George Garrett, city manager for the city of Marathon, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
Marathon City Council met yesterday where the art project at city hall was discussed.
Garrett said, “That was an amazing project, relatively simple, but it actually was led in some ways by something that our audio visual guy had done. Of course, everything’s AI these days, and he had taken some historic photos, which are available through the Monroe County Library System. And he’d taken some of these old photos, and some of them went back quite a ways. Others were more recent, the 50s, and he had turned them into an AI, almost video clip. In fact, there were two people at the art unveiling, which is in the same hallway, that stopped at that art unveiling, and went, oh my god, this is amazing. And first of all, you’ve got old images that now have come to life, literally. That became part of, I’m going to say, a bygone historical perspective on the city of Marathon in our hallway here in City Hall. So that was pretty cool.”
Employees were also recognized for their service to the city.
Garrett said, “I believe, says a lot about the city of Marathon and its its ability to keep people for a while and, in fact, keep them engaged as employees, people don’t really tend to stay that long, and these people have, and so that’s been fantastic. I appreciate it. And then the other side of that was, we inducted three new firefighters, and the chief obviously introduced them. And one of the comments, which I think was kind of a side comment, was not so public at that point, but it was like the other chiefs asked me, tell me you’re fully employed. How are you doing that? And honestly, I think it’s our firefighters are well trained, I think as well trained, or better trained than most other fire services. And frankly, I think we’ve done what we needed to do to retain them, which frankly, ends up being money. But at the end of the day, we’ve got some great people, and it’s been, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, which not everybody gets those reports, but if you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on right now, Marathon, the Florida Keys, in general, every day there is an accident somewhere where somebody is seriously injured or even fatally, had a number of those over the Christmas, New Year’s holiday, and these guys are the ones that take care of it, deal with it, and they may have downtime in between, which sometimes, oh, man, those guys are just hanging out watching TV. And then they’re not, they’re out dealing with somebody that literally may have been, well, not the best topic for bright and early in the morning, but literally may have died, in an accident or something. They go great work.”
The discussion on revising the rates for the vacation and rental fee schedule was tabled after some discussion.
Garrett said, “What’s happened in the past, we’ve revised vacation rentals some number of times in the past, I think seven times actually, or this may be the seventh, and not without a lot of discussion, but I think we took a little bit different approach to how we were looking at what the impacts of vacation rentals are on the city and city staffing. That led to a discussion, outside of those chambers, and not amongst council members, but between council members and staff, and concern over just what assumptions were made, what data was used, etc, to come to a number, if you will, or a percentage to increase our vacation rentals. So that was really the gist of the discussion. And the concern about whether we should pass this right away. I absolutely believe we will pass something at the next council meeting, probably in February. It may go another month after that, if we have some more discussion, but I think it’s warranted. The question is, how much should we increase fees by? And how much can we absolutely justify and then if we had to support in court? So that’s going to be the gist of the discussion, and I am absolutely convinced that we will pass some revisions. But we’ll just see what happens.”
There was also discussion about open code cases.
Garrett said, “There are, let’s say, 400 code cases open. Oh, my God. How come there are 400 code cases open? And, why are they just sitting there? And the fact is, I will say yesterday, and it’s coincidental, yesterday we have on the list of open code cases, one case that goes back to 2006. Why is that open? Well, because there was a determination made at some point that by a hearing officer or code board that they should have fines running. So the fines were running. In fact, I think we terminated that at some point, but there was approximately $150,000 in fines on that so of course, we’re going to leave that case open. We can’t do anything about a lien on that property with the $150,000 until somebody sells the property. So we sit on it, and if we don’t keep it open and keep extending the liens, we won’t get our money at the end. And in fact, yesterday was the day, been trying to sell the property, and they have, and the agreement in the sale of the property was we got a check, the city of Marathon for $100,000, so if we had closed that case four or five, six years ago, and it just sat there, we would have lost $100,000 and so some of these cases do sit. The other cases we have, we have to, like, send a note out once a month. Okay, you didn’t get a permit for a fence. What are you doing about the permit? And ultimately, we may take them back to the code board again. But it’s a process, and we do have to keep track of open cases and not just let them sit, but it is a process. I think other things that happen is that I can run this more quickly now, we accepted and actually initiated a contract, accepted a grant and initiated a contract to bulldoze and start re-constructing 15 affordable slash workforce housing units on Avenue D here in Marathon. That’s pretty cool. That was something we got done as a grant through the legislature last year. So we worked on the developer to do that. And really what it does is it offsets this cost and makes makes the project more truly affordable.”
There are 62 projects going right now in the city of Marathon.
Garrett said, “We’ve got the Quay going. We’ve got pickleball courts happening. We’ve got Seven Mile Marina. We have 62 projects going. And some of them are small, but it’s pretty amazing. So most of those things are grant funded. Not all of them, a lot of them have TDC dollars behind them. And so we’ve got some pretty cool things going on. The ones that just really have the wow factor, are things like the skate park and concession stand bathrooms going on along with the skate park, and then ultimately a splash pad, same area. So those are the ones are notable. But Seven Mile Marina, we’re getting 14 dock slips completed there. Of course, we’re starting on the Quay here, coming up to do a new boat ramp there. So, some really cool things. And we’re very pleased about that. Of course, the other news and issues that we deal with is, we’re working on the deep well project, and we are just notified yesterday that through Stewardship Act funding that we got through the legislature last July, we’re now getting officially notified that we’ve $2.72 million out of Stewardship, which, of course, will all go to the deep well. We want to support stewardship in the legislature this year again, and hopefully we’ll be successful this year. In past years, typically, we get about $20 million on that project, and we’ll split it up amongst the jurisdictions. This time, we got our 2.72 out of 20 million. Hopefully it will be as fortunate this coming session, and we’ve also done a special appropriations request, and hopefully they don’t see that as double dipping when the legislature looks at it, but we need the money in order to make this project work and be affordable. And so the 2.7 2 million hopefully another 2.72 million in the coming year. I believe we’ve asked for five in the special appropriations request, so 5 million. So those are the things that are happening in a Marathon and just lots going on.”
What about the ROGOs?
Garrett said, “Senate Bill 180 said we could only use one unit per lot of the units were given to us. Well, an affordable housing project doesn’t happen. We’re just talking about this yesterday, if nothing else happened and you were taking no money out of this, one of our bigger and I mean big guys, local contractors, if you had to build a workforce housing project for your people, you were going to take nothing out of it except a reasonable rent when you charge rent, what would you be building that unit for? It’s like 600,000, so at that point you cannot build, in my mind, and we can debate, but you cannot build an affordable housing project and the Keys on one unit per lot. And we’re going to have to get that straightened out in the legislature this year to be able to use those allocations we got, we’ve received them now, in more than one unit per lot, to make it affordable, or practically affordable for the developer to build them.”
Safety is so important.
Garrett said, “Whether you’re local, whether you’re a visitor listening in on this today, be safe while you’re driving down the highway. Most things are on the highway where we have problems. Our guys, I know, Marathon Fire Rescue EMS had some sort of very traumatic event almost every day of that Christmas, New Year’s, including multiple, unfortunately, multiple deaths. And the only thing I can say to everybody is, relax, slow down. The locals who want less traffic, just relax and slow down and those visitors and if you missed the turn, just go down to the next safe U turn and do it. Don’t be crossing three lanes of traffic. Just think in those terms, and life will be a lot better for everybody. Because we really want everybody, frankly, in our busiest part of the year, to be safe while they’re here and enjoy what they’re doing.”