City Hall

Reeves Hits Several Topics at Tuesday Presser—From Clean City Audit to Yard Debris Crisis

The mayor called the city’s yard waste backlog a “massively unforeseen increase” and said enforcement against contractor dumping is coming—but not yet.

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Mayor D.C. Reeves covered a lot of ground at Tuesday morning’s press conference, touching on a clean city audit, a surging yard debris backlog, the Palafox Street reconstruction timeline, a tree ordinance overhaul, and Birdon’s lease negotiations at the port.

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City Audit: Clean Bill of Health

The annual independent audit of city finances is complete and heads to the City Council on Thursday. Auditors found no material weakness, no significant deficiency, and no non-compliance in financial reporting. The only finding involved three out of 40 housing department tenant files where third-party income verification wasn’t properly documented in the electronic record—a technical glitch, Reeves said, not a substantive issue.

• “All of them are income qualified, income eligible,” he said. “Nothing slipped through the cracks from a procedural standpoint.”

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Yard Debris: A 50% Surge in Two Years

The city’s biggest operational headache right now is yard debris. From February through May 8, city crews collected 9.2 million pounds—a 21% jump over the same period last year. With three weeks left in May, Reeves projected the final total would land between 10 and 11 million pounds. By comparison, the city collected 6.1 million pounds through May just two years ago.

Reeves said the city has postponed its county neighborhood cleanup—a routine part of a longstanding agreement that gives the city free tipping fees on yard waste—to focus all available equipment on the backlog. County Administrator Wes Moreno agreed to the postponement.

• The mayor pointed squarely at private contractors as a major driver of the surge—landscapers cutting palms and hauling limbs to the curb rather than taking debris with them as required by city code. He stopped short of immediate enforcement, calling it “a tomorrow conversation, not a today conversation,” but signaled that stricter enforcement and better public education on the six-by-six cubic yard limit are coming.

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Palafox Street: On Track for May 24

The Palafox Street reconstruction project remains on track to meet its May 24 incentivized completion deadline. Reeves said some discussion had circulated about opening individual blocks ahead of schedule, but given the rain delays and punch-list work remaining, his expectation is a full, coordinated street reopening around the 24th. A public-facing reopening plan will be announced next week.

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Tree Ordinance Update

Reeves and Councilman Jared Moore have spent roughly two months working on a revised tree ordinance, with a focus on updating fines and fees that haven’t been updated since 2009 and on building an enforcement mechanism that can actually be carried out. The mayor emphasized a key legal reality: Florida law prevents the city from blocking property owners from removing trees on private land.

• “The biggest misperception about our tree ordinance is that somehow in the city code we could stop people from building,” Reeves said. “That is very clear in Florida law.”

The city attorney’s office has been benchmarking fee structures from around the state. Reeves said he and Moore plan a briefing with the city attorney early next week.

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Birdon Lease and Port Workforce

Negotiations with Birdon on its proposed $104 million, 400,000-square-foot facility at the Port of Pensacola are in the final stages, as Birdon, the City of Pensacola and Triumph Gulf Coast iron out the details. He confirmed the lease language must satisfy all three parties. Autonomous vessel construction featured in the conversation—Birdon has publicly tied its Pensacola project to autonomous maritime work—though Reeves said the immediate priority remains getting the lease finalized.

On workforce readiness, Reeves acknowledged that Pensacola can’t repeat the slow ramp-up that hampered previous economic development projects. He said he’s convening a roundtable with Pensacola State College, UWF and other partners to map out a training pipeline for the roughly 1,400 jobs projected to pay $ 80,000 per year—an estimated $160 million annually in outside dollars flowing into the local economy.