Watch the City Council Meeting online.
General Items:
Best of DTO Photo Contest Gallery Grand Opening
Over the summer, our Downtown Development Board, in partnership with the Downtown Arts District, held the third annual Best of DTO Photo Contest.
Beginning at 6 p.m. on Thursday, September 15, you are invited the Best of DTO gallery opening at the Gallery at Avalon Island and at 7 p.m. the DDB will announce the winners of this year’s competition.
The gallery exhibit displays Downtown Orlando through the creative eyes of local, professional and amateur photographers.
The exhibit runs until October 15, 2016.
Items of Note:
Stand Up Orlando
The Stand Up Orlando anti-bullying initiative is part of our commitment to ensuring that our community continues to be a place of belonging, acceptance and respect for all people.
Council voted on an item that will further the City’s Stand Up Orlando program by providing funding to the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida to continue their Upstanders program for sixth and seventh grade students at nine public schools in the City this school year and in 2017-18.
Since we launched Stand Up Orlando in 2014, more than 2,000 students and more than 500 parents and school staff have participated in the initiative, which includes field trips, guest speakers and in-class anti-bullying curriculum.
Promise Neighborhoods Grant
Council voted on an item that will allow the City of Orlando to join community partners including Heart of Florida United Way, UCF, Valencia College, Orange County Public Schools and Orange County Government to apply for a Promise Neighborhoods grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The grant funding will help us to further move the needle on education and developmental outcomes for children in our underserved neighborhoods.
The grant aligns with our efforts to provide opportunity to our community’s youth. If awarded the grant, part of the funding would be used for the expansion of the Parramore Kidz Zone’s student-advocate model, which has resulted in improved academic performance and increased enrollment in college among children in Parramore.
Building Energy and Water Efficiency Strategy
Commissioners, here in Orlando, we’ve made great strides when our residents, businesses and community join together to help achieve a common vision that furthers the resilience of our city. From SunRail to our Community Venues to the new Downtown UCF/Valencia campus to even solving chronic homelessness, we’ve accomplished so much together.
And there’s more to do. Together in 2012, we mapped out how we wanted our community to become cleaner and greener through our Community Action Plan.
Council voted on an ordinance that will further that vision – specifically our goal to reduce our community’s energy use by 25 percent by 2040 – with a Building Energy and Water Efficiency Strategy (BEWES), a new partnership with our large-commercial property owners.
Through BEWES, a strategy modeled after other forward-thinking cities like New York, Boston and Seattle, our large-commercial buildings over 50,000 will be required to benchmark and report their facility’s energy and water usage each year. The City will do the same for building over 10,000 square feet.
For property owners, this information provides the knowledge they need to make decisions that can help to increase operational efficiencies, create costs savings and invest in the overall future of our city.
Here at the City, we are already seeing investments like this paying off, through improvements we’re making at 55 of our buildings, which will save us up to $2.5 million per year – freeing dollars we can invest in our parks, public safety services and youth programs.
