Key West Mayor Teri Johnston joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the city.
The violence over the weekend at the rally for Republican nominee for president Donald Trump saw a gunman open fire on the crowd and a fireman was killed.
It was a terrible tragedy.
Johnston agreed, “It certainly is and I think that everyone in the United States saw this coming. We’ve had such a monumental shift in how we approach politics since about 2015 or 2016 and we’ve lost all respect. We can no longer have a conversation with each other about political viewpoints and it’s really, really concerning, because if we think it’s going to stop with the events that happened this weekend, I think, we are fooling ourselves and we need to take a good hard look, we need good people in politics. We need honest people, transparent people in politics. We can agree to disagree, as we have all done over the years, but that’s what it is. It’s a disagreement, it certainly is not grounds to take somebody’s life. We’ve lost all sight of that in in the United States and perhaps around the world, but it’s time to, as President Biden says last night to lower the temperature, to really think through our thoughts and words and actions and remove ourselves from that and get us back to the incredible country that we have been for a couple hundred years. Let’s all take some personal responsibility here and approach things differently from this point forward.”
Michael Stapleford of KeysTalk 96.9/102.4FM pointed out, “You’re right, it doesn’t seem like we can have a well, a calm discourse anymore, between opposing points of view. I think Key West in general does certainly uphold the One Human Family mantle most of the time, but again, a mutual respect, even if someone doesn’t agree with your viewpoint is very, very important and we need to keep that in mind.”
Johnston agreed, “That’s so true. I was talking to somebody the other day that said, look, when you’re having a conversation, break it down to issues. While you may support a candidate, do you agree with every single one of his issues? And the answer normally is no. So you can have conversations about certain issues or stances, but when you start taking potshots at the candidate altogether, and this is not just on the national level, at all. We’ve had discourse for years, and then COVID continued to divide this country severely and just in our local elections, we have death threats. We’re talking about a position here that pays $22,000, and you’re getting death threats on yourself and your family. That is just mind boggling.”
Stapleford said, “It’s a wonder anybody does run for office anymore, because it really is pretty thankless.”
Johnston said, “It is and that’s the area that we need, the most honest, and trustworthy people in the country, is running for office. But it’s become very difficult. It’s become a point where you have to take a look and say, is my family safe? Is my business safe? Am I safe and is it worth it? I hope that good candidates can continue to come out. But we’ve seen the same thing here with elections, having no opposition, which is so unusual ,so highly unusual, because people need choices. I mean, you just need choices, so that people can lay out the campaign, lay out their vision for the country or for Key West and have a dialogue with your constituents and with your potential voters. That gets taken away when we don’t have multiple candidates running for office.”
Budget season is upon the city.
Johnston said, “Our director of finances has gotten into our budget books last week, in the middle of the week, just got us some more information on Friday. Here’s what I would say, is it I’m very concerned about the budget. It shows us having 551 employees for the city of Key West. I remember, during our 2008 year, and of course, we went through that financial crisis, the market dropped out of the real estate area, but we got our employees down to about 380. That concerns me because almost 60% of our budget is geared around personnel services, around insurance, around salary. So, I certainly do want to take a look at that. Do we need 551 people? Do we have the right 551 people or could we do the job with 500 people that are more highly qualified? So that’s certainly something that I want to take a look at. The other thing is our 2025 paving allocation, which is this year at $2.5 million. That is one of the areas that our public wants improvement on the most. $2.5 million if we’re going off of the figures that we just got from repaving, United Street, and repaving South Street, which we’re in the process of right now. These are complete streets where we mill and pave, we do curb and gutter, we do sidewalks, and we do landscaping there. But each one of those blocks was right around between $500,000 and $700,000. So you take a look at what we’re looking at, with a $2.5 million paving budget, is being able to do about four blocks in Key West of roads. So that that concerns me greatly. We’ve got to have good roads. We also have to get some help, because a lot of why we don’t have good roads, is the fact that we take a beating seven days a week, 365 days a year, we’ve got a lot of delivery equipment coming in, heavy equipment coming in, we’ve got a lot of people who drive down from Miami and spots north of here and the taxpayers are never going to be able to keep up with the impact from that kind of wear and tear on our streets and sidewalks and things of that nature. So we’ve got to get some help there. Throughout this report, our Director of Finance has said, we need to find new revenue sources and yet our inability to change, our inability to grasp and embrace new ideas is holding us back from generating new revenue. We’ve had no revenue generating ideas for the last four or five years and either the commission rejected them, or we didn’t implement the programs, or something has happened. But it brings me right back to the amphitheater because we are taking a look at an amphitheater, which really is a glorified band shell. The amphitheater is projected to generate $220,000 next year. We just had a proposal, that with improvements to our amphitheater, upgrading it, putting green rooms in, putting more restroom facilities, upgrading the whole program has the potential to bring in $50 million into this community. Not one cent of that is paid by the taxpayers, those renovations that are required. When it was completed in St. Augustine, the TDC bonded out the money that was required to build their amphitheater and then it was paid back by the profits of the amphitheater. So not one taxpayer dollar was utilized in improving that facility and creating an incredible revenue source for the community. But that’s where we’ve got to get to as a city of Key West. We’ve got to be open to new ideas. We’ve got to be open to change. We’ve got to take a look at other communities our size and say, how are they able to do this? Can we incorporate this in our community? But it really does come down to our ability to change and to react to the marketplace.”
This is where the bond comes in.
Johnston said, “The bonding it heavily supported our streets, and sidewalks and fire and police and our public parks and things of that nature. It is so critical that we move forward with a bonding for the city of Key West. It doesn’t mean we have to use it. It means it’s out there. It’s out there and available so that we can plan projects. We can have shovel ready projects on the books ready to go and we can actually make market improvements in the city of Key West every single year.”
There’s one more vote before the bond issue comes up for referendum.
Johnston said, “If you remember, the second vote got postponed. So we’ve got one more vote on that coming up in August. August 8. We’ve got to make sure that we continue to generate revenue sources to take the burden off of our taxpayers and continue to look at new ideas. I think as every budget we can we can tighten our belt in some areas and we need to take a good hard critical look at that.”