Rhonda Haag, Chief Resilience Officer with Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
The residential improvement ordinance is still being discussed.
Haag said, “We’re proposing it to be an ordinance. We’ve already discussed it at the November meeting in Key West. We’re going to discuss it again at the December meeting here in Key Largo, and then a third time in Marathon. It’s a proposed ordinance. What this does, it’s going to allow neighborhoods, if they want some type of special improvement above and beyond what the county provides as its basic level of services, they can request it. So yes, it can be a road elevation project. It can also be a lot of other things. It could be a smaller drainage project. Maybe they just have a street that needs additional drainage. It could include things like a weed gate for canals. I know we have a lot of canals down here that get inundated with that floating vegetation in the summer. So if they want to have a weed gate, we could use that program for that, or mangrove trimming and sidewalks, a lot of neighborhoods I know like to have sidewalks, and I don’t see a lot of them down here, or street lighting, a lot of things like that, shoreline erosion control, recreational services. So it’s not limited to just resilience. It focuses on that, especially with the road elevation program, but it could include a lot of other types of things.”
How does a neighborhood start the process?
Haag said, “This is an active program that’s been used for a couple of decades over in Lee County, and that’s how a lot of their neighborhoods were developed with the special services over there, so we’re going to try it and implement it down here. What happens is, a neighborhood, it doesn’t have to be a formal homeowners association, although, if it is, that’s okay too. But even if it’s just a group of neighbors that get together and say, okay, we might want this. Then you have a representative approach the county and just tell us what you’re thinking about, and we take a look at it, and see if it’s something that would be doable by the county, and if it’s something feasible, and we’d probably developed just a cost estimate up front, not anything detailed, and then we would meet with the neighbors and say, okay, here’s what we think it’s going to cost, here’s how long we think it’s going to take. We also tell them if there’s any grants that are available. Now for road elevation projects there, of course, are grants. It doesn’t mean we automatically get them, but the county is pretty good at getting grants for road elevation projects, and we would tell them the availability of potential grants and if the county would go ahead and apply for grants to help fund the cause for that. And then if the majority of the neighborhood, 51%, that’s our number, agree on this, then the county would move forward. So it’s a lot of opportunities for the residents with that, though, there is, the other side, the responsibility part of it. So these are new projects that staff doesn’t currently do, and even the road elevation projects. So what the county is looking at doing is, like I said, we would apply for grants as available. But if there aren’t any, we would look to the residents then to fund these costs of these projects through a neighborhood assessment program. So the county, we would pay the cost up front for whatever planning, research, design and engineering would be needed, and any grant application fees. Then as the project moved along, we’d go ahead and put that into an assessment, and then the residents would pay the county back for our costs. Then if there was any differential, like, road elevation, I don’t expect the neighborhood to pay an entire $50 million road elevation fee, but if we were to get, like the the Big Coppitt neighborhood or the Winston Waterways neighborhood in Key Largo, where we have 50 and $80 million respectively, already on hold for grants, then the residents would agree to just to fund the differential. So if there’s any differential in the construction costs, when we put those out, sometimes they come in a little higher than what we were anticipating, and there’s a differential. So the residents would also pay that through an assessment and those assessments can be 20, 25 years long, and so we would spread the costs out over that.”
The assessments would be paid by the neighborhoods that directly benefit from them.
Haag said, “We would definitely perform a study. We would determine who exactly would benefit, and then we would include them in that benefit area, and only those people that benefit would pay. Now, the beauty of this, there’s two things. Everybody pays, because under assessment you have to pay. That’s your taxes, so you don’t have to worry about those that don’t pay, and then if you’ve got a neighborhood down the road that’s not benefiting from this project, or lots of other neighborhoods, they don’t pay either. So your regular county ad valorem taxes won’t go up to help fund these special projects. So we wanted to offer the opportunity to have these special projects, but we didn’t want to have to use county ad valorem funds to fund them, because, as you know, there’s a lot of talk in Tallahassee about reducing or eliminating property taxes. So we’re being very careful now. We’re building up our reserves so that we have enough for hurricane disaster if it happens. But right now, we’re on hold spending any funds on road elevation project matches that we don’t have grants for.”
How long has Lee County been doing this?
Haag said, “At least 20, maybe 30. It can be a simple thing, like even street lighting. I like to have street lighting out when I walk at dark, and I like to have sidewalks. So if I was in a neighborhood that didn’t have them, you now have the opportunity to request those. The assessment, if there’s not an operations and maintenance component, that requires a long term assessment, if it’s just capital funds, that could be a short, depending on the cost of the project, it could be a three to five year assessment and then you’re done, as long as the county is paid back for the funds, then we’re done. So sidewalks and lighting, they can be relatively short term, so you don’t have to deal with an assessment forever and ever.”
This will be discussed again at the county commission meeting.
Haag said, “It’s going to be at the December the 10th meeting in Key Largo, and then the final meeting in January in Marathon, and that’s what we’re going to actually have the formal public hearing. It’s January 28 in Marathon, and that will be the formal public hearing. And then if all goes well there, there, there might be a final reading after that, or it might be finalized that day. But we wanted to get in front of each of the audiences in each of the areas, and so that’s what we’re doing.”
Special staff will be set up in the county.
Haag said, “If we do adopt it and county commissioners choose to move forward, we have special staff that will be available to meet with these people, including myself, depending on the type of project, and to meet with them and just kind of go over the rules and how it works. There is a component of this, it’s called financial hardship program that’s part of this. So if we do pass an assessment, and there are some low income people that can’t afford to pay the assessment, we are looking at deferring their assessments like it would just build up on their house until the point of sale. Then we would get our money back through the assessments at that time, even if it was like 100 years later. So we’re trying to think of everybody, and consider those people who are elderly or low income and maybe couldn’t afford assessment, but still would benefit from that particular improvement.”