Key Colony Beach has a lot going on for residents and visitors alike

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

Presents in Paradise was a huge success this year.

Bartus said, “We have a lot of volunteers or elves, as we call them, and they do such a great job. We helped over 800 kids and their families out and just it was a great year.”

The city commission will meet on Thursday.

Bartus said, “One of the big things going on, of course, is our city hall project, and we’re making some great progress there. We’ve hired an architectural firm. We’re in the process of working with them on a design and really looking forward to getting this project going. It’s been a long time coming since Hurricane Irma, but we’ve got a great direction going. I’ve got a good commission to work with, great staff, and we look forward to seeing when the architects going to come up with working with us. I’m excited to get this project moving forward. It’s going to be a storm hardened facility. We’re going to take the existing facility, storm harden that and add a little addition to that on the front end of the building, and we’ll be able to have more office space. We’ll be able to move all of our offices back over there. The police department will have a hardened structure. We’ll be able to put in a small emergency operation center, and it’ll totally meet the needs of the community over there.”

The pickleball and tennis courts are also nearing completion.

Bartus said, “That’s another one that’s been worked on for quite some time, where the new pickleball courts, new tennis courts are under construction, and hopefully we’ll have them done at some point here in the next, I would say almost next month, to two months, we should have new courts ready to go, which also begs the thing, we’re going to have to have some extra things, like a new Tiki hut for shade and structure so that people can relax underneath that. We’re going to be probably improving the parking situation over there and making sure we’re all ADA compliant. Our stormwater projects are still going on. Sunset Park is a great thing. The Key Colony Beach Community Association, every year hosts a lot of Sunday afternoon concerts in the park and those are going to be starting up here fairly soon. I have my date. I’m going to be playing there on February 2, and that’s going to be a great time. I call it my anniversary concert, because February of 1984 was when I arrived in the Keys and played my first gig. So this year’s my 41st anniversary concert, which is real hard to believe.”

The annual coconut crawl is coming up on Saturday.

Bartus said, “People have such a good time doing this and the community association is the one that sponsors this. They sponsor the concerts in the park, and it’s going to be another fun event. There’s such a great sense of community in Key Colony Beach. The people there love the city, they love the town, and they get together and celebrate every chance they get.”

Farmers markets happen on Tuesdays.

Bartus said, “Every Tuesday from 9am to 2pm and what a nice variety of things you can get over there. You can you can smell the food cooking almost from inside the city hall trailer. They’ve got cool things happening over there.”

Representatives from Key Colony Beach will be going up to Tallahassee on Florida Keys Day on March 13.

Bartus said, “We’ve been participating in some of the other delegation groups, meeting with the State Senator and the State Representative to talk about some of the needs that we do have as a community. So while we don’t have necessarily a dog in the ROGO fight, we have a lot in common with all the other jurisdictions down here. We’re trying to make sure that we get water quality money and assistance with some of our projects, so the state can help.”

For more information, click here:   https://keycolonybeach.net/