St. Petersburg Seeks Marina Proposals

RFP Deadline is July 14

By Monroe Roark

St. Petersburg wants a development partner for its city marina.

City officials recently released a request for proposals (RFP) for anyone interested in redeveloping and operating the downtown marina. Interested parties can apply before July 14.

The City wants a developer and operator with a significant amount of experience in developing and operating saltwater marinas.

“Adjacent to the St. Pete Pier, with slips right in the heart of downtown, St. Pete’s Municipal Marina is an anchor point of the Waterfront District,” said city development administrator James Corbett. “This is just the next step in the revitalization of the marina. We look forward to finding a partner that sees the potential of this landmark in our community.”

The City built the central yacht basin docks along the downtown waterfront in 1963 and four of the five south yacht basin docks in 1977.

Officials said the facilities have been well maintained over the years. Time and exposure to the aggressive saltwater environment have taken their tolls, though. Marina infrastructure has reached the end of its service life.

The City has completed a Marina Master Plan which includes a framework for the redevelopment of the Municipal Marina.

Find details about the marina and the RFP at stpete.org/marina.

911: What’s Your Emergency? The Mystery of Lost 911 Calls in Pinellas

By Mike Sunnucks

Jim Fogarty wants to solve a mystery.

Fogarty works as the director of public safety and emergency services in Pinellas. He oversees the county’s busy 911 emergency communications system — which receives more than 900,000 calls annually.

But Fogarty said an estimated 12% to 15% of emergency calls coming into Pinellas’ 911 system end up getting dropped or never make it to an emergency operator.

“It’s a big issue,” said Fogarty, an emergency communications veteran with professional stints in Clearwater, Long Island, and King County, Washington before landing his Pinellas County job in 2017.

Dropped and abandoned 911 calls challenge emergency agencies across Florida – and the U.S. While some of the abandoned calls never make it to dispatch centers, other calls— whether they are accidental or might stem from old phones or telecom system issues — require callbacks.

That takes time and resources.

Researching Dropped 911 Calls

Fogarty said his agency may partner with the University of South Florida to research abandoned and dropped 911 calls — including where they come from, and the role of emergency call features on old cell phones and smartphones that might be in active use.

“We are doing some formal research,” Fogarty told The Gabber Newspaper. He said the research will look for trends with dropped 911 calls among carriers, geography, certain towers, and routing systems. “That’s the type of calls we are trying to understand.”

Fogarty said the county hopes to see progress on that first-of-its-kind research partnership with USF this year. He gets calls from out-of-state agencies about the dropped call issue and research aspirations, also, he said.

“It’s never been researched before,” he said.

Working with Pinellas Agencies

Emergency 911 calls are centralized locally with emergency calls routed to Pinellas County’s Emergency Operations Center near Ulmerton Road and Seminole Boulevard. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and SunStar Emergency Medical Services ambulance service also have dispatch operations at the same center.

“That’s not true in most counties,” said Fogarty of the centralized system.

St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and Pinellas Park have secondary emergency operations centers that also serve as dispatches within their jurisdictions.

The municipal operations also take non-emergency requests for police and other public safety assistance.

St. Pete, for example, handled more than 486,000 calls at its communications center in 2022 and 2021. It handled more than 490,000 calls in 2020, according to Yolanda Fernandez, community awareness division manager for the St. Petersburg Police Department.

“The SPPD Communications Division manages the 911 law enforcement calls that are within St. Petersburg once they are screened and routed by the regional center,” Fernandez said. “All non-emergency requests for law enforcement services in St. Petersburg are directly answered and processed by SPPD Emergency Communications Division personnel. Certain mental health related calls are dispatched to the CALL team, comprised of mental health professionals ensuring the most appropriate resource is assigned to each incident.”

911 Calls and Gulfport Dispatch

While a number of smaller cities in the county have outsourced law en- forcement operations to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, Gulfport maintains its own police and fire departments.

Still, 911 calls in Gulfport go through the county.

“We outsourced communications about 10 years ago. There are obviously ups and downs in sharing a radio channel with other local agencies, but it is frankly the trend in our business,” said Gulfport Police Chief Robert Vincent.

Pinellas County wants to centralize its dispatch and communications systems.

“It will be a seamless application across the region’s agencies,” Fogarty said.

“May 2024 is when that is supposed to be turned on. We have a very narrow window to turn that on,” Fogarty said, referring to the start of the 2024 hurricane season in June.

Vincent said a “single dispatch application” will help GPD.

“The biggest benefit is knowing what is going on, in the moment, in the neighboring jurisdictions. Responses are better coordinated, and information is shared every day that might not be otherwise,” Vincent said.

The meshing of municipal systems and getting local residents accustomed to central operations that ask standardized questions also takes time, the Gulfport chief said.

