Lynn Landry, mayor of the city of Marathon, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5 FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
This is the third straight year that there will not be a tax increase in the city of Marathon.
Landry said, “I just wanted to highlight that one more time. We decided to have no more new taxes in the city of Marathon for the third year. We are going to run a little bit of a deficit budget, but we’re burning off a little bit of the reserve to get us to about 12 months, which is our safe spot or a delineation, that we decided that that would be best for the city to be at 12 months of reserves in case of a hurricane or a disaster.”
Marathon City Council will meet tonight at 5:30 p.m.
Landry said, “It’s kind of a light agenda, a lot of things on consent, which is just kind of the some of the contracts and things that we normally do in the course of business that needs to be approved by Council. We are going to look at the second reading of an ordinance for fish cleaning tables. We’ve had some issues in the city with some of the newer style fish cleaning tables with coverings on top of them for shade. So we’re going to kind of redo our ordinance a little bit to allow those covered and uncovered up to eight feet in height. I think the largest you could put on your dock would be about nine and a half feet. We’re going to limit those to one per slip. So I think that’s going to be a good addition to our ordinances and clarify a little bit here in the city. We’re also looking at a resolution to transfer 19 early evacuation units from the county to the city so that the county can build 19 workforce affordable housing units for tourist industry related jobs. It’s something that’s coming and be funded through the TDC money that we got back through the legislature last year. They’re doing that at 490 63rd Street. It’s where the old fire services were for the county, and they’ve moved over into the new EOC building.”
The community events committee has been working hard.
Landry said, “Maria Covelli is our grants coordinator. She has a heart for service, and she proposed the community events committee, and they’ve been doing a fantastic job. We started with the food truck event a couple months ago, which was a great community turnout for that one. So there is a community here, and we’re trying to foster more community here in the city of Marathon. We’ve recently been doing movies at the park in community park, with Parks and Rec with community events committee, and then Saturday night, they did the showing of Jaws at the lagoon on Grassy Key, and it was about 150 to 200 people there. It was amazing. I got to go to the event and kind of hang out there and it was just, it was good to see the community come out. It’s a great partnership that we’re trying to do within the city and just want to let people know if they have a business and they have something that they may want to do, reach out to Maria and the community events committee, and we can hopefully maybe try and partner with you to get something off the ground to keep fostering community here in Marathon.”
Marathon has a first time home buyer’s program.
Landry said, “We can give up $15,000 to $20,000 to a first time home buyer, and they’ve been combining that with SHIP loans, and you can get up to $45,000 through SHIP, which is the State Housing Initiatives Partnership program. So you can conceivably get $65,000 in a first time home buyers program. So we’re having ordinance on our meeting tonight to become the third mortgage holder instead of the second to allow those types of deals to happen so we can get people in homes. That’s really our goal is to get people in their own home here in the city of Marathon.”
It looks like the ROGO scheduling might be a bit different.
Landry said, “That issue will definitely affect the city of Marathon. If those units do not come, we’re down to our last six, one unrestricted affordable housing unit and five market rates, or they can be anything we want them. But at this point, Marathon is probably in the hot seat earlier than anybody else. If we do run out of units, we are going to be the test case for lawsuits and takings. So we’re going to see. I think we’re going to send some people to the meeting tomorrow night for the county commission to kind of hear the report from what they’re getting from Tallahassee. But yes, Marathon is definitely, will be first to run out of units here in the county. We’re already into our administrative relief units. We did go from we were issuing 20 units a year, a couple years ago, we went down to 10. We do five and five to market rates, to market rate, owner occupied, and one affordable. We’re actually going to be looking at in the near future of maybe decreasing that, trying to extend ours out as long as possible until all this gets resolved from Tallahassee.”
November 4 is the election in the city of Marathon.
Landry said, “There’s seven candidates running for three spots, and so get out and be an informed voter and turn out in November. I think early voting starts the 20th of this month. I know absentee ballots are already out, but that’s coming up November 4. One more thing on the agenda tonight, it’s on consent is we’re renewing the contract, we had a six month original contract with our Public Information Officer, Carlos Garcia, on agenda tonight to approve his contract for the next year. I will have to say that it has been fantastic having him on board in the city. He has done a great job getting timely, factual and clear and concise information out to the public, and we’re using multiple outlets as well as emails to get all that information out. A prime example was last week when we had the five inches of rain in a matter of hours, the PIO was on top of that, we were doing updates, multiple updates, getting it to every outlet we could get it to, the sheriff’s office, public works, everybody did a fantastic job dealing with that situation and having that kind of rain and a short amount of time. So I just want to give a shout out to Carlos and all the staff, and everybody that was involved in making that go as smoothly as possible in a bad situation.”
For more information, click here: https://www.ci.marathon.fl.us/