by Jeremy Morrison
Mayor-elect D.C. Reeve’s mayoral transition team gathered for its initial meeting early Wednesday at Pensacola City Hall. The assembled team, headed by Capt. Tim “Lucky” Kinsella, USN (Ret.), will be delving into various issues and presenting the incoming mayor with a report meant to guide his time in office.
Chairman Kinsella, former commander of Naval Air Station Pensacola, encouraged his team to take the long view, to think beyond Reeve’s current term in office, and consider Pensacola’s future — its arc and direction — years out.
“What will the city look like five, 10, 15 years from now?” Kinsella said.
Reeve’s transition team has more than two dozen members, with 12 areas of focus, including attainable housing, citizen engagement, development, education, environment, livability and public safety. Each of the focus areas will be assessed by two or more team members.
Kinsella instructed team members to think of their final recommendations and report as a guidebook for the mayor, laying out a to-the-point formula for the composition of eventual final reports: describe the issue, discuss the issue, and make recommendations concerning the issue.
“We want this to be simple,” Kinsella said.
The chairman said each member should limit their recommendations — members focused on a single issue will be making separate recommendations — to no more than three.
“Otherwise, we’ll get mired,” he said.
Kinsella also called for members to “be bold” and “be useful” in their recommendations. He advised them to approach the recommendations with a question: Is this something Reeves will actually be able to work with?
“Or is he just going to look at it and say, ‘Well, it’s a great idea, but it ain’t gonna happen?’” Kinsella asked.
During his brief remarks to his transition team, Mayor-elect Reeves, who takes office in November, assured members that their work was important and that the group’s final report would be put to use.
“Know this is not energy wasted, this is not collecting dust,” Reeves said.
During this initial meeting, the transition team received an overview of Florida’s Sunshine Law, which requires any government business conducted between elected officials or members of governmental boards be done in public and on the record; this means that members of the team, even ones working on a single issue, may not discuss transition-team related matters outside of the confines of a publicly-advertised meeting. Also, during the first meeting, members were given a briefing on municipal government in general.
Reeve’s mayoral transition team will be meeting every two weeks. Before that schedule kicks in, though, the team will be reconvening next week to discuss the respective issues before them more in-depth.
In the days between these two initial meetings, Chairman Kinsella said, members are being presented an opportunity to get a better feel for how they want to approach their respective issues.
“Let you ruminate on it, sink your teeth into it, think how you want to progress,” he said.
—For more information about mayor-elect D.C. Reeves’ mayoral transition team, please visit cityofpensacola.com/TransitionTeam2022.