By Jeremy Morrison
With a report and recommendations due in late November, Pensacola Mayor-elect D.C. Reeve’s transition team is busy digging into various areas of focus and assessing how the incoming mayor — and the city as a whole — can best address a myriad of issues.
“We’re in the listening phase right now,” Christian Wagley, who is focusing on environmental issues for Reeves, reported during a Oct. 26 mayoral transition team meeting.
Like the rest of the team, Wagley and his focus area partner, Kelly Hagen, have been hosting public input sessions to better understand their respective issues and how Reeves can best approach each area.
During the full team meeting, members offered updates on their work.
“I think we’re getting some information to put our narrative together,” said Shirley Henderson, who is looking at attainable housing.
Henderson said that its public input session was well attended and informative but also urged her cohorts to look beyond the traditional means to make the public aware of such public meetings. “You have to really put it out there, and the city website is not enough.”
Pensacola Habitat for Humanity CEO Sam Young is also concentrating on attainable housing and found the session to be an educational experience as to the depth of the local housing issue. “I walked out of there realizing that the scope is even much greater than even I realize, and this is what I do day in and day out.”
Young felt his recommendations for Reeves would concentrate on three areas: land availability, regulatory environment and funding.
“We’re not going to bring to this report a silver bullet, or even three silver bullets,” he cautioned, noting that numerous studies and reports had been dedicated to the housing issue and that actually acting on the various recommendations found in such reports would be key. “The problem is execution…persistent execution of the strategies that have been developed.”
The input on citizen engagement, reported team member Frency Moore, has been interesting in that she was surprised how many different definitions of citizen engagement people seem to have.
“That was eye opening for me,” she said, listing off such discussion topics as the city’s 311 information system, social media guidelines for staff and public officials, as well as communication efforts as they pertain to citizens with special needs or those that speak different languages.
Amber McClure, who is looking into the city’s finances, noted that her area of focus touches on the other focus areas as well. “Finance overlaps pretty much every single aspect, right?”
She plans to offer up “useful” and “actionable” recommendations, but not everyone would be pleased with her assessment of city finances and related recommendations. “We’re usually not the most popular person in the room.”
Jason Bortz reported that his focus area of military relations had recently conducted an input session with the public and Naval Air Station Pensacola leadership that resulted in “a lot of really great ideas.”
“The issues really centered around education and housing,” added partner Jason Crawford, who said he was looking at other cities with high military populations, such as San Diego, Calif., to learn how they defined the city’s relationship with the military.
Another high concern for the incoming mayor, public safety, would likely boil down to a few key areas of focus, said team member Aaron Watson. “I think our report will be summed down to basically three points, which will be budgeting, retention/recruitment and then, community engagement, addressing the problem of youth gun violence and some of the other issues.”
Julie Sheppard, who is focusing strategic planning, aims to engage more of the public by scheduling meetings after working hours going forward. “Our hope is that we’ll get better attendance at an evening meeting.”
While individual team members will continue to host public input sessions and meet with city staff members and relevant players in the community, the full transition team will only meet once more, on Nov. 16, prior to the final recommendations being submitted on Nov. 21.
Following that, the recommendations will be distilled into something the incoming mayor will present to the Pensacola City Council and begin implementing.