George Garrett, City Manager in Marathon, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the city.
The powerboat races last weekend in Marathon were incredibly successful.
Garrett said, “Though it was very windy, I know it approached 20 miles an hour. It was out on the east and not being a powerboat racer, I don’t get all the things, but a little basic physics means they’re going into the waves and out of the waves instead of crossways to them. So I think there was only one significant crash and it wasn’t during a race. So they had a great couple of days, Saturday and Sunday. Just to confuse things, of course, we have the Leadership Monterey County graduation on the same site on Saturday. It was Class 31 and we’ve taken a different approach because we basically, in the past, we’ve always done a graduation event at typically a local resort, a little bit like a high school prom sort of event and everybody gets dressed up and you have a really good meal, but honestly, what it got down to is we realized for that event, we’re spending money we weren’t recovering and by doing an event at the field where graduation becomes part of it, we actually made money. We had a bounce house, we had a waterslide, we had ax throwing, we had food trucks. We had military there in force, as well as law enforcement. So we were able to bring that contingent of people just to show what they do. We also had a classic car show, so we just had fun and graduated at the same time. It was just a nice way of presenting Leadership Monroe County to the rest of the county and what it is we do and what we support.”
Things are fairly quiet in Marathon right now.
Garrett said, “One of the controversies recently, I think, honestly, a tempest in a teapot, but some legitimate concerns, on some people’s part, what was approved for the golf course, is what’s being built at the golf course. That’s underway again, other things are just kind of progressing. We’re looking a little bit further down the road, a little bit more broadly timestamp wise, obviously, ROGO and BPASS are a critical issue this year. The City of Marathon felt that that was a critical issue for us this year. I think we’ve managed to work out the details so we can kind of slide into next year, in fact, we’re meeting with Kimberly Matthews tomorrow to discuss the city’s approach to whether we want to get more allocations or not. The City of Marathon does but we’re going to have to work out the details in collaboration and that’s probably a next year legislative issue and then of course, we’re working on this deep well issue. We’re committed to putting in a deep well in Marathon and we’re already beginning the engineering for that project.”
With the ROGO situation, it looks like it’s more like 3,000 ROGOs that the county will have available, not 8,000.
Garrett said, “The factions are lining up in ways that they lined up in the mid 90s or higher. I’m going to say it pro growth, no growth or limited growth factions. I’m going to pick on my ex wife, she and I are actually very good friends, but I have not seen my ex wife in a public setting in the Keys in probably 10 or 15 years because she’s retired and living in California. When Richard Grosso of Last Stand spoke here a week or so ago on the ROGO issue, she actually got online and of course, she was a huge, huge advocate in the past for limited, managed growth and I’m going to turn that around to the city of Marathon, so is the City of Marathon. We are never going to propose or accept the possibility that we put our citizens at risk, whether they’re permanent citizens or our visitors, but we also believe we’ve got an obligation to deal with takings issues. Thought there’s some argument that those things are less immediate than we have indicated or feel, nonetheless, we’ve been in a 20 year takings case on a single piece of property in Marathon. So I’m sorry to say the city of Marathon feels that takings cases are very serious and we need to deal with them at least intelligently and build that into our long term approach to how we want to do see the Keys grow, assuming we get allocations in the future.”
Marathon has a skate park that’s coming along.
Garrett said, “It became a big issue and it’s because I think to the extent that it was an issue, and I’m hoping that it’s no longer as much an issue, I took on the mantle that Chuck Lindsay had left me when I became the manager, and he had already begun working on skate park issues and I moved forward with it. In the midst of that, we had some changes on council and so we sort of had to get everything in line again, and get perspective from those newer council members. I think now, we brought a concept to council at a workshop meeting and it showed where we could put in what had been proposed, in a way, in a manner that it didn’t influence or impact the areas that were fields for soccer games. I think that council said, great, we still have details to work out, we still have funding to work out, although we do have funding, in part for this project. So I think we’re now moving forward with a skate park that I think the skaters are going to enjoy and feel that they’ve been dealt with fairly and appropriately. And at the same time, we’re going to leave the soccer fields and those game fields, not impacted on. It’s going to be all at Community Park, which was part of the discussion. There was possibility that we’d do it at Oceanfront Park, we’ve set that aside. So it’s all going to go at Community Park, we’ve kind of figured out how we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t impact sustained sports and we’re going to move on. I think that’s a tremendous thing for no other reason than we want to be able to provide skating facilities for those kids that have been skating for years. I am a huge advocate.”
A Marathon Council meeting will be coming up soon.
Garrett said, “It’s the 14th of May. What’s on that meeting is relatively minimal. It’s just kind of business as usual. The May agenda is fairly light and not looking really controversial.”