Richard Clark, executive director of Monroe County Transit, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with travel in the county.
Things in Tallahassee have been a little tough this year.
Clark said, “It’s a myriad of things. A lot of it is, from just the outside looking in, people are positioning themselves for what happens two years from now. We’ve got a governor who made a, no one’s going to hang with Donald Trump in a presidential cycle, but he made a valiant effort. I wouldn’t know why he wouldn’t try again. You’ve got the Speaker of the House, who’s a South Florida guy, really great guy too. Some of it is the where am I going to be two years from now? Then it’s philosophy and belief and sometimes it’s hard to get around that stuff. The difficulty when you start changing laws and moving things back and forth, or even under the idea of protecting the taxpayer, the difficult process you go through, you legislate for the poorest behaving 2% or 3% and the other 97% of us are there who are doing it right and correct. So it’s tough. It’s a tough road to hoe. I don’t envy anybody. It’s a part time job. Everybody wants to get back to their families and their jobs, and delaying it a couple more weeks is tough on everybody.”
The fact that the House passed the bill that would disband the Tourist Development Council was also a surprise.
Clark said, “I’m not sure what the Senate’s going to do, yeah, and they’ve got two weeks, and I think these two weeks are going to be really focused on the budget because they are so far apart. They’re close to $5 billion. That’s a lot, so I think that’s where all of their focus is going to be, but it’s certainly a shot across the bow regardless and very difficult things and subjects like that take a couple cycles, years to see how they how they actually ferret out. So we’ll have to really pay attention and frankly, all of us, we really rely on that down here. It’s how we live down here. We need the tourism, and we need that machine to turn and bring people to the Keys. So we have time to talk to our legislators and see what happens.”
Transit is also affected by tourism.
Clark said, “We’re trying to build a transit system specifically built for the Keys and our residents and those people that have to get not just the tourists that come in. We want them to get in our public system too. But the residents and people that come into the Keys to work here and earn a living, and the businesses here that employ people, that’s our primary goal and every day we get a little closer, and we will, at some point, hit that tipping point where, where it looked like it went from zero to 100 but obviously it’s a process to get there. One of those processes is just simply seeing how FDOT is going to handle what we want to do. Just, very recently, we all received a letter on the 22nd from FDOT. They have changed the Long Key Bridge project from a rebuild, a building of a new bridge to a major rehabilitation project. So the good news is our district did a phenomenal job at keeping the funding that was earmarked for the bridge, which was roughly, good ballpark numbers, $200, $250 million, which was the original budget of what they thought the bridge would cost somewhere around $200 and then once they got further along, they realized it was going to cost more like $600, three times the original estimate. So they had to really see, what could we do? How do we make that bridge safe? How do we make it strong? How do we make it last a significant amount longer? You don’t do a rehab project to last five, 10 years. You do it to last into the future for a period of time. So the good news is, they kept the money in the budget. They’re certainly going to move that project up. I think the original plan for a reuild was 2035, but according my last conversations, it’ll be closer to 2030 when the rehab starts, which is great. It’ll happen sooner. There’s good and bad. We’d love to see a new bridge with new standards, wider shoulders, wider lanes. But we have to take the good with the bad and applaud them for the efforts that they’re doing. But it is going to take time, and it will certainly impact us from a transportation perspective.”
Does the state budget battle affect the funding available for these kind of projects?
Clark said, “They plan in five, 10, 20 year increments. So when you get into the five year work plan, it’s pretty sound. They know they need, they want to do it. They’ve done their due diligence. They want to get there. It appears over the past five years post COVID, what we’ve seen is this dramatic spike in cost. So it’s not picking one project over another or the state and our elected officials obviously, they really support FDOT and everything they do. Our infrastructure is vital to getting everybody to and from and around and FDOT isn’t just roads, it’s airplanes and boats and it’s everything. So they aren’t held harmless, per se, but everybody understands they’re good stewards of the dollars that they are given. Most of the projects they see, they do a lot of brick and mortar, so a lot of capital projects, as opposed to operational projects, paying for the day to day. So you can see it, you can touch it, you can feel it. And those projects are always well liked when you’re balancing a budget and you’re an elected official and you can say that bridge is going to go that place, or we’re going to rehab this and it’s going to stay and be strong and safe.”
We’re almost at the end of our second iteration of the Transit Coordination Committee.
Clark explained, “That is made up of elected officials from each of our municipalities and the county. We’ve been meeting for months now, and looking at projects and so we’re almost done. We’ve got some highlighted stuff that a lot of people have talked to us about, the bike, pedestrian master plan for all of the Keys. That’s something that it’s time to do an update, a refresh on that and understand what we have accomplished and what we can make better, things like looking at inter island ferry, kind of looking at, is it really feasible for us to do such a thing? Where would it be? How would it run? And then, just generally, look at things that we need, that multiple cities in the county, everybody wants to see us do up and down the Keys to help traffic flow, taking the Weigh Station and turning it into a virtual weigh station, instead of making semis make two left turns in and out as they come in, things like that that are really good things. They came through and did a whole study on trucking and all of the goods that flow in and out and so we’ve put that in our list of, hey, we support all of these things that are mostly very simple, a little longer, right turn lane in to get the traffic to continue to flow, or a left hand turn lane, very similar to let traffic continue to flow. Not rocket science, just simple things that take time. They get put on a schedule, and then FDOT is smart, and they look and say, okay, what other projects do we have in those areas that are really close, are right there, and we can add that to that program, as opposed to digging something up? It takes time, but we’ll get there.”