GovLove - A Podcast About Local Government · Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL)

Floating Flower Islands with Yocelyn Galiano, Pinecrest, FL

·51 min·1 clip

I pick up on the subtlest changes and I'm good at threading the needle to find consensus where none appears to exist.

Meredith Reynolds opens from Long Beach, California. She introduces GovLove, ELGL, the podcast's 10-year milestone, and the guest from Pinecrest, Florida. The guest is Jocelyn Galeano, called Yossi. She is Pinecrest's village manager, with an MPA from Florida International University and ICMA credentialing since 2002. Pretty quickly, the conversation moves to water. Yossi explains floating wetlands as a possible way to improve water quality in canals and other waterways. The idea is easy to picture. Plants sit on floating structures, their roots hang in the water, and the roots absorb added nutrients. The flowers are the hook. If the village can harvest and sell them at the farmer's market, residents get beauty, a lesson, and a cleanup project all in one place. Yossi does not pretend it sounds ordinary. She says she walked into a council meeting with what she called a crazy idea, and she gave council an easy out if they did not want to try something that sounded too far out there. The experiment needed room to breathe. South Florida Water Management District manages most waterways in the area, and canal flow is not a small issue when hurricanes and flooding are part of the local reality. Pinecrest had one useful advantage. The village owns some of its own canals, which gives it more control over what can happen there. That ownership changes the question. Instead of waiting on a larger bureaucracy, Pinecrest can test the approach in water it manages directly. The useful lesson is plain: a small environmental pilot gets possible when staff understand the water system, the authority map, and how to bring council into a calculated risk.

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