Christine Hurley, County Administrator with 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.
How is the budget coming along?
Hurley said, “I think overall, we’re in a good position now with the budget, the final adoption hearing right now is set for next Wednesday, at five o’clock up in Key Largo. Overall right now, the millage is set at a little bit higher than it had been last year. Primarily the board did that to make sure that they could put extra money into emergency reserves, the funds we use if we are hit by a hurricane or have some other kind of emergency hit the Keys. So that was about 2 million that was produced by the increased millage. And then they designated another 2 million that we found by cutting the budget elsewhere to go into those reserves. So that is set. Now we’ll see how that ends up on the final day. The HSAB cuts were a lot of the discussion that the board had. There were some really good public comments. In the end, the board did stay with a 50% decrease to the funds that they put aside for those nonprofits. Last year they were funded at about 2.2 million, and now this year, they’re funded at about 1.1 million overall. The county, department, state, every one of them pretty much contributed to budget decreases so we could balance the budget. We laid off or eliminated about 45 county positions. So it’s been a rough few months. I’m very proud of the department heads that worked within their budgeted allotments to figure out how to restructure, and I kind of considered a reset. We’re watching already what the state is going to do with ad valorem tax reform. Many, many of the state folks are looking at that for this current session that will start up in January. So while I wish we would be going into this year with full confidence that things are going to be great and we won’t have this kind of hardship next year, based on what the state is talking about, we could end up back in the position of looking inward to eliminate expenses. So that’s kind of where we ended up. We’ve been working with the Department of Government Efficiency, providing our documents. Some governments in Florida are being in person, audited by that agency. So far, we have not been but we did try to follow what they published as their priorities and make changes to our budget based on those state priorities.”
What do the budget final figures look like versus the current budget?
Hurley said, “I think we ended up with a large decrease. We’re at about $674 million in total. Last year, the adopted budget was $715 million. But the majority of that, believe it or not, was really changes in our Tourist Development Council budgets and our airport accomplishing a lot of their capital projects. So that’s kind of how we ended up this way. A report that will be published by state DOGE mid January in 2026. The bill that the legislature passed required them to produce a report, and we’re hoping that when we see whatever they come up with we will know more than just what their priorities are like, how they define essential services and things like that, but I also envision the report is going to be used for them to see if they want to pass new laws on what counties and cities can do with ad valorem taxes, since that’s the big discussion in Tallahassee right now. So it could be all the way through next spring, when they finish session.”
Is the US 1 arterial travel time and delay study still being discussed?
Hurley said, “Next Wednesday, September 10, up in Key Largo, at 1:30, time approximate, we will have the policy issues, really, that surround transportation on our agenda. The planning department will present with the consultants that prepared the study and then we will also have a discussion with the board to see if they want to transmit the comprehensive plan amendment that would eliminate the restriction we have currently to only allow two laning of the US 1 arterial roadway throughout the Keys. So there’s a lot of community input on that. It’s kind of a community character slash safety, I would say, debate. So looking forward to the board making that decision on whether to transmit and I want to make sure the community understands we are still very focused on how to improve traffic in the Keys. We eliminated the transit department because basically, when we formed that department, the board was focused on possibly becoming a charter county which would have let us levy extra sales tax to pay for transit, but they abandoned that concept. And there are ways we could have still proceeded that were very complicated. Right now the state does not have the appetite at all to let local governments create new taxes. So we’ve been meeting with Key West. They run a transit system from Key West up to Marathon, and working with our partners there to see how we can enhance what they’re doing. We had some good meetings with city of Key West manager and their staff, and kind of watching what happened after we eliminated Freebee from the Lower Keys.”