Key West Mayor Dee Dee Henriquez joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the city.
The holiday parade was just a wonderful time in the Keys.
Henriquez said, “It was a magical, wonderful weekend. It started off Friday with the Wesley House Be-Lighted Bike Ride that I participated in. So all of the bikes were all lit up and the decorations. So that kind of kicked off the weekend. Then on Saturday, we had the holiday parade and a huge thank you goes out to Dorian and the rest of their committee for putting all of this together. They just did a magnificent job and the community services, they had to clean up afterwards, all the candy that was thrown on the streets and the fire department and police department. It was just an amazing job done by all and just to see all the participants, I think this is the most that we’ve ever had. I believe last year we had 85 this year, I want to say was 101. It was just an amazing, amazing weekend. And then I ended it yesterday at the Women’s Club, where I was able to do the tree lighting there, and they had the Bahama Village music program, singing songs. So it the whole weekend was just magical.”
A new city manager for Key West will be decided this week.
Henriquez said, “This Thursday, we have our commission meeting starting at 9am and we will be selecting a city manager and directing staff to negotiate a contract for the approval by the commission. The hot topic right now is, when is that going to happen, in the morning session or in the evening session? So it is going to happen in the morning session, towards the end of the session. So we’ll get a lot of work done, and then we’ll start negotiating and approving for a new city manager. So we’re excited about that, and we’ll be taking care of some resolutions that we need to pass, and hopefully will pass and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Will this be a difficult decision?
Henriquez said, “From my understanding, because this will be new for me, but what we’ll do is they’ll hand us a paper with all five names on them, and we will choose who we would want as our city manager. Then they will announce what the commissioner and the mayor had voted for, and they have to get to four votes for the city manager. So until we get to that point, we’ll just keep plugging along until we can get a decision to where we have a new city manager. From my understanding, it may take a couple rounds, supposedly. So we’ll see what happens on Thursday.”
The agenda will be pretty full on Thursday.
Henriquez said, “Starting today, we’ll be looking at the agenda, going over everything, getting prepared for our Thursday meeting. So if we have any last minute questions and we need to ask our interim city manager or city attorney and or the directors we have that time to do so. So yes, Commissioner Lee is requesting maximum amount of building permit allocations, which is we call BPAS from the state of Florida. So we’ll be approving, hopefully approving that, nominating the projects and activities to be developed for utilizing the tourist Development Council surplus funds for the county. So we’ll have discussions on that and also approving our lobbyists. So there’s a lot of work that needs to be accomplished.”
The BPAS issue is a separate subject for Key West altogether being its own entity.
Henriquez said, “Commissioner Lee, like I said, has requested a resolution, and he’s requesting to ask for the maximum amount of building permit allocations, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to get the maximum. The state may give us none or only a few.”
That doesn’t mean the city will actually use all the allocations. What is the maximum number?
Henriquez said, “The number that I’ve heard was 1,200.”
The TDC funding will hopefully be made available for employee housing or for affordable housing.
Henriquez said, “The TDC was allocated $35 million and the BOCC has requested the city of Key West commission to pass a resolution outlining our potential projects for those allocations, and we’re hoping that the number I’ve heard again was $16.5 million that should be allocated or potentially given to the city of Key West. So we’ve been speaking with our Key West Housing Authority director Randy Sterling Jr, on some potential projects that he has, one of them being the Poinciana project to help with that as well.”