At his weekly press conferences this morning, Mayor D.C. Reeves underscored the gravity of a potential data leak from the city’s servers in last month’s cyber attack.
While there is no confirmation of specific data being leaked, he has chosen to err on the side of caution and notify all customers and employees. An estimated 60,000-70,000 notification letters will be sent later this week.
“Out of an abundance of caution, I’d rather be wrong to have notified too many people and offered too much credit monitoring than the opposite,” Reeves said.
Yesterday, the city announced that it was offering residents, customers, and employees the monitoring services of TransUnion. The city will have a toll-free number. The mayor said, “The number is going to be 833-543-2815. It’ll be through TransUnion and Monday through Friday from eight to eight.”
ROGER SCOTT POOL: “The demolition of the bathrooms at Roger Scott begins April 29. We obviously are not going to finish those during pool season, but we wanted to go ahead and get started. So there will be, I would say, a significantly approved situation of temporary restrooms over what was there last year.”
Construction on the new bathrooms will begin after pool season. He added he will propose to the Pensacola City Council increasing the pool fees at Roger Scott and Cecil Hunter pools by a dollar.
Mayor Reeves said, “We’re going to be offering a new scholarship program, so it’ll work very similar to some of our other programs we have through Parks and Rec.”
CITY SIDEWALKS PROJECT: “Phase 2 of that construction begins next week, April 22nd, and we’re doing the northern side of Texar Drive from O.J. Semmes Elementary to Cortez Drive, and then going along the western side of Cortez from Texar to 34th and then the southern side of 34th to Cortez on 12th Avenue.”
He estimated the work would completed in 60 days.
SMOKE ALARM SATURDAY: “Our next one is this Saturday in District 5, April 20th, and we’ll have more details in the next couple days.”
BAPTIST’S OLD CAMPUS: The mayor expects to engage a consultant soon —”really an owner’s rep for the environmental and potential demo of Baptist Hospital.”
“We’re obviously waiting until July 1st to ensure that we’re going to have that $7 million of funding from the state, but that we would tiptoe into getting some expertise on our side to make sure that we’re not wasting time…It’ll be really an owner’s rep representing the city in terms of looking at the environmental information, looking at starting to piece together a potential RFP for some of the work that will need to take place post July 1.”
REPORT ON NEEDED PARK MAINTENANCE: Mayor Reeves wants to hire a consultant to assess the status of all city parks and buildings and develop a priority list. He wants to pay for it with ARPA funds.
“Instead of us guessing about which things look to be in the worst shape, which has kind of been our policy for a while around here, we’re going to start to have something where we’re, going to have an outside expert come in and assess everything we own,” Reeves said. “We’ve got a list of everything we own. We can now take the next step and say, ‘We know that number’s going to come back enormous. And we know that’s in a number that we’re never going to have enough money in one year or in five years to take on at one time.”
He continued, “But we now can make informed decisions, not district by district, not as something breaks, and then we have to shut it down. Now we can start to say, ‘Hey, we can all agree as a council, as a city, that we’ve had someone come in and say our problem number one is this building, problem number two is this park, et cetera.'”
Later, Mayor Reeves gave the best line of the presser:
“We’re trying to get out of this habit of major maintenance problems finding me; I’d like to find them.”