Monroe County Commissioner Holly Merrill Raschein joined Good Moring Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the county.
There were a lot of accomplishments in 2024.
Raschein said, “I just want to give a shout out to my colleague, Mayor Jim Scholl. He’s at the helm now, and he’s a strong leader. His skills, very, very together, very accomplished, very reliable, and he’s got a steady hand, and I’m excited about his term as mayor. But yes, we did have a very productive 2024. I think the leading topic was the hurricane evacuation model study that the Department of Commerce sent to us just a year ago, and we laid out a plan as a county working in conjunction with our municipalities on how are we going to move forward? This is pretty complicated. There’s no other place that I know of in the United States, if not the world, that has their growth regulated to the standards that we do, and rightfully so. Obviously, we’re a skinny island chain with a lot of environmental challenges, but I think that’s part of what makes us so special. So we put together a timeline, and at the top of that was community input, and we went out into the community dozens and dozens of times and had workshops and meetings and town halls just to get feedback. We had surveys, and I think that the process was very open, was very transparent. We got a ton of feedback. Of course, you have folks on opposite ends of the spectrum as you would on anything like this, folks that didn’t want any more people in the Keys, and then the other side where we want as much as we can get. But I’m very, very proud of our work and our staff and the community and the Commission and working with our state and our state delegation, and we wrapped up 2024 with that plan, again, looking to our municipalities for their input on their needs and their futures, and taking a super deep dive into what this all means. I think that a big part of it was educating our community, educating our future community members and I think we did. We were very, very successful at that. So you’ll see those details kind of roll out. We had our final workshop on December 19, where we basically just said, let’s put it all out on the table, and I think that might have surprised some folks, but I don’t think that we’re being grabby. We’re just putting it out there. We have no idea what the future will bring, no crystal ball, and we want to make sure that we have as many options available to us as possible. At the end of the day, this is a state driven function, and we will have a lot of input from our state leaders. I think we’ve got a delegation meeting actually coming up here next week, next Tuesday, so I’m excited about that. That’s not the only priority. We actually have a lot more. So it’s going to be a good year.”
Do we have any idea how the legislature may act upon the recommendations?
Raschein said, “No, and that’s fine. I think there’s some concern about that, but I actually am the opposite. I’m not concerned about that. I don’t think that we have to act right now. We did the work, we did the research, we had the conversation, and I think that that just will spurn even more discussion. I don’t see a rush. If our delegation is not comfortable with filing legislation, that’s fine. We’ve got another track. We’ve got those units that still keep us within the 24 hour evacuation period. We did hear from our sheriff, among others, that folks want to get out of the Keys. We haven’t historically seen an issue with regard to evacuation. So is that what we need to be focusing on? I’m not sure. Where did that number come from? It’s just been so interesting and the collaboration that we’ve seen, and we’re dealing with a lot of folks up in Tallahassee that maybe have just dipped their toe in this thing called ROGO in areas of critical state concern. So there’s a teachable moment there for staff in Tallahassee. So I’m comfortable with that. Let’s keep talking. Let’s keep communicating. Maybe each municipality in the county needs to follow their own path, because our needs are different. I heard the saying, each Key, or each region is its own tribe, with their own Indians and chiefs. I was like, wow, that is so true. But that’s part of what makes us so awesome and so I’m not worried. Again I think that this is important. This is critical. The concerns of our community and different stakeholders are not going unnoticed. They’re not going by the wayside. So I think you’re going to see, we’re going to be discussing this a lot and I’m excited about that, and at the same time, we still have insurance, natural resources issues.”
Another topic is the Early Learning Coalition.
Raschein said, “It’s of Miami-Dade and Monroe. It’s the oversight body that helps out our working parents with school readiness programs. So those can be pre K, Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten or preschool programs. Parents who have young children, but they need to work and those resources make sure that our children are prepared by the time they go to kindergarten with those essential skills like letter recognition and colors and the alphabet and numbers and things like that. But we have an issue as usual, down here in Monroe County, where our income limits are such that a lot of parents are having to choose between staying at home and caring for their children or going to work, because they make just too much money to qualify for these programs. That is something that we’re no stranger to in the Keys. We’ve seen it in the Take Stock in Children program, where parents who have children that would be perfect candidates for these college scholarship programs, but their parents make too much money, just over the limit that they can’t take part, and that’s unacceptable. We just saw a wage increase that exacerbated the problem. So I’m going to ask Senator Rodriguez and Representative Mooney to consider file legislation that invokes our area of critical state concern status, which takes into account the way that we draft the language our income, and would basically carve out a separate amount for parents in the Keys. We’ve got a lot of folks that are in the service industry that make a very good living, but again, too much for their children to qualify for these critical programs. So I’m going to ask for that threshold to be raised. It’s not a huge hit to the state’s pocketbook. It’s very minimal and if we’re going to be investing money, I think we need to be investing in our future and these are the littlest ones. These are our next, next generation of leaders. So I’ve been working on language with my early learning coalition stakeholders. We’ve got buy in from the school district and parents don’t have to use public schools. They can use charter schools. They can use private preschools. I mean, the parental choice aspect is really strong here, and so I’m going to ask that they save one of those precious bill slots for that legislation. So I’m excited about that, and I’ll hopefully have a chance to go over that and make that request in it in a big way next Tuesday.”
The creation of the Emergency Operations Center in 2024 was a big one.
Raschein said, “Oh my gosh, what a beautiful day that was cutting that ribbon on that fine facility. It has got all the bells and whistles, all the newest technology. It’s sturdy. It not only houses our emergency operations center, but our administration for our fire and rescue and our state of the art, 911 dispatch center for the sheriff, and I feel so safe. I hope all of our community feels safe knowing that should that day come, that they need to make that 911 call, we’ve got the most up to date technology that will allow our first responders to get where they need to go in a fast life saving pace and it’s just, it’s neat, we were the only community that is probably the most hurricane prone location that didn’t have a safe, operable EOC during the time of a big storm, and that was unacceptable. So hats off to our county leader, to our entire emergency management team, Sharon Weiner and all of her leaders. It was a big effort. It actually came together pretty quickly. The cool thing, no taxpayer dollars, it was all grant funded. Ya-hoo!”
On a sad note, the passing of Michael Halpern near the end of 2024 was a real loss to the community.
Raschein said, “Michael, he was a gem. I mean, just an incredible person, and put his community first, and his family first, and his loss is just devastating. He did a good job at creating a foundation, literally a foundation, but his own personal foundation, and his legacy, through his work will live on. I certainly plan on helping with that effort. We will hopefully have a chance here to remember him and his awesomeness. It was a big hit, but I know that if you if you knew Michael, he wouldn’t want us just laboring in our grief. He would want us to move forward and make sure that his priorities in youth education and cancer research will go on. I certainly plan on doing that and I know that there’s a lot of community members out there that want to do the same thing. So while he’s not going to be here in person, but his work is still going to be going on.”