Resources, News, and Announcements
From the Mayor’s desk – 12/5/25
Happy Friday! With the Christmas holiday rapidly approaching, this will be my last letter for the year. I will be taking some time off starting next Thursday.
I do want to take the opportunity to thank everyone working for the Village, including the volunteers in our City Council. This has been personally a very rewarding year working with you all, and I really appreciate each and everyone that I get the pleasure to interact with every day at City Hall and around this island. I hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and truly look forward to working with you next year.
PD:
Chief Hester brought in some training expertise to certify his full time and reserve officers on safe use of our side by side vehicles. Our PD will be required to pass this training and hold this safety certification in order to operate a side by side vehicle from either our fleet or loaners from the County Sheriff’s office. The training included classroom learning along with real life application on our beach. If you witnessed our PD driving like maniacs on the beach recently, it was all approved and sanctioned!!
Beach & Parks:
Our off season work continues. The shower at the main beach entrance is being completely rebuilt. We have more asphalt on order for street repairs and our golf cart path down Bluewater Highway.
Our sign at the intersection of 332 & Bluewater isn’t broken. It runs on solar power, and due to the “blah” lately we haven’t had enough sun juice to make it work.
Public Works:
Erick is working on a large scale project this offseason to repair and resurface the water storage tanks in operation. We have $120k budgeted in the Systems Fund to perform much needed repairs and resurfacing on the water tower, the hydro pressurized tank at Oyster plant, and the ground storage tanks on Yucca. The budgeted amount will not be enough to fund all those repairs, but Erick is working with vendors to potentially perform the repair work in 2026, and then budget and pay off the balance from future years of System Fund income. These tanks are all in violation with TCEQ and need repairs ASAP, and credit to Erick for this creative way to get the work done without pushing up taxes or negatively impacting the Village financially.
Finance:
We completed our financial audit this week and look forward to the official report back from the auditors in the coming weeks. Good news is that we are current with financial audits and received high praise for the current state of our accounting, record keeping, and financial transparency with the public. Credit to Christie and Mindy for getting us to a great place and in position to have a clean and easy audit next year.
Human Resources:
The active search for a new City Secretary continues. Interviews will be set up starting next week for prospective candidates.
Clear Career Professionals visited us this week to kick off the recruiting process for the new City Administrator. They met with all department leaders, all of City Council members, and myself. Their recruiting begins based on the input from us. Projections from Clear Career are to have the position open and posted until late January. They will interview a slate of “semi-finalists” in February, and bring in the finalists for in person interviews at City Hall. They have suggested that we have an open forum with citizens as part of the process to allow the candidates to meet and hear from residents, and for you to ask questions of prospective City Administrator candidates.
We have promoted David Calhoun, currently Code Enforcement, to the dual position running both Tourism & IT. David brings with him a great background and passion for event planning, social media/advertising, and digital IT expertise. He is a perfect fit to support the VOSB IT needs and take our Tourism efforts to the next level. I’m looking forward to see what David brings to Surfside in this new capacity.
Other items of interest:
Yesterday I had the pleasure of representing Surfside at the Port Freeport Centennial Celebration. It was a celebration of 100 years of progress. Multiple Texas State elected officials, Leaders of Industry, and Commissioners of Port Freeport spoke on the rich history and what the port has meant to our local, state and even national economy. It was personally a great opportunity to meet others in government and industry that can benefit VOSB, plus it was a really spectacular celebration of 100 years. They did a great job hosting and boasting Port Freeport. Speaking of hosting, they are offering guided tours of Port Freeport on Saturday. I’d encourage you to secure a reservation for a free guided tour of Port Freeport. Use this link to get a reservation:
https://www.portfreeport.com/centennial-community-port-tours
As always, I hope that you have a great day in wonderful Surfside Beach! Bundle up and stay warm and dry this weekend. It appears that winter has finally made an appearance in Surfside.
Thanks,
Zach
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If you need help obtaining a WPI-1 for Windstorm Inspection, feel free to call the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) Angleton Office at 800-248-6032, option 4, then option 3; or you may hire a Texas Certified Windstorm Engineer.