JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 Today the Jacksonville Special Committee on Drowning Prevention held its first meeting.<\/p>\n
Action New Jax told you the committee was formed in response to the drownings of two autistic children last month in retention ponds. <\/p>\n
The meeting was all about mapping out what the next several weeks will look like and gathering the facts. <\/p>\n
Jacksonville City Council President Nick Howland charged the committee with making recommendations in six specific areas:<\/p>\n
Emergency response dataPrevention, public education and awarenessYouth, autistic child elopement, and special needs water safety Public residential retention and stormwater facility safetyInteragency and community partnershipsBest practices, legislative authority and recommendations <\/p>\n
Committee chair Reggie Gaffney Jr. also requested data on the number of both public and private ponds in the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore we can even move forward, I think we need to identify the high-risk ponds and the low-risk ponds because, like I said, if this is over 1,500 ponds we\u2019re not going to be able to do everything for every pond,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what we can do as a committee\u2026.what we could do now is to identify the high-risk ponds and potentially put some type of guard rails or safeguards in place,\u2019 said Councilman Gaffney Jr.<\/p>\n
>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<<\/a><\/p>\n Councilman Mike Gay wants to look at what measures are in place with the st. johns water management when it comes to pond construction and design. <\/p>\n \u201cThose are the questions we are going to try to get a baseline. What is already implemented? Are we overlooking it? Is it being enforced? And set our baseline in this and start working from there,\u201d said Councilman Gay. <\/p>\n Gaffney Jr. requested to have the number of both private and publicly owned ponds by the next meeting as well as the best practices from five local counties and\/or cities.<\/p>\n The next meeting will be on September 23rd.<\/p>\n [DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks<\/a>]<\/p>\n [SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter<\/a>] <\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here<\/a> to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here<\/a> to stream Action News Jax live.<\/p>\n Action News Jax Top Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 Today the Jacksonville Special Committee on Drowning Prevention held its first meeting. Action New Jax…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[982,23732,18607,18613,157673,969,116,118,117,157669,73528,634,644,72314,157671,157670,155991,157672],"class_list":["post-395329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-action_news","tag-city_hall","tag-council_president","tag-councilman","tag-gaffney_jr","tag-jack","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-jacksonville_special_committee_on_drowning_prevention","tag-jonah","tag-local","tag-madison","tag-madison_poglio","tag-mike_gay","tag-nick_hallland","tag-reggie_gaffney_jr","tag-saint_johns_water_management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}