Let’s check in with the city of Marathon

George Garrett, manager of the city of Marathon, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city. 

The city of Marathon offices are closed today, as are Monroe County Schools, but city business does continue and the city will be maintaining median strips. 

Garrett said, “So we’re going to take that over and start maintaining it and I think you’ll see as we do take it over towards the end of this coming year, you’re going to see a really nice appearance of US 1 in Marathon.”

What’s going on with Sombrero Boulevard? 

Garrett said, “Through the winter, we had more than double the amount of rainfall that we would normally expect and we had at least one storm, if not two, that really were huge storms. So we had one event on Memorial Day weekend that exceeded 100 year storm, significantly and it really caused problems, and of course, it caused an outcry amongst people that have to get past a flooding area at Sombrero Boulevard. So we jumped on it and we figured out how to manage it. It took us a couple storms, actually, to figure out how to do that best, and we now have it pretty well under control, so that when it starts to rain, we immediately are on it and are pumping the water down one of our storm water wells, and typically on a normal day we can clear the road on Sombrero Boulevard within two or three hours. But that’s a short term solution, and we have got applications into the water management district. We’ve already got the project out to bid and could see both permits and a contractor to start a permanent project, so that we have a an automatic system, when it starts to rain, water will flow into sumps and then be pumped down a deep well. The pumps involved there, we’re talking huge volumes and really anything but the absolute most extreme storms. The people who live on Sombrero Boulevard should see some really positive results quickly. We’re hoping to get that started around the end of the year.” 

Hurricane Milton could bring one to three feet of storm surge. 

Garrett said, “Sombrero is not going to be the issue unless we get rain. Some of the other areas which are low lying, whether it’s coming over the edge of the sea wall or along the shoreline, or, frankly, coming up a stormwater injection well. You look at these things and go, wait a minute, that well over there, that storm water structure is supposed to be taking storm water, not pumping it up and of course, when we’ve got these really, really high tides, it kind of reverses the flow, but that’s where we’re at on low lying islands, but I think we’re in good shape.” 

Marathon City Council met yesterday. 

Garrett said, “It went fairly long, it was a significant discussion. We haven’t seen very many projects in the last few months. I think just changing situations with the economy, people have been a little bit slower about getting things started. But we’ve had a couple things on the agenda now, one project for about 20 units. We did a code change last night to our affordable housing for the early evacuation units. When we did our early evacuation unit, Key West took an extra step and said, you know what? In the way that the governor and cabinet distributed those 1,300 units, if any other jurisdiction doesn’t want all of those, we would take them. We did not do that. So we made a modification to that ordinance for us last night that allows us to take additional units out of that, if another jurisdiction doesn’t want them. We can use them. We’ve got place to use them. It’s never going to amount to a huge number, as much as some folks thought it might but it does give us the flexibility that if a project comes up where we need some affordable housing allocations, we can potentially get them from another jurisdiction. So that was a big thing last night.”