Christine Hurley, the administrator for 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.
With the new year upon us, what were some highlights from 2025?
Hurley said, “We had a up and down year. We had some budget struggles, but when I met with the team and got together with them, and we put together our accomplishments, I couldn’t be more happy. The new concourse at the Key West International Airport, and then, of course, they widened the Marathon airport runway. So both of those accomplishments are huge for our county. Artificial reefs, we deployed our first one, and already over 90 marine species are growing on those, so kudos to our new director in that arena. She’s done just a great job. We also had a record breaking year for removing derelict vessels, something that nobody likes down here, but we’re stuck with doing it, and it’s very important to water quality. Everybody focused on this one, I think it’s really going to have a good result for our citizens, especially our property owners. We eliminated that maximum 299 square feet for downstairs enclosures. That’s going to let people really open up their space for storage of fishing equipment and things that we really struggle with down here. I think another one that I really am so proud of is that our board supported big salary increases for our fire rescue employees, and we haven’t talked about this, but our Fire Rescue Department literally runs about eight or 10 vacancies a year from turnover. We struggle to recruit locals, and we even have a fire academy locally. But still with that, we really have a big turnover, and we’re really hoping that that salary increase will help people stay with us. Training firefighters is very expensive, and they’re critical to our existence down here. So we’re very, very excited for that department to level up.”
The ROGO discussion was a big one for 2025.
Hurley said, “We were very focused on the struggle we had trying to obtain new ROGO or permit allocations for our county. And in December, luckily, the administrative commission met the governor and cabinet, and they actually awarded the Keys with 900 new ROGO allocations. The county will receive 657 of those. And what is the best part of this, is that our board is supporting that 70% of those will be used for the workforce. In other words, we’re creating a new pot, basically with new rules, and those that receive one of those types of allocations will either have to be part of the workforce or rent to the workforce. So that is really something we’re excited about.”
The legislative session is beginning soon in Tallahassee and the county is ready.
Hurley said, “We’re watching it carefully. We are analyzing already certain things that they’ve put forward, the potential elimination, or a partial elimination, of property taxes. Obviously, that would create huge budget challenges for us, even if it happens, though, and it’s on a referendum in 2026, we don’t think it would impact our budget until the following fiscal year. So we would have about a year to figure out what we were going to do, and we are closely watching to see if the legislature is going to propose an alternative revenue source, for example, increase sales tax, or some other mechanism where we could replace that type of revenue because it pays for well, let me just put it this way, of all that we collect, about 70% of it is for public safety, and about 90% of it is public safety and all the constitutional offices. So it would be quite challenging if we lose that type of revenue. We did substantially cut the budget, but we do have our department heads looking at ways to raise revenue. One example, Parks and Recreation is evaluating paid parking at parks, boat ramps for everybody except locals. In other words, the visitors would start to pay for parking at certain of our locations. We’re trying to find ways that we can not hurt our current residents, but generate alternative revenues to support all these great parks and things that we have. We want to keep them, but that’s one of the items that if we had a substantial cut in property tax, we’d have challenges keeping. So that’s where we’re headed with what we’re looking at for goals for 2026. We’re going to do some great things over this next year, and we’ll talk about those as we go through the year. I was very pleased to see we have a lot of visitors in town, so I think our businesses and our hotel years will be a little happier than they were in the fall of 2025.”