Pensacola Mayor’s Presser: Three Takeaways

1. Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves didn’t hide his frustrations with Escambia Children’s Trust staff.

“I apologize, frankly to our staff who spends a lot of time – our Parks and Rec Department, Dina in Finance, that have spent a lot of time and effort on something that, as I’ve maintained and as I’ve spoken at one of these committees and said, ‘I personally do not care if the city buys the building or if the trust wanted to buy the building.’

“What I want is positive action for the children in this community. And I could speak confidently for Commissioner May, for the county commission, for Chandra at Community Health and Lakeview. That’s what we all want. This is not something that we have to do. We are not looking for one more thing to do. We’re looking for something that we know could have impact.”

He felt ECT Executive Director Tammy Greer had misled him.

“We get emails after our private meetings that we have with staff. They say the application looks great and everything’s good to go, and then we go to a meeting and we find out it’s not. So it’s been frustrating.

And frankly, if I didn’t know how valuable this could potentially be at the end of the rainbow and that if honestly it wasn’t a children-related thing, I might be waving my hands of this at this point until we have some better understanding about how things are going.”

Read email sent by Greer in June.

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2. Pelican Drop isn’t happening.

“We had a meeting last week in this room with every internal organization that would be a part of any kind of downtown event that the city would be heading up and external people who have operated Pelican Drop in the past.

“Ultimately, it’s hard to pull off and it’s expensive.”

Mayor said the last Pelican Drop cost more than $200K and the organizing process began in March. The City would support any effort to bring back the New Year’s Eve event but not take the lead.

“We all left the meeting pretty unanimous that, especially for this year, that’s not something that we’ll be taking on,” said Mayor Reeves.

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3. 3-1-1 Service is improving.

“We had 2,608 open tickets in 3-1-1. More than 1,200 were more than 365 days old since any action had been recorded. As of August 4th, we have 338.”

• Lissa Dees, who has taken over supervising the system, will be my guest on WCOA tomorrow at 7:30 a.m.