“The biggest perceived down side is the lack of familiarity with our town on the part of the communications staff. Unfortunately, our residents are comparing what we have now to what we had 10 years ago, and that is not a fair comparison,” Vincent said. “The biggest complaint I get is about the number and type of questions the call-takers ask, and these questions make it seem like they know little or nothing about Gulfport.”

Not necessarily.

“They follow an industry-standardized script for every call,” Vincent said.

Pinellas 911: Help Wanted

Pinellas County’s 911 command center has a $300 million budget. It can staff up to 120 emergency “tele-communicators”, according to Fogarty.

He currently has 92 or 93 frontline emergency operators on staff, with between 20 and 25 openings.

The stressful job requires new tele-communicators to go through weeks of paid training.

“It takes weeks and weeks to get proficient,” Fogarty said.

That includes four to eight weeks of classroom training and, more time working with experienced operators. The whole training pro- cess can take 12 to 14 weeks.

“A good tele-communicator could be handling 12 to 15 calls an hour,” Fogarty said, adding that calls can spike significantly during hurricanes and tropical storms.

Fogarty has seen 911 operators and dispatchers relocate to Florida for jobs from places such as New York. Others transition into the profession from other careers, including health care, Fogarty said.

Command center employees work various daily and weekly schedules, including 10- and 12hour shifts, he said. Pay starts at $20 per hour for training; operators can make between $40,000 and $50,000 per year with night, weekend and holiday shifts, as well as annual step increases. That can bring the salary to as much as $67,000 annually, Fogarty said.

The turnover proves challenging for a stressful job. Pinellas and national labor markets have worker shortages after the public health crisis, economic shutdowns, and job losses that began with the pandemic.

“It’s a really good career, but it is a stressful career,” Fogarty said. “You are talking to people in their worst moments. But it’s meaningful work. You have the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Look Kids: Big Ben, Parliament A European Vacation with Kids? Sure, Why Not?

By Jon Kile

Having spent months on the road with our kids in an RV, we’re seasoned in the art of family travel. But until recently we’d never dared cross an ocean with them. We meticulously planned a 10-day trip. Our flight was delayed 90 minutes. A butterfly flaps its wings and suddenly we are not going to make our train from London to Paris. Our kids got to see their parents react to a pressure cooker of travel woes. My wife, a pro tour planner, whipped out her laptop like a hacker in a spy movie, rebooking hotels, museum tickets, and the rental car.

Stranded in London, we all marveled at Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, (look kids, Big Ben! Parliament!). For me, the most foreign thing was their left-sided streets. I know, I’m a rube, but it was like I’d suffered a blow to the head and everything looked backwards. I could barely cross the street without getting hit by cars coming from the wrong side. People even walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk.

After two days living in a mirror, we finally caught our train to Paris and rented a car to go explore Normandy. The roads were oriented correctly, but my college French classes did not translate their road signs. I decided that if the meaning wasn’t obvious, it must not be tres importánt!

Our kids will never appreciate the baptism by fire of the first hour of our drive, when we traveled maybe 1.2 kilometers. We emerged from a parking garage seven stories deep in the belly of Paris. We found a rainy traffic jam outside the Gare du Nord, where the street patterns result from a thousand years of pre-auto- mobile development, followed by a “renovation” (their word) in the mid 1800s. Fun fact: Paris traffic signals are merely decorative. Having endured multiple cycles of green and red lights, everyone decided it was now their turn. Each intersection looked like my son’s box of Matchbox cars.

Despite the GPS’s advice to abandon the car in the street and report it stolen to Hertz, I called upon seven years of daily meditation and calmly threaded our way out. My heart rate never went above 72. I’m Jason Bourne in traffic.

We spent four blissful days in Normandy. We know France’s reputation of hostility toward tourists, but Normandy’s economy depends on American tourists. I bet deep down they’re tired of celebrating American and British glory, but we felt embraced. Vast empty parking areas and countless gift shops foreshadowed the invasion of tourists each June. Our son explored wrecked German bunkers wearing his army surplus jacket, and our daughter donned a pink beret and reveled in the atmosphere of one quaint French village after another. They were a modern day Rusty and Audrey Griswold.

Lest you think the French are getting soft, we returned to Paris and witnessed a bit of good old-fashioned strike action. A garbage strike left six weeks of trash piled two meters high on every sidewalk. Outside the Louvre, we saw a rowdy demonstration that involved a topless woman and a nearly naked man performing some kind of protest dance. Our son turned crimson at the sight of this sidewalk Moulin Rouge.

Weary after two whirlwind days trekking across Paris, we grew complacent. We ducked into a shop where bulk candy sits in piles. The candy’s price was a multiple of a currency and system of weights and measures, both foreign to us. Let’s just say we could all retire at 50 selling bulk gummy bears for €42 per kilo.

By the time we returned to London for our flight, we weren’t surprised to find the British joining the rail strike fun. We threw caution to London’s chilly wind, caught a late show in the West End, and managed to find one of the only running trains to the airport.