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.
Bartus used to be the mayor of Marathon.
He said, “It’s something that really worked out as well as anybody could have possibly planned, and nobody actually planned this. So that even makes it even better. I mean, last year, Key Colony Beach was going through some turmoil. They had the former city administrator that was let go, and they were sort of in a bit of turmoil because of City Hall plans to possibly build, to tear down the existing and put up a very expensive new City Hall and there was a lot of residents who were really opposed to that. There was a lot of unrest, and I had two commissioners resigned and the city administrator was let go, and I started going to Key Colony’s commission meetings to try to find out if this will be something I’d be interested in. We spent the next seven months without an administrator. The mayor took over that job, but that got tiresome, because the mayor, at that point as administrator, because of Sunshine Law, still couldn’t talk to the other commissioners about pertinent city business unless it was in an actual notice meeting. So they took their time making sure they got criteria for a new administrator position, finally put that out, and I responded, sent resumes and all that good stuff and went through a process, and as of July, I was hired to be the city administrator for Key Colony Beach.”
The structure of government in Key Colony Beach is such that the city commissioners do have a pretty active role to play that is somewhat shared with the administrator.
Bartus confirmed, “They certainly do. The mayor still acts as the main signatory to all the different ordinances and legislation that comes out of the commission and takes an active role, too, in all sorts of other contract negotiations. I work with him quite a bit. Joey Raspe, who’s the mayor of Key Colony Beach. He’s a really good guy. I actually get along very well with all the commissioners. Vice Mayor is Freddie Foster. He comes from a contractor and an engineer’s background. He works in nuclear plants and brings a whole lot of intelligence and information. Our secretary treasurer is Commissioner Tom Harding, and he does so much work with our city’s finance director and coming up with all the different budgets, keeping us informed by the city’s fiscal health throughout the year. Commissioner Doug Colonell, he’s the new guy on the commission, but he also a contractor with a lot of background experience and Tom Difransico brings another wealth of experience as well. They work on a lot of the issues, hand in hand with our staff, our building department, our Public Works people, and we have such a wonderful staff over in Key Colony Beach. I work with three people in the office, our city clerk and the administrative people over there, wonderful folks. We have a great city over there. The department heads take a very active role working with myself and the commissioners to make sure the city runs properly. It’s a really well oiled machine, and we have a lot of good stuff going on over there. I have a particular set of skills, but I thought it would be a good match. I thought that it would work well over there. I thought we could work together to keep the commission’s vision for what they wanted to see and the residents vision for Key Colony Beach. I could help them out with that, to help make their make that a reality.”
The city has come quite a long way in recent years.
Bartus said, “They had an election this year. There were four seats up on the City Commission, the four incumbents filed, and nobody else did. So it just goes to show you how much things have calmed down and settled down, and how the residents seem to be very comfortable in the direction the city’s going right now. I’m very impressed with each one of those commissioners, and the mayor, and I’m very happy to work with them all.”
Did the strife come after Irma?
Bartus said, “There was damage. But the damage to the building wasn’t as extensive as I believe that it the people were led to believe. It’s got to the point where Marble Hall, which is the main meeting room at the city hall building in Key Colony Beach, is open, and we’re back meeting there as of the last couple of months. The post office building, which the post office was in trailers, because they thought that was going to be another part of that complex that was going to be condemned and raised. The post office is back and the original post office building has been rehabilitated. Everybody is really happy about that. The building department and the code department are in the Old City Hall. There are some areas of city hall that were damaged, and we just put out that’s going on this morning, an invitation to bid on putting in pin piles and floor leveling, so we can make the other parts of city hall that did get some structural damage, so we can fix that, and we’ll be able to move our administrative offices back over there at some point, in hopefully the reasonably near future, the next few months. We’re fixing it, we’re repairing the damage that was done. Found the building to be still quite functional, and we’re back in there for meetings.”
The final budget hearing was this past Tuesday.
Bartus said, “We reduced the millage rate to 2.76. In terms of rollback, we still had around a 7% increase in that. But for homesteaded properties, people that are there, where the homestead exemption is not going to be nearly as bad. A lot of the people that are there in Key Colony own them as vacation levels. They can afford to pay and help the city. We’ve had inflation for the last several years and the cost of doing business as a local government, it’s not gone down. The city of Key Colony Beach has been very fiscally responsible. They’ve not gone out to overspend. We do have basically reserves of at least a year so we can keep government going in the event of a natural disaster. Building back reserves I thought was very important.”
The city commission met yesterday,
Bartus said, “We approved a contract with a group called McCourt Construction to construct new tennis courts and new pickleball courts. Pickleball has sort of taken the country by storm, and so we’re going to expand our pickleball court offerings over in Key Colony Beach, so that we can have a lot more pickleball to offer people. By the same token, we were putting in new tennis courts too. So the tennis people and the pickleball people, can get along famously. That’s something we wanted to make sure we could have happen.”
What does the future hold?
Bartus said, “I think our big next priority is getting bids in for the pin piles, the floor leveling on city hall, and then eventually moving the city administrative offices out of the trailers and back into City Hall. Same thing with the police department too. So that’s the big focus going to be over the next several months, is getting that project done and then seeing where we need to go from there, in terms of, do we need to put another building on the property to house our police department or expand administrative offices? Are we going to be able to all fit in there and work together? It’s a process. A friend of mine said government moves at the pace of a dead snake. So it’s a process. It doesn’t move nearly as fast as you might want it to, but it’s slow for a reason, and I think that reason is to make sure that we don’t do things, the government shouldn’t be able to pull wool over residents eyes, and we should do everything, a very public process, a very measured process, and a process that gives people a chance to weigh in and find out what their local government’s doing. I do have to say that the citizen involvement in the city of Key Colony Beach is it’s a model for a lot of other cities and communities around the world.”
October 2 has been proclaimed Ron Sutton day in appreciation of former commissioner.
Bartus said, “When I was still on the council over at marathon, Ron, who was mayor and Commissioner of Key Colony Beach. He and I would get together now and again, and we ran into each other a lot at the Florida League of Cities conferences. It was always good to see him. He always had a good thing to say, always had a kind word for everyone and we’ve also named an annual fishing tournament after him over there in Key Colony. Ron was a great guy. Very happy to make that proclamation yesterday.”