Michelle Lincoln, Monroe County Commissioner and mayor of the county, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
The Florida Association of Counties annual conference is being held this week.
Lincoln said there are a lot of contacts to be made. She said, “A lot of not just state partners, not just other county commissioners, but the cabinet, the governor’s cabinet, always wants to meet with us as well when we’re together, and you never know who will pop in and want to speak with us. So that always makes it exciting. We had James Uthmeyer, I know he was speaking locally at an event here in town, but we also get him at our conferences, and a lot of the policy makers from the state level want to engage with us on the county level, so that we’re all in step together.”
Storm water and canal restoration continue to be a big focus for the county.
Lincoln said, “This county is very complicated, and we are an area of critical state concern. Maybe new residents don’t understand what that means, but that was a designation that was given to us from the state of Florida, and so we were mandated to go from septic to sewer, and we’re the only county in the state of Florida who is completely septic to sewer, and when we finished that task, the governor’s office this past thing was like three years ago said, okay, great, now you need to work on canal restoration, because the water that is in your canals, some of the canals are dirty, and that is impacting our beautiful coral reef. So we are taking that homework assignment seriously, and we have aggressively found funding sources to aid in doing canal restoration projects, which is a definite benefit for the members of that neighborhood to have a cleaner canal and a benefit to our near shore waters by having cleaner water going into the open waters.”
Quality of life is also an incredibly important issue in Monroe County.
Lincoln said, “I’m very proud of the fact that we built a brand new library in Marathon that we have renovated the library in Big Pine, it’s adorable. Now we just finished renovating the one in Key Largo, we’re looking at renovating the one in Islamorada. I’m very proud of the fact that we have put in a new amphitheater at the Big Pine Community Park, we put in new pickleball courts, we’ve opened the Big Pine Channel Park, which is just another fabulous place for residents to go and enjoy our beautiful community we live in. So, it’s more than just workforce housing, it’s the quality of life that surrounds it. It is the parks putting in new playground equipment and also doing summer camps for the children, so they have something to do while their parents are working and they’re not in school.”
The business community is also incredibly important.
Lincoln said, “The backbone of our community is our workforce and our businesses, and so it is extremely important that we’re doing as a county everything we can to support their efforts, and so one of the things I’m very proud of that I’ve been working on is with Grimmel Grove and helping them change their destination to that of institutions, so that they are now working with a college, one of the universities, to do a partnership, which will just be a plus plus for our community, as well as how we were working on making a user-friendly ordinance for our food trucks. If you’ll remember, about a year ago we brought up the idea of tweaking our ordinance for our food trucks, because the language in it was outdated, and all of a sudden all of the owners of food trucks reached out to us and said, whoa, stop, what are you doing? You’re about to really hurt our business. So, because we listen and it was at a county commission meeting where we make things happen, we tapped the brakes and now the food truck industry has been working with our planning department and I believe we’re about to roll out a now a friendly ordinance that is good for our food truck people, as well as the community members, so it’s that type of being able to pick the phone when people call me right away and hear what the needs of the community are, and then being able to respond in a way that it’s a plus plus for everyone.”
What about the property tax reform that will be on the November ballot?
Lincoln said, “I can only speak for myself as a commissioner, but I do believe we all are strong supporters of tax reform, and in a way that still allows us to run our government and to take care of the core services that as a government we are responsible to provide, some of those are state mandated and some of them include the constitutional officers and veteran affairs, and so when the governor’s bill rolled out, it had left out a gap, because the governor’s bill, not only is saying let’s increase the homestead cap to 150 and then the following year to 250, but it gave very specific categories of what the ad valorem tax funding can be used for, and it had left out some very important services, including funding our constitutional officers and funding our government resources of how we run government, as well as veteran affairs, and so I wrote a letter on behalf of the county, as well as every other county in the state did, just asking our Senator and our House Reps to add or amend the bill and add that other category back in, and I was very happy that they took that advice and added the category in, so now there’s seven categories that can be used to fund that you can use ad valorem tax money for, so I was very happy about that. I will say that as a county, I’m very proud of our lean budget. We are the lowest millage rate in the state of Florida, year in and year out, and this past year we cut 15 million during our budget talks, and we reduced our overall budget by about 41 million at the exact same time that we increased the salary for our first responders, our firefighters, and the sheriff’s department, because they were much lower than that of the other fire rescue in our county, and so I’m very proud of the fact that, while we cut a huge chunk of money out, we did what we really needed to do in taking care of our first responders. So we are going to be starting our workshop talks for this year’s fiscal budget 2027. Those are in the afternoons after work, so people can join us, and we are looking at how we’re going to make this budget even leaner than last year’s. And after we set our millage rate for this coming fiscal year, we are then going to circle back around and do workshops up and down the county with our residents, so that we can all sit in a room together and figure out if the referendum goes through, that first year’s reduction could be about 13.6 million, and then in ‘29 that could be about $27 million because it’s not just a cap on on the homestead, but it’s also capping the non-homesteaded property, so your businesses and your second homeowners to 5%, so that’s a used to be at 10%. So we’re looking at all of this, and we want to make sure that we do workshops for us all to figure out together what we’re going to do to provide good government at the same time as determining where are we going to make these cuts, so all the commissioners want to help our property owners by decreasing property taxes as much as we can.”