
Skatepark
The surveillance cameras are in place. The mayor said graffiti has been an issue, but the users dealing with it.
“The biggest issue we see is graffiti from time to time, and next thing we know, there’s an advocate of the park or someone out there with matching paint and trying to get it figured out before we even know anything about it,” said the mayor.
“That’s a big testament to the skating community here that they cared about this and continue to care about it when it comes to maintenance.”
Reeves added that hours will change from 5 a.m. to midnight.
Portland Loos
Mayor Reeves said three Portland Loos have arrived, and two more are ordered and expected to come in later this week. The first one will be installed at Bruce Beach so that Phase 1 of the park can open this spring.
“I hope by next week we’ll have a final date, whatever it may be, when we can actually go ahead and kind of soft open Phase 1,” he told the media.
The next two will be installed at the skate park and MLK Plaza on North Palafox Street. If the city gets approval from the UWF Historic Trust, the fourth will be placed in Museum Plaza. The last one is slated for Veterans Memorial Park.
Downtown Businesses
City staff is finalizing processes and procedures for overhauling business licenses – “how we rent the sidewalk, how we do parking if someone’s looking for exclusive parking, things like that.”
“We’d had a lot of archaic policies and procedures that have been around for decades,” said Mayor Reeves. “We’re getting closer to the finish line of cleaning that up. We hope we’ll be able to send a letter out in April that will outline some of those things.”
Smoke Alarm Saturday
The Pensacola Fire Department will hold its next Smoke Alarm Saturday event March 16 in District 6. Smoke Alarm Saturdays is a continuing effort by PFD to provide free smoke alarms to every household in the City of Pensacola without a working smoke alarm.
Mayor Reeves said, “We’re actually getting close to installing over 500 smoke alarms.”
Featured Photo by Niket Nigde on Unsplash
