HOLLYWOOD UPDATE

By Mayor Josh Levy

Greetings, to all the readers of Our Cit y Hollywood.

This month I’d like to highlight the record number of capital improvement projects that we have coming up this year, though before I do, please join me in extending our best wishes to City Manager Dr. Wazir Ishmael, on his announced retirement. Dr. Ishmael led our city’s administration for the past 8 years, through tough financial times for the organization at the start, through the pandemic, and through the ongoing renaissance in the city’s public and private reinvestment in itself. Always a steady hand, Dr. Ishmael developed a culture of public service that centered upon the professionalism and integrity that he modeled. Carrying it forward will be Mr. George Keller, who was appointed by the City Commission as our new City Manager. George brings 30 years of experience in public administration and has been our Deputy City Manager under Dr. Ishmael for the past few years. We are excited to have George take the helm. He wants to see our city government “do more, better, faster” in all that we do to serve our residents, businesses and investors, and we all look forward to him leading the charge with our city team toward that end. A big focus area for 2023 is improving our public facilities and infrastructure, and our City Commission has prioritized and authorized the City Manager to undertake quite a list of projects. This year from our Parks, Recreation and Cultural Arts team, new playgrounds are coming to the ArtsPark, the Lakes of Emerald Hills Park, Kooser Park, Stan Goldman Park, McNicol Community Center, and Driftwood Park. A new concrete skateboard park, pathways, lighting, pickleball courts and dog park are coming to Stan Goldman Park. Pickleball courts are also coming to Jefferson Park. Artificial turf soccer fields will be installed at Dowdy

Field. New exercise equipment will be installed at Oakridge Park. Pathway renovations will take place at Joe DiMaggio Park, Zinkil Park, John Williams Park and Mara Giulianti Park. New floating boat ramp docks will be installed at Holland Park. Bottle-filler fountains will be installed at many of our parks and community centers. We’ll be pursuing indoor pickleball for seniors and more teen programming. Plus, we’ll be partnering with Memorial Healthcare System to provide aquatic exercise classes and games for seniors; and more.

From our Engineering team this year, we’ll have select street and alley resurfacing completed in each of our commission districts. We’ll be constructing new sidewalks and ADA improvements, creating safer routes to neighborhood schools and we’ll be completing designs for our neighborhood bicycle greenways, and designing phase 2 of our neighborhood traffic calming program. From our Public Works team, you’ll see hundreds of additional trees planted along the roadways of our city. Downtown and on the beach, our CRA team will be beginning to oversee a transformative streetscape construction project that will beautify the historic segment of Downtown Hollywood Boulevard with new and wider sidewalks, cafe space, trees and lighting, and the beach will see large resiliency and storm hardening projects continue and get underway. I am very excited about all these public infrastructure and facilities projects and I hope you are too. Big thanks to our teams. This has all been years in the making. Let’s get ready for some public improvements in Hollywood!

Sincerely,

Josh Levy Mayor of Hollywood