Mayor D.C. Reeves announced on Monday on my radio show, “Real News with Rick Outzen,” and at his weekly press conference that he will let the Escambia Children’s Trust keep the CRA dollars in its bank account, but only the Trust will spend the funds, as established in a yet-to-be-drafted Memorandum of Understanding.
What he didn’t say was how much money was involved?
- I followed up and received the answer this morning. Mayor Reeves texted, “They owe $1.8 million now, $500K annually through duration.”
“I’ve met with two of the principals and two of the teachers at our Title I schools several weeks back. I’m meeting with all four principals of the Title I schools, Holm Elementary, Workman, O.J. Semmes and Global, again on Friday afternoon to listen,” Mayor Reeves said at his weekly presser.
He wants to create a Memorandum of Understanding with the Trust and the Escambia County School District to ensure the City’s CRA funds fund programs to help schools inside the city limits.
“I got a lot of great ideas from them before, but my philosophy on the funding right now, which this is not finalized,” he said. “We have to work through it, and there’s three partners here. There’s the Trust, there’s the City, and there’s the School District because anything that we are going to prescribe is going to have to be administered by the school district.”
Last Thursday, the Escambia Board of County Commissioners voted to have the Trust refund the CRA dollars it has received – $1,134,025. The commissioners plan to spend the funds on infrastructure needs and public safety in the CRA neighborhoods.
On “Real News” this morning, Sheriff Chip Simmons said the commissioners will spend some of the money on more cameras that would connected to this Real-time Crime Center.
“It should be no secret that I believe that the cameras in the public areas are the way to go,” he said. “We’ve been behind on that for years. Some of our partners in other counties are way ahead of us with the number of cameras that they have in the community. So after we had a couple shootings around Diego Circle and one on Erress Boulevard, Commissioner May and I have had many conversations about that and ballpark safety.”
Sheriff Simmons continued, “We’ve documented Montclair area, Erress Boulevard area, this is the number of cameras we’d like. The county, to their credit, said, ‘You know what? We have the availability to get this money.’ And so they took the money, and they were able to use it to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to put about $400,000 of that money into these cameras.’”
The Escambia Children’s Trust meets today at 5:30 p.m. in the Commission Chamber. I’m not sure the board knows about the $1.8 million.
Photo by Mathieu Turle on Unsplash