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City also wants to use its own SROs

Kile Brewer
Posted 5/2/18

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Tuesday’s meeting of the Green Cove Springs City Council was one where visitors needed to stay until the end.

As council members wound down and moved on to council …

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City also wants to use its own SROs


Posted

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Tuesday’s meeting of the Green Cove Springs City Council was one where visitors needed to stay until the end.

As council members wound down and moved on to council comments, Pam Lewis started a conversation about a recent workshop held between the Board of County Commissioners, School Board and the Sheriff’s Office regarding funding School Resource Officers for every school countywide as required by a new state law.

Lewis explained that she had called members of the school board requesting that part of the money for SROs be given to the city so it can fund city police officers at Charles E. Bennett Elementary and Green Cove Springs Junior High.

“I told them how wonderful our police department is with community policing and about the hard work they’ve done with children and their families,” Lewis said. “It makes sense to have our own police department provide the resource officers.”

Once the council comments moved to Mitch Timberlake, the mayor asked Police Chief Derek Asdot to speak to the department’s involvement in the schools.

“When incidents happen in the schools we’re the ones responding, we’re the ones dealing with the families, we’ve already built those relationships,” Asdot said. “I’d hate to hand those over to somebody else and then we’d kind of lose that. We worked hard to build it and we do a really good job at doing that. I don’t want to talk about other agencies but if you look at what we do and follow our Facebook page and see what we’re doing, we’re in the schools, we’re already there.”

Asdot then presented some numbers to the council, saying that his department had been involved in 1,411 programs at C.E. Bennett since 2015 and 1,709 at the junior high in the same time period.

“I think that speaks volumes right there,” Asdot said. “That’s what we do.”

Timberlake and the council decided to make an emergency motion, and voted unanimously, to send Asdot and City Manager Danielle Judd to Thursday’s school board meeting to present their case for funding members of the Green Cove Springs Police Department for their two schools.

“We’ve already got heavy involvement in the schools, and our officers have already done a phenomenal job of engaging themselves in the community,” Timberlake said. “It makes sense to use people that are already involved in the schools and that the students already know.”

Also in discussion was Spring Park Pool, which is now fixed up and ready for the first full season after last year’s construction snafu caused a late opening.

“That pool is a huge attraction and will continue to be a huge attraction for this city,” said long-time pool supporter and city council member Van Royal.

The pool will begin operations Saturday, May 5, from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., hours that will continue on the weekends until Memorial Day, May 28 this year, when the pool will open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. all days Tuesday through Sunday with Mondays reserved for cleaning. After Labor Day, the pool will revert back to the weekend hours through the first day in October.

Fees for the pool are set at $4 for adults and $2 for children under the age of 17, with seniors 65 or older and active duty military being charged $3. Passes will again be available at $84 per adult and $63 for children, seniors and military. Family passes, for a group of five, will be $200 for the season.

For more information, contact the pool’s long-time manager and newly appointed Green Cove Springs Parks and Recreation Director Glee Glisson by email at gglisson@greencovesprings.com, or by calling (904) 297-7500 ext. 3332

Aside from the recently renovated pool, the city will be doing a rehaul of another city-run entity – the electric utility system, after unanimously passing a resolution Tuesday that will allow the city to borrow the not-to-exceed amount of $10.7 million from CenterState Bank, the lender chosen the last time the council met.

Passing the resolution sets the money in motion with the city now having approved the full amount as well as any costs related to the transaction.

The $10.7 million is being borrowed at a 3.3 percent fixed rate over 15 years with the city paying $915,445 annually until the term is up in 2033. The total interest paid by the city on the loan is expected to be around $3,179,322.

“We are accelerating projects that would’ve taken us well in excess of 10 years to even begin to work on, and hopefully they’ll be completed over the next three to five years,” said Timberlake. “It will make a huge difference to the reliability of our electric service.”

Following the resolution, there were no additional action items, but the council heard a presentation from North Florida Transportation Planning Organization representative Wanda Forrest concerning important transportation improvements coming to Green Cove.

Forrest talked about four major areas where road resurfacing and sidewalk improvements will be completed, including the First Coast Expressway bridge across the St. Johns River just south of Green Cove Springs that will take palce sometime in 2022-2023, and a resurfacing project along U.S. Highway 17 from Black Creek going up to Water Oak Lane on Fleming Island, which is expected to start construction later this year or in early 2019. The last two areas of improvement are sidewalks that will go in along Governor’s Creek Bridge and along N. Palmetto Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the city.

“Where there are not sidewalks, there will be sidewalks on both sides,” said Janis Fleet, city Development Services director.

Royal, who has been asking for improvements to the sidewalks along the Governor’s Creek Bridge during previous years’ TPO presentations, has finally got what he asked for.

“Thank you, particularly for that bridge – it’s a safety issue,” Royal said. “It will make it a lot easier for a lot of us to have connectivity.”