Holly Merrill Raschein, Monroe County Commissioner for District 5, joined Good Moring Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the county.
The Aqueduct Authority’s project with replacing the water pipeline requires patience because it is very necessary.
Raschein said the project is “going on right in front of my house, in front of my neighborhood. So it’s something that we see every day. We see the progress. Obviously, we are part of that traffic, but I want to commend our community. It had a little bit of a rough start there, but with lots of work with the Department of Transportation and obviously the Aqueduct, we’ve got a smoother situation. When we look at the scope of the project, we can see it every day now they’ve started moving off and bringing the pipe in, reminding folks that this is an essential, critical project for our drinking water. So shout out to the community. A little more patience, and we’ll keep moving on.”
The ROGO issue is moving through the legislative session in Tallahassee.
Raschein said, “Through coordination and advocacy on behalf of the county and obviously all the municipalities that are up and down the Keys, we saw some changes to the bills, specifically with Representative Mooney, kind of tightening up this language in coordination with the Department of Commerce, and some additional modeling that they did. Then we saw Senator Ana Maria Rodriguez come in and match her bill this week to Representative Mooney’s. Those, I believe, are identical, and not just the ROGO issues in there, we’ve got some other property language in there, so it’s really a comprehensive bill that has to do with the area of critical state concern here in the Keys and in Key West. Then there’s a couple other pieces of legislation moving that’s got the wide open 26 hour language. It doesn’t appear that that one is moving. However, there was an amendment added, I want to say, Wednesday to another bill that’s what I would say is unrelated, but maybe you could make the argument that the issues are related, there’s actually a very comprehensive emergency response disaster recovery bill moving in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Every year there’s lessons learned, right? Every storm is different. The impact on communities is different. I don’t have to walk our community through that, but this bill speaks to that. This week, again, I think it was Wednesday, the 26 hour language with no guardrails was added to that. So definitely a major, major play. We’re going to need to watch that. We went through a really comprehensive process throughout the spring, and the summer, and the fall, months and months and months we spent on this, running numbers, getting community input. I think that the process has, well, it has been arduous and complicated. It was open and transparent. So I just hope, moving forward, that in this last month of session that we’ll continue to have those open conversations and dialog and that we don’t have any, I won’t call them shenanigans, but again, I think people expect and deserve accountability and transparency and so, and at the end of the day, I want to make sure that our delegation, Representative Mooney and Senator Rodriguez are our champions, and I want them to know that our community is backing them up, and we are so proud that they are friends, that they are colleagues, and again, that they’re champions for the Keys.”
The final number of allocations is 825.
Raschein said, “I think it just it bumps up the evacuation time by half an hour, I think 24.5. I think there might be a lot of angst out there, and whatever happens this year, none of this is written in blood. The legislature, our community, the commission, we deserve the right to come back next year and say, well, maybe we didn’t get that exactly right. Let’s tweak this. So I want to sort of calm those fears. It’s a good reminder that at the end of the day, we can pass bills and we can pass resolutions, but the Department of Commerce and the administration commission, which, of course, is made up of the governor and the Cabinet members, has the final say.”
So while those numbers are quite different from what the commissioners originally asked for, we can return to the legislature in the future.
Raschein said, “If folks out there have larger scale projects, bigger projects that require a lot of units, that maybe there’s already land available, or that they are for larger workforce housing needs, there’s options out there. Maybe we even carve out a set aside, maybe we could even use the city of Key West status as an area of critical state concern. I mean, again, while it’s complicated, there’s room to be creative and still bolster property rights while trying to preserve our quality of life as residents and our and our natural resources.”
What’s happening with property tax elimination?
Raschein said, “You see competing interests, right? You’ve got the House speaker that wants to tinker with sales tax, which I love speaker Perez. He’s an amazing leader and a very innovative go getter. But sales tax, though, tourists pay a lot of that, so that just kind of makes me scratch my head, since tourism is our number one industry, so I don’t really understand that. The governor wants to give a flat $1,000 property tax refund, which, that’s fine. I don’t know if that really moves the needle. I mean, it’s nice. We’d all like $1000 off of property taxes, but I don’t really know. The big struggle is, let’s not pick on our schools. I was just walking during Lauren’s Kids Walk, the Walk in My Shoes down in Key West, and there was a number of local educators that came out and showed their support, and it’s really awesome. That’s a walk to end abuse and protect childhood. They were just talking about the funding streams and how they could do so much more if they had had some more resources. So I want to make sure that we’re protecting our schools, we’re protecting the ability for our first responders and our law enforcement officers to do their jobs. You’ve just got to be careful when you want to make changes. And I love change. Change is hard, but if there’s a way to cut expenses and waste, and I really am digging these DOGE efforts, we’re doing a really good job in Monroe County. So we can feel really good about that. The governor’s office, sent out a memo to all the mayors in the county, and it had five things all related to finances and we were able to say no to all of them. So that’s a really good first step. So I think that we’re in a wonderful position.”