Emily Schemper, Growth Management Director 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.
Monroe County Administrator Christine Hurley is in Tallahassee for a review of the area of state critical concern report.
Schemper said, “This is an annual thing. The governor and cabinet sitting as the administration commission, they review Florida Commerce’s annual report on the Monroe County, Florida Keys area of critical state concern. So that’s all the jurisdictions other than Key West. Each jurisdiction has a work program. It revolves around things like sewer connections. They track, making sure we’re keeping up and finalizing all the sewer connections, canal restoration projects, land acquisition for conservation land and development rights. So we have a work program. They look to see if we’ve completed our tasks for the year. Their report this year shows that all the jurisdictions have completed all of their tasks, so everything looks to be in order, but you want to make sure you’re there in case any questions come up. So Christine Hurley’s there, Lisa Tennyson, our legislative affairs director is there. I think our lobbying team is there for support as well. So hopefully that will just be a routine item that’s happening today.”
We are into day 10 of hurricane season right now.
Schemper said, “Now that I’m the director over planning department, planning and environmental resources, building department and code compliance, there’s a coordination that needs to be done between the three departments. We get called on by emergency management before and after a storm event to help with certain elements of the response. So a big one is damage assessment. So we’re making sure that everything is up and running and everyone’s ready to go out. That’s really an important step. You’ll see, after a storm, in the first couple of days, right after the storm, there’s teams of inspectors out there, and they’re going out there doing a quick drive by to give an overall assessment of the damage. It’s called the preliminary damage, and that’s really important not only for emergency management to know where to direct resources immediately, but we have to report to FEMA, and that’s how they determine if our county or certain jurisdictions will get a declaration and certain resources released at the federal and state level. What we’re hearing now is the federal thresholds for those declarations is going up. So it’s really important that we get that done and quickly. Time is very important. We have to do a drive by of everything in the first couple days and try to get those numbers into them. Then there are more detailed layers of damage assessment after that, but we’re working on that. After Hurricane Irma, our GIS administrator, he actually made an app that the inspectors can use to make it more efficient. And we’re also now getting trained on some software that emergency management was given by the state to try to make things more efficient, quicker reporting the right format. FEMA wants everything in a certain format, so we’re just trying to be quicker and on the ball.”
The county commissioners will meet soon and the height of structures may be a discussion item.
Schemper said, “Some may recall, back in April, they had a discussion item at the BOCC meeting. The commissioners discussed the potential to raise the height limit of residential structures, and they asked staff to draft some proposed language to raise residential height limits to 42 feet. There’s a little more detail involved, but they’ll get into that next week. So staff has come back with those proposed amendments and I believe that April meeting, there was a there was a glitch in the online participation portion of the meeting. So we wanted to make sure it did come back again for discussion in case people have comments and with more detail flushed out on how it would work. So the proposal would be to raise the height limit for residential structures to 42 feet, potentially keeping a limitation of two habitable floors. So it’s more about lifting your whole building, not getting more buildable space. But it’s that’s also something they’ll consider next week. For non residential, it would stay the same. They’re not proposing to have commercial buildings be taller than they are now. It would be for new builds. But every once while, you get someone who has, for example, they’ll have a single story house and they want to add a second floor, and they can’t quite fit it in. So this might give them the opportunity to do that. So that would be a situation where they could get more living space, but that’s more likely to be a building where they had already elevated it above flood. They’re trying to stay out of the floodplain. But I think the commission, they’re not only thinking about this in terms of flood protection, it’s also to sort of ease the height restriction because building practices have changed. The esthetic requests have changed. People want slightly taller ceilings than they used to have, and some of the building practices, the thickness of your floor, between floors, the thickness has has increased. So some people are coming up on the height limit because of that as well.”
Where are we with the ROGO situation?
Schemper said, “We’re definitely in that same kind of holding pattern, waiting to see the final outcome. But on May 2, at the very end of the session, the Florida Legislature did pass Senate Bill 180 and that hasn’t yet been transmitted to the governor for signature. We can’t really anticipate what his decision is going to be, but it hasn’t even been sent to him yet. So we’re kind of we’re still waiting on that, but it increases the hurricane evacuation requirement for permanent residents from 24 hours to 24 and a half. Then there’s a section in the bill that directs Florida Commerce to do evacuation modeling to determine the number of additional permits that would be but it does also put some limits on parameters on that. One would be that the maximum number that could be given out would be 900 total — and that’s Keys wide, Key West all the way up through the north end of the county. It says they have to be distributed among all the jurisdictions based on the number of vacant lots they have left, vacant buildable lots, has to be over at least a 10 year time period, so stretched out, not given out all at once. They have to be issued exclusively to vacant buildable parcels. So this limited number would be directed straight towards those vacant parcels that don’t have permits yet, and the priority has to be given to owner occupied residences, affordable housing and or workforce housing. So there are some some limitations on there. We’re kind of waiting to see. First step, Governor signs a bill, actually becomes law, and then second step, where is that going to take us?”