Christine Hurley, county administrator for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
Florida Keys Days in the state legislature is next week.
Hurley said, “It sure is next Thursday, and we have a big contingency going up to represent the Keys, and really talk and meet with individuals who can influence the things that we’re asking the state to do for us.”
The ROGOs issue will definitely be on the list.
Hurley said, “Representative Mooney is proposing a bill that would grant 500 allocations over a 10 year time period. And Ana Maria Rodriguez, our senator, she’s proposing a bill that would grant 3,550 allocations over a 40 year time period. Then we kind of saw a little bit of an oddity, a third bill got filed out of the Senate for a change to the number of hours for evacuation from 24 to 26 with no other provision, so a much more simplified bill, but one that doesn’t have the protections to assure that those units go to individual, privately owned lots, which is very important to all the Keys communities. So we make sure that we satisfy private property rights and allocate those units to the people who could potentially, in the end, claim a takings if we don’t have a permit to satisfy their request.”
As the former director of the Monroe County Land Authority, Hurley has a unique perspective.
She said, “The land authority has been in place for decades. They buy up as much private property as they can for preservation, not only for the environment, but also to retire development rights. I still am working very closely with them. Monthly we go through things that are on the market and whether we can purchase them or not, and what are our goals? So that’s been going really, really well. They’re a great, great asset for our Keys.”
Property taxes are another issue.
Hurley said, “We are analyzing that actually there’s been different bills filed, some to eliminate them completely, others to reduce or give extra exemptions to people that homestead. It’s kind of an odd thing to propose, from my perspective, because if you don’t have property tax, you’ve got to somehow find funding to provide services, roads, water infrastructure. Now we’re combating sea level rise, so eliminating it sounds wonderful at the get go, but it would impact our budget substantially. I don’t know if you realize it, but we’re lucky in the Keys, because ad valorem tax, property tax, is not our major revenue. We really have a love-hate relationship, however you want to describe it. But our tourism brings a lot of sales tax, a lot of bed tax, so from our community’s perspective, we would be impacted a little less than some of the others in the state that fully rely on that. Think about rural communities.”
Are there concerns for getting funding at the federal level for climate change?
Hurley said, “That’s a huge question. First of all, we are so successful given our relationships with our Commissioner Raschein, who was in the House of Representatives for years. She formed the stewardship bill, and every year we advocate for $20 million to come down for us for water quality projects. The other major thing that I’m very proud of, our Sustainability Coordinator Rhonda Haag and our engineer, Judy Clark, they have been so successful obtaining what’s called Resilient Florida grants, and those we are using to offset some of the expense for these neighborhoods that we have who have had major flooding and have it even on sunny days from sea level rise. So we are embarking on huge projects in that arena, and we have a projected need in the hundreds of millions, billions. It’s mind blowing, and we’re really looking for revenue sources to match those grant monies we get from the state, because they are a 50/50, match, and we have to raise that locally, so we will be advocating for more money to be put into that program when we go up next week. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the great efforts we’re making for our mooring fields or down in the Lower Keys right now, very important to clean up water quality because those unmanaged acreages, there’s a lot of bad things going on in those areas from the environmental perspective.”
The Florida Association of Counties will meet as well.
Hurley said, “They advocate for things that impact all the counties in Florida. So the item you mentioned, property tax, they will weigh heavy on that. They do similar things that we do during that week. You meet with leaders, you just let them know what their proposed bills would do to all the counties in Florida. Preemption is their big deal. The state, over the past several years, has really passed a lot of laws that take governing out of local government hands. For example, we cannot create rules to say that vacation rentals can’t be in our community. The state took that out of the local government control, and so they are the biggest advocate against preemptive bills that force us to do things because one size does not fit all. What’s good for one county in the state may not be good for another, and it’s hard when the state passes things that we have to do that our locals don’t want. You heard me mention how we need those matching funds for the resilience projects where we’ve got the neighborhoods flooding out we in the future, and do need to talk to our board about potential revenue sources that can help us raise funding for that. Charter County was one option. There are a couple others that we may bring forward in the future. I’m not sure exactly where we’re going to land, but it’s a rough discussion, because these projects are $20, $40, $80 million for one neighborhood. That is very, very high. Think of trying to raise those kind of funds to benefit 200 properties. It’s a lot of money. The major goal was that if we became a Charter County, we could then hold a referendum to see if our citizens would vote for additional sales tax, and then that funding could have been used for batch money or completely used for the resiliency projects to help harden our Keys, make us resilient and save people’s places they live.”