It’s budget time for Monroe County

Michelle Lincoln, Monroe County Commissioner for District II, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county. 

Lincoln is the president-elect of the Florida Association of Counties. 

She said, “It does bode well for our county, it definitely puts me in the spotlight in the state of Florida. It puts me in Tallahassee a little bit more and whenever our elected officials in Tallahassee see me they see Florida Association of Counties and Monroe County. So it’s always good for our county, and it was quite an honor to be elected by the other 67 counties in the state of Florida and to have the county commissioners from the entire state support me. It was quite an honor and I look forward to doing more work with the association this year and next year for sure.”

A Monroe County budget workshop was held the other day. 

Lincoln said, “I always love when we do our workshop. I think that our director of finance and her staff, the whole crew, are absolutely amazing. Tina has been doing this for so many years. She really understands what she’s doing and takes this extremely seriously. Our budget is a large number, $700 million. I always like to point out that the majority of that money though, is not ad valorem money. Ad Valorem is property tax. So the taxes that individuals that own property, own homes, own a business that is your ad valorem tax, and 70% of our ad valorem tax, are all used for public safety. It’s used for the Sheriff’s law enforcement. It’s used for our detention center. It’s used for our state mandated Substance Abuse Mental Health Baker Act services. It’s used for our extremely important Fire Rescue Department, our medical examiner, our Monroe County Health Department and our fire and ambulance. I always like to point out that while we are a small county with only 82,000 residents, we have large county challenges. We have over 5 million visitors a year, that grace our beautiful county and we are responsible for their health and their well being and their safety when they’re in our county. So, like I said, 70% of our ad valorem taxes go directly to those areas of health, safety and well being, 93% of our budget is public safety, and also our constitutional officers budgets, which all come through the county. So constitutional officers, that would be our state attorney, our judicial court system, our supervisor of election, our Property Appraiser, our tax collector and our clerk of court. So 93% of the budget is public safety and constitutional officers. The remaining of the budget from ad valorem, which is the property taxes is for our parks and beaches, our human service advisory board, a special taxing district for Key West, and then just the operating budget for our county. So it’s very complex, I always want to explain that. Then to be able to say that the rest of the money that makes up our budget comes from all other types of revenue sources, whether it’s from sales tax, or grant money, or other ways that we attract funds that help offset the cost of running our county.”

There may be some increases in salaries in the budget. 

Lincoln said, “It’s so important, and all of the raises for everyone from the Sheriff’s Department, the tax collector, the supervisor of election, the county commission, all of us, we all came in at the same increase. So I think that’s good, that keeps everyone everyone happy and safe there. There’s another slide that Tina always pulls up and it is comparing, we call her Mrs. McGillicuddy, and we compare her house every year of what would a typical homesteaded individual pay on their ad valorem taxes every year, and last year, she would have paid $1,318. This year she’s going to pay $1,348, which is an increase of $2.54 a month. We went in this year our millage rate actually came in lower this year than last year, which I’m very pleased to say our millage rate came in at 2.6929. I do believe we will be the lowest again in the state of Florida.”

The improvements to the Key West International Airport is paid by tourist dollars. 

Lincoln confirmed, “Absolutely. Again, not one penny of ad valorem taxes goes for that capital improvement project.” 

The same is true with the Emergency Operations Center — that was primarily state funded. 

Lincoln said, “You’re totally correct, but it’s all part of our budget. So we are responsible for overseeing all those funds, even though the majority of those funds are coming from grant funds and other resource streams. But yes, absolutely very excited about the capital projects that we have, some very large ticket items, but extremely important. I think we were the only county in the state of Florida that didn’t have a hardened Emergency Operation Center and yet here we are out there hanging out in the middle of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. So very, very good. This was our first meeting. We will be having several more meetings on budgets in September and what we do in the summer is we just kind of see what we can tweak. If we can’t lower something, we’ll get the projections from the state of Florida in for what they believe will be the sales tax revenue parts of it, and then we’ll be able to make our final reductions if possible. But the truth in millage rate, the trend notices go out, it cannot go any higher than this projected 2.6929 millage rate, but maybe it can get a little lower, which would be nice.”

The commissioners met yesterday where there was a pretty big agenda. 

