Marathon Council Member Lynn Landry joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
The Marathon airport saw the hurricane storm chaser event yesterday.
Landry said, “It was exciting. I think it was the first time in almost, I think 14 years, if I’m not mistaken, that they’ve been here. It was very good to see the plane and kind of learn a little bit of what they do. It’s amazing the data they collect and how they help us with the age of supercomputing and all that to help do better and better with these forecasts on all these storms.”
The aircraft can sustain 500 mile an hour winds.
Landry said, “That is amazing. And I was talking to him about maintenance yesterday, and I said, is there any extra maintenance that happens on those planes? And he goes, well, it’s normal maintenance. It’s just a lot of times they fly through hell, and every time that they do, they have to do extra special care on that plane to make sure there was no damage to it. But that just seems harrowing to me. You fly into the storm, most people fly away from.”
There has also been work at the Marathon airport recently.
Landry said, “Going back a few years, we’ve had Air Force One, land on that airstrip. It’s a full size runway. They just don’t have the overruns, a lot bigger than Key West, but George Bush Sr. flew in there years and years ago to go to Islamorada. I believe he was fly fishing at that time. I couldn’t imagine landing that plane there, but they did very successfully.”
How is the search for a new city manager going?
Landry said, “Our city charter gives the criteria for city manager, and then we write the job description based upon that, and then going a little bit forward to come back once that someone is in the process of being hired, then a lot of the job description and the contract will bind a lot of what they do, as long as it doesn’t violate the Charter. But the charter is kind of vague for a reason. It gives us leeway in this style of government, because we do run a manager form of government, with council setting policy. But again, last night, we did go over the job description for the city manager, the real biggest tweak from before and we’ve had a good run of about little over 10 years with two managers, which was before George’s parting. He happened to be the longest tenured manager in the Florida Keys. So we put that together last night, and we have the minimum qualifications and a lot of preferred qualifications, and now we’re going to start putting that out there to the general public and without a real timeline, other than to say it’ll be out there until the position is filled. So we’re going to start that, and I think we’re going to be talking a little bit more about we’re going to put together a committee, Steve’s putting together with himself, our HR director, and a couple other people to review applications and score them and then bring them forward to us. We haven’t really gone to a real detailed approach on that yet, but probably we’ll have some interviews, maybe some public input, and go that direction. I hope that the public could get a chance to meet the final few candidates before decisions are made. I’m one of five people. We have spirited debates up there. It always tends to be very professional, and no, we don’t always agree, but I always take the tack that, hey, once the decision is made, I’ll accept the will of the Council and move forward. I made my comments on how I felt about what transpired, and that’s done. Now we’ve got to move forward and move forward trying to find the right person, whoever it might be that’s qualified and interviews well, that will lead the city forward.”
What are some of the qualifications for the city manager position?
Landry said, “The minimum qualifications originally, as written, our interim city manager Steve Williams, had a master’s degree in various fields, like public administration, management, planning, business administration, or something closely related. In that field, you can only get a Master’s if you have a bachelor’s. So we took the master’s degree and moved it down to preferred qualifications, and then before it was over with, we actually moved the bachelor’s degree down to preferred qualifications, which I don’t necessarily agree with. But on the other side of that, part of the minimum is a 10 years of progressive, responsible executive level experience in a county or state government administration. Technically speaking, if you’ve been in government that long at those positions you will have that minimum a bachelor’s because usually promotions don’t happen unless you have that. So I’m assuming that some of the other qualifications that we have will kind of lead that toward and for a bachelor’s degree, for me, at minimum, would have been just to show you’ve accomplished something. You set your mind to it, you accomplished it in a field that’s related to what you’re doing and I personally have a business degree, and I’ve used it my entire life at times when I think I wouldn’t, I would, but, typically speaking, it’s still in the preferred qualification. So we do prefer that you have that, but it’s not a minimum qualification. But some of the other stuff we did is just some of the stuff that’s kind of more specific is being able to engage with elected body government lobbyists at the state and federal level, which is a good one, familiarity with ROGO and BPAS. We’re kind of on an island down here, literally and figuratively. We have ROGO in the county and BPAS in the city. There’s not any other place that has that but us, because we’re an area of state critical concern, and we have limited growth and limited land. Also expensive experience in coastal communities, areas of state critical concern, working relationships with county level or state level, all those things will drive the candidates that we get, because you’re going to have to be familiar with the state of Florida and with us specifically in order to have the minimum qualifications for this job. No timeline is set for a deadline. We’re going to open it up. We’re hoping within, I mean, realistically, 30 or 60 days, I’m hoping we’re going to have some good candidates. We didn’t really want to put a deadline on it. We did have some debate whether we were going to just advertise locally, see what we get, and then open it to the state. I kind of fought for, hey, let’s just open to the state. There might be somebody in the state that knows about us and has experience with us that we don’t know about, that lives somewhere else, that may be at state level or a county level, that understands an area of state critical concern and realizes what we go through and may be qualified. So let’s cast the net at least in the state of Florida, and see if we can get all the qualified candidates at one shot and not have to maybe go back to the drawing board a second time.”
There were a number of resolutions on the agenda for yesterday’s meeting.
Landry said, “Most of the resolutions going into ordinances the second reading, probably 99% of them were word changes, because it used to be DEO, then we went to Department of Commerce, our land planning agency. And so because we’ve have to change it every so many years, and it’s just a paperwork shuffle to change names and our ordinances to be compliant with the state, we’re changing them to just say land planning agency. So no matter what they call it, it’s still our land planning agency in the state of Florida. We had to do them one by one to change those words in those ordinances. So that didn’t really take that long. It was the second reading. So that went quick. We had a discussion on our sign ordinance last night, we have some pretty good teeth in our ordinance on the books. The council decided last night that we were going to push a policy to enforce our sign ordinance. So we’re going to be putting out some information to the public, and we’ll probably have in the next few weeks, a big sign roundup, and then code compliance will be out talking to people and making sure that the sign ordinance is followed. That’s one of the big things that came out of last night’s meeting.”
Marathon will receive some grants from the TDC for Sombrero Boulevard.
Landry said, “I think it’s been on the way for a while. It’s finally coming through. Sombrero Boulevard is far on its way. I don’t think they have too much further to go before they’ll be completed with that project. It’s probably one of the quickest projects we’ve done in Marathon. So then there’s a lot of other grants. I did highlight. I pulled the grants coordinators off the agenda last night, and we just spoke about, there was a time in our city we did not have a grants coordinator, and she is fantastic. She finds money in places that we didn’t know was there. And I just highlighted that it’s open to the public. I mean these are published every month. If you really want to know what’s going on within the city, pull that report. Pull the Public Works report, engineering. It’s all there. It tells everything that’s going on in the city and kind of where we’re at with it. So it’s all available to the public all the time, every month. It’s on our website, under the agenda, and when you click on it, you can go and find all those reports. And every department gives a report every month. So if you’re concerned or you don’t understand something, read that, if not reach out to one of us, we’re pretty much open books, and we’re more than willing to sit down, talk with you, talk with you on the phone, email you whatever’s best for you.”
There are also upcoming events.
Landry said, “June 13 at Oceanfront Park, the community events committee, we’ve been doing all kinds of stuff. We had the neon skating a few weeks back that was a very big success within the community. They’re doing a Havana Nights event at Oceanfront Park under the tiki. We did approve to sell alcohol there for that event. I think it’s going to be an awesome event. And they just keep trying to come up with creative ways to engage the community and bring us together. So that’s happening on June 13.”