Marathon Mayor Robyn Still joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the city.
In addition to the run on the Seven Mile Bridge this weekend, there’s a lot going on in Marathon – including a council meeting on Tuesday this week where the nonprofit grants were discussed.
Still said, “They weren’t publicly named, however, they were included in the agenda and that is open to the public. You can go to the city’s website and it’ll be listed there. It listed all of the recipients and the amount they were awarded. So I was really happy that we can award $150,000 to some pretty well deserving nonprofits in the Marathon community. These funds keep in mind are to be used in the city of Marathon. What I saw from the averages of the amounts that were awarded, it seemed like we were pretty consistent as a council that we wanted to make sure that the funds went into the hands of the true local nonprofits and that that money stayed right here in our city.”
The organizations help a variety of different people in the Keys.
Still said, “If anyone’s interested to know what these organizations do, and what their intention is for the use of this money, we had a workshop last month and the nonprofits, the majority of them were able to attend. They got up and they talked to the public and the City Council about what they did as an organization and how they plan to use these funds in our city. That meeting was recorded. It can also be found on our city website. So I would urge everybody if you have questions about it, to please watch that. You might find one of these organizations that strikes a place in your heart, and then you might want to volunteer to help. It just amazes me the organization that we have here and the work that they’re doing for our citizens.”
The city council made the decisions on the nonprofits.
Still said, “The way the scores came about is our planning director and our grant writer provided us with an Excel spreadsheet, each council member got one separately, we didn’t talk about how we wanted to score each nonprofit, we independently scored them. We submitted that Excel spreadsheet back to city staff and then they basically averaged out the numbers and the totals that they arrived is what you see on that report. The top ones that you see that got awarded money, when the $150,000 ran out, that’s where the cutoffs came. It’s not that the other organizations aren’t worthy. We were asked for around $417,000. We only had $150,000 that we were able to allocate. And unfortunately, some worthy organizations didn’t get allocated any of those funds. I urge them to apply again next year. But I wish we had enough money to give everybody money. But we just simply didn’t. We increased it to $150,000 this year. The council approved it. Last year, it was right at $100,000. So hopefully as we go into budget year later this year, maybe we need to have some talks about the potential of increasing that.”
The hotel/motel ordinance was also discussed and approved.
Still said, “If you attended or followed last month’s meeting, there were some suggested changes, since I think we started this back in August of last year, but as that was written and read at last month’s meeting, that’s exactly what passed. Nothing wavered off of that.”
The hotel/motel ordinance came up because of a concern about the golf course.
Still said, “The way this ordinance originally came up is this was a cleanup of language of our ordinances in general and it just so happened that this ordinance, it was the time for this ordinance and when the city staff got to this ordinance, they noticed some things that needed to be revised. That’s how that started. Our city staff is going through each and every one of our ordinances. So this one wasn’t targeted for any particular reason. It just this was the time they got to this particular ordinance, and it needed to be more modernized based on what’s going on in our city. This ordinance is a citywide ordinance. I know that there’s development that a lot of our residents were very concerned with that is impacted by this ordinance. That’s how the golf course kind of got involved in this. It was not the reason for the redraft or rewriting or revision of the ordinance. It just so happened to be a development that was in the middle of this. We have several others that are impacted by it as well. This was just one that citizens were more concerned about. But this ordinance is going to affect development as a city, not just one development in particular.”
The lighting ordinance also passed.
Still explained, “That was passed. If you go to that ordinance, it does give a definition and gives some pictures of what are approved lighting and what’s unapproved lighting. So that kind of gives a little bit of guidance there. The only change that we made to that is in the original reading of the ordinance, it gave residents and homeowners two years to change the existing lighting.”