Is this what people want?

Back to our regularly scheduled programming... Citrus County.

Tuesday looks to be a snoozer at the BOCC meeting. The big thing of the day will be the hearing for the RV park. I'll dive into that another day.

There is notice of the public hearing regarding the sales tax. Before we get into all that, if you have not yet, please take this survey about the sales tax. It is based on what you will see below. I want your feedback on if you will support that or not.

Although this is just a notice of a future hearing, there may be some discussion on it. It's not likely since its under consent agenda, but you never know with this group what gets pulled for a conversation. The hearing will be on November 18th. It will be a time certain, so should start at 1:25 or close to that... depending on what is before it.

The key thing to see here is the language. This agenda item includes the text of the referendum. It may change to be more "formal" later on, but this will be for funding "pavement management" that will be exclusively for resurfacing and describes the type of resurfacing projects.

Ignoring the fact this should not have even been discussed at that meeting, there are problems starting to appear with this.

It is now becoming a BOCC thing and not a community thing. They are starting to direct this and not following the process they decided they wanted to follow when this began. Their plan was to be hands off, but at the last meeting we heard that commissioners were speaking individually with members of the steering committee and getting ideas from them on what this should look like.

The completely ignored the recommendation of the steering committee. This is now becoming things that they want to do, not what their process told them they needed to do.

Que the failure.

But the bigger problem here is that there is ZERO plan on how to implement this. I suppose there is 12 months to figure it out, but assuming they are going for this option, what is the plan to spend the money? They have had NO conversations about this.

The language above says resurfacing publicly owned and maintained roads. Seems pretty straight forward right? But what roads? This allows them to choose residential roads. But it also allows them to choose a road like Ozello... they are buying a new park out there, why not re-do that road and make it nice for people who go to the new park? Or maybe they choose Rock Crusher.. That will be booming with development soon. Or any number of roads the county owns and maintains.

How do they decide what roads to do and how the money will be divided? Does it get spread evenly around the county with each district getting 20%? Does it get divided by road miles? Does it all go towards a specific area to get as much done as possible without moving trucks all over the county? What is the process to do all of this... and how much will the estimated $100m get done? Rock Crusher will not be cheap. I bet they could spend half of it or more just doing that road. That leaves less for the residential roads.

Are people going to be ok with that?

What about doing a CIP where they decide specifically what projects to fund before the vote? The problem with that... if a road someone travels is not on that list, will they vote for it? If someone has been waiting YEARS for their residential road to get fixed and they do not see it on the CIP, would they want to pay an additional 1% on their purchases? Pine Ridge and Citrus Springs anyone? Good luck getting that to pass.

I believe our road consultant is coming back at that same meeting for a discussion/update on our roads. Why is the BOCC going to vote for the referendum that night? It seems like to me that the best course of action here would be to listen to the presentation, then tell staff to come up with a plan for how this will work and then come back later with a presentation on that. Certainly discuss some ideas that night... but let staff take that and formalize a plan... then bring it back for discussion/vote if desired.

Not sure voting for the referendum on the 18th and then trying to figure out the details later is the best course of action.

And what happened to the steering committee's recommendation to create a citizen board that monitors the spending and provides reports back to the board? I do not see that on there.

This thing is destined for failure. I am still of the belief that it has a shot, but we need to do the proper market research to determine what it needs to look like for that shot. Maybe they are on it with "roads".. but maybe they need something else included to bring along those who will not get their road resurfaced this cycle.

For instance, if it is for roads and they allow it to be used for collector type roads, chances of someone in Citrus Springs getting their residential road resurfaced goes down significantly, as the money will run out. However, if the funds also support a park or something else they would support, perhaps that causes them to vote for it. While they won't get their road done, they get some benefit from the park or whatever.

Commissioners need to take a step back from the process and either go with what was recommended to them by the process they created or do a new process to determine what will pass. Doing it on their own will lead to failure.