Monroe County Administrator Christine Hurley joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
The county will be handing over control of Higgs Beach to the city of Key West after a vote at the Key West Commission meeting recently.
Hurley said, “We’re really happy, because we think it is the right thing for the citizens, and it’s important that local governments that are closest to geographic areas handle and plan for that. The next steps are our board will consider the agreement that Key West just voted in favor of on April 15. Then there are a series of items that have to go back to the Key West commission, and some that go to our board, namely the tenants that are there, their leases will be assigned to Key West. Then the funding that goes with the park will all start moving into Key West. So within the agreement that was approved, there are different items that have to occur literally through the beginning of next fiscal year. So all the way through October, we’ll be working on items related to that transfer.”
What’s happening with the mooring fields?
Hurley said, “On the April 15 agenda, we will have a settlement agreement between the county and the plaintiff that has been challenging our DEP permit for the mooring field near Wisteria Island that has been literally held up for a couple years already by that challenge. So we worked with the challenger and have agreed to phase in the mooring balls in a certain way and limit a little bit the maximum number we can put there. It’s so important that we get this accomplished because right now you’ve got boats in that area, as well as Boca Chica, where we have our second mooring field we’re working on, that have been there forever. They don’t really have adequate anchors. They use things like engines to hold themselves down that damage seagrass. So we’re really looking forward to getting these projects started. Brittany Burtner, she is the staff person that’s been leading this effort, along with many others that help her, but April 15, she’s going to have a presentation before the board. We thought it was very appropriate to do that with the settlement agreement that will be on the agenda, so that our board and the public can be updated on how long it’s going to take. What are the next steps? We do have other permits we still have to obtain, and then we can get started on construction. So the one mooring field will be near Wisteria. The other one is in the Boca Chica basin. We have a shore side piece of property there that we are working on building restrooms, showers, office for the person that’s going to manage that mooring field, and we’re going to include a little apartment on top of that office. Hopefully that will help us attract a great person that will manage the facility. So there’s a lot of work to be done, but a huge step toward improving water quality and cleaning up our nearshore waters, which is pretty much some of our main goals we continue to strive for down here.”
How many mooring balls will be available at Wisteria?
Hurley said, “60 will be made available out of the box. And then the plaintiff has a couple years to figure out whether or not he can pretty much get any type of agreement with the federal government to utilize part of Wisteria for whatever use. And if that doesn’t happen, we can add another 17. So there will be in total, 77 mooring balls. We’ve done inventories throughout time, and we know that about half of the boats that are moored out there now on anchors or whatever is being used to hold them down are storage. So people will literally just park their boat out in the water. They don’t live in it and they don’t use it daily. So those are not really counted in what we consider need to provide for those that are either transitioning by boat through Key West or, as a lot of people know, some of it is workforce housing. So there are a lot of people that live on their boats, and they provide work force for our businesses. So we think it’s adequate. We really think there were about 40 to 50 that are more the workforce category, and look forward to figuring that out as we bring those online.”
Will there be a requirement for those to rotate off of the mooring locations?
Hurley said, “So once the balls are in place, within 10 miles of that mooring field, you cannot anchor out for longer than 90 days in one location. That makes sense to us, because, like I said, some people don’t even have real anchors, and they are doing things on the sea bottom that is really not good for our environment. So hopefully this will provide an affordable way for people to moor correctly, and then they’ll have access to showers and shore side facilities. And then the people that don’t choose to go on the mooring balls, they do need to be able to move around, and they are not able to anchor permanently in one location. Usually it’s a license or tenant agreement. What we’ve been doing is looking at how Key West handles their mooring field agreements and Marathon and we’ll kind of use the same kind of agreements that they use. I don’t know if it’ll be first come first serve. I do kind of think it’ll be the first person to sign the agreement and pay the reservation fees, or however we set that up.”
Budgets were due in the county this week.
Hurley said, “So we’re going into budget season, and I’m sure our next discussion will likely be about that, and some of the bills that we are following that were passed by the legislature related to budget. So yes, there’s a lot going on actually, and we’re going to go into high gear very soon. There was a bill that actually passed related to local government spending, and it requires us to do our budget differently, including annually a 10% proposed budget decrease analysis. So that’s going to be different for us. It’s not effective until next budget year. Thank goodness they gave us time. But we’re going to go ahead and start working toward that formula, because that’s where we’re going to have to go in the future. The property tax, we’re all nail biting on that, and we’ve still got the state department of government efficiency, or DOGE, that we’re evaluating. They published the report in January. Basically, when you read the report, you can see what they deem as wasteful spending. So we’re still applying that concept to how we’re evaluating our budget, and because of property tax potential changes, this will be different this year. We’re going to tell our board the cost of mandatory services, because no matter what, we have laws where we’re required to do certain things, and if we have to strip down to bare bones budget, we need to solidify what that is and and get everybody in the same mindset on what is the minimum services the government, a county government, has to provide.”