John Bartus, city administrator for Key Colony Beach, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
Yesterday the city commission had a pretty big meeting.
Bartus said, “It was one of the, probably the best City Commission meeting that I’ve been involved with since I’ve been the administrator over there. We had a huge agenda. The paperwork stack was literally three inches thick, but we got a lot of stuff done. One of the big ones, if people recall, just over the last seven years since Hurricane Irma, the city hall has been a source of controversy over there. They initially had condemned the building and said it was unsafe, the existing city hall, the post office had to move to a trailer. Everything had to move to trailers with the idea that that the commission, at the time was going to tear down old city hall and replace it with a very large structure. There was some unrest in the community about that, and things definitely settled down, and a new commission has been working together on this. Yesterday, I’m very pleased to note that we awarded the first bid for the first phase of City Hall rehabilitation, which is the pin piles and leveling of the floor in the building to bring every part of the structure of the building up to code. From then on, the Commission reviewed some architectural renderings. We came up with a design idea that we’re going to develop further, but there also is a $2.2 million funding source that doesn’t require a local match, and we’re able to move forward that. That funding source is also going to be available to help us flood proof and harden the existing building and have some leftover so we can construct another expansion of the first and second floor on the south side of the building, and it’s going to be a wonderful project. Hopefully the city administrative offices and the police office will be also out of trailers at some point. But we’re moving forward. We’ve got a we’ve got an idea where we’re going, and City Hall is going to be something that will be able to be proud of, plus we preserve the existing city hall and and make it even better than it has ever been.”
Has the commission seen the preliminary designs?
Bartus said, “There were three preliminary renderings of some possibilities and then there included artistic renderings and floor plans. The Commission decided on one of those, but pared down make it smaller than the initial drawing intended it to be, but just to be able to make sure that we can have a storm hardened building with the city will be able to have its own emergency operations center up on elevated on a second floor. I’m actually excited about this, you can probably tell, but some good plans have come forward. The Commission agreed on this, and we awarded the first part of the city hall rehab bid yesterday for the floors and pin piles.”
What’s the timetable?
Bartus said, “I think the the commission wants to move forward fairly rapidly so we can get construction going. I would imagine that the idea would be to have our offices in the trailers moved over into a rehabbed City Hall sometime by, I would like to say, sometime early or the middle of next year, and when I was on Marathon City Council, a former Mayor and one of the first council members over there, along with myself, Randy Mearns, who does a lot of great work still for our community, he said the government moves at the pace of a dead snake. But Key Colony yesterday proved it wasn’t true, because we had just put out the the bid for the pin piles and Floor Leveling project for City Hall. We got the bids, we opened them Tuesday morning and Thursday we had them evaluated, a recommended contractor and approved the award of the bid. So that’s moving pretty fast from government standards.”
The budget was approved last month.
Bartus said, “It ended up being a slight increase, but we’re working on some other things and trying to cut costs elsewhere, maybe in like, permitting fees. We’ll be looking at doing that by, hopefully, the next commission meeting. So we’re working on a bunch of stuff. We also, yesterday, agreed on terms for the contract for the pickleball and tennis court construction, which is a huge thing, we’ve gotten pickleball people and tennis people together to sing Kumbaya over in Key Colony Beach. It is amazing but we’ve got a lot of good things going on in the community over there right now, and the pickleball courts, the tennis courts, will be constructed, and that should be done hopefully by, I want to say early next year, middle of next year.”
Key Colony Beach fared pretty well with the recent storms.
Bartus said, “We got lucky. Like a lot of other communities down here, especially considering what both of those storms did elsewhere in the state. One of the things that we got to do, I’m the city’s liaison to our county emergency operations center, and I’ve spent some time over there now, and let me tell you that is one fantastic building they do. They’ve got a lot of good things happening over there. It’s hard to believe that Monroe County was the last county in the state of Florida that did not have a dedicated emergency operation center. I think now we have one of the best, state of the art all the way around. Plus the sheriff’s office has their dispatch unit over there and from what sheriff’s office dispatch used to be, now they’ve got people with phones, computer displays. They can track so much and keep everybody posted as to what’s happening when they do get calls for service. It’s amazing.”
Key Colonly Beach will have a town hall coming up in the future.
Bartus said, “In addition to our regular commission meeting, we will also have our first town hall meeting, when a lot of the residents will be able to talk about different things. A town hall meeting over there is where each commissioner has an item they want to bring forward and discuss. It would be like more of a workshop format, and no action can be taken because it’s not an official meeting, but it’s a way to gauge public interest in certain things. Each Commissioner can bring up their own topic, have it discussed with the members of the public in a more loose, less formal situation than a business meeting of the City Commission. I think that’s going to be on November 18.”