Lincoln said, “I was very pleased with everything. I like when we look at our agenda, and I see how many items on there say, for sustainability, sustainability, sustainability, and I’m looking okay, what are all these projects? Oh, it’s for our canal restoration. Oh, this is for our road improvements. Just really pleased with all the work our county is doing to keep us sustainable in the future. We had a discussion with our resiliency officer, Rhonda Haag and our consultant to go over what grants we wanted to go after for this coming year. We have Resilient Florida Funds. When Governor DeSantis rolled that out three years ago, we were sitting pretty, we were probably the lead county in already having mapped out every road in our county to know what its flood risk were, what the elevations were. We already had pilot projects in the in the pot that we were working on with sand subdivision and Twin Lakes and now we’re Stillwright Point. So we already had in the streamline projects that were shovel ready. So early on in the first year of the Resilient Florida grants, we were capturing a lot of the of the grant money because no one else was ready. Well, now everyone else is caught up with us. So it’s a little more competitive. However, like we were we were discussing at our meeting yesterday, for the Stillwright Point project, even though we don’t have all the funding for it yet, the funding for the initial design was approved by the Resilient Florida program. We did not make the cut last year for the next step to be approved. But one would think if the state approved three years ago and invested the money for the design, that they will eventually approve the construction. I mean, to me, that just makes sense. So we kind of discussed that. It was number 27 on the state’s list last year. So we really hope that this year, it will get promoted and we can move into the next phase while we’re currently in the phase of design right now. So that was really exciting to kind of talk about that.”

The hurricane modeling ROGO survey was also discussed. 

Lincoln said, “Where are we going to land in December when legislative session starts up again and we have to let the state of Florida know where we are in that process. So Kimberly Matthews has been out and about doing her surveys with individuals that takes anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes. Then also the surveys that have been online, we have our second one online right now and she was kind of going over some of the results of the first one. So we are are making our way through. I was very interested in some of the public comment yesterday that was made by organizations like Last Stand and SPOA, who were really concerned wanting to make sure we’re doing this right, that we’re not under estimating the cost of infrastructure, the cost of extra houses on our environment, and that we need to weigh that with the cost of takings liability, and to make sure that we’re addressing all of the costs, not just the economical cost of a taking liability. I know some organizations aren’t as confident that we’re going to have as many takings cases as we’re concerned about. I’m hoping that as we continue working with the legal team, that they will make us all feel a little more confident in why they think the numbers are as high as they are. So we’re halfway through, maybe not even halfway through. So we still have a lot of questions that staff is helping us come up with the answers to, and it’s a process. I always encourage everyone to please participate in this process because this is our county, it’s up to all of us to weigh in and give our opinion. I think we had 1,800 residents fill out the first survey out of 83,000 residents. I did ask at this last meeting, if we have it in Spanish and Creole and and I was told no. So we are going to get it in Spanish and Creole so that all the residents of our county can participate in this process. I know that Kimberly is still going out to every community group, neighborhood association and we encourage anyone to call her and make sure that you’re having her at your your groups that you can fill out the survey. If not, we’re going to have an end larger places as well. For example, this coming Tuesday at the city of Marathon, Marathon City Council is having Kimberly give the questionnaire where it’s very engaging, everyone gets to weigh in and if you have a cell phone bring it so that you can get on the QR code and fill out your responses to her questions. I believe that is at 5:30 and I will be there.”

New garbage carts are being rolled out. 

Lincoln said, “I’m really excited about this and all my residents in the Lower Keys are super excited about it because they keep sending me emails about how pleased they are. We will be rolling out new garbage carts with lids and locks on wheels and every resident in the county will be receiving their 96 gallon garbage cart with a lid. This will secure the garbage cans. They will not be falling over. They will not spew trash throughout the street that is a health and safety issue for our residents, for our key deer, for our nearshore waters, and it will really help us in reducing neighborhood pollution. 

Monroe County Fire Rescue welcomed four new firefighters. 

Lincoln said, “We’re really proud of those four young men who took the oath and became firefighters for our county. It’s super exciting and just hats off to our our first rescuers, whether they’re the sheriff’s department or our fire and rescue, they’ve had a couple of challenging weeks with some horrific accidents that they’ve helped with and they truly are our heroes.”