Chief Resilience Officer for Monroe County, Rhonda Haag, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM yesterday morning to talk about sustainability.
Funding of the various projects through grants is incredibly important.
Haag said, “We try not to put any local county funds in if we can help it. Flagler Avenue, even though it’s in the city of Key West, it’s owned by Monroe County, so we manage it, and that’s hopefully, our next road project. So that’s a little different. So all of our other ones are $300 million in existing projects that are moving forward. Those are all road elevation up to two and a half feet of elevation. But because Flagler Avenue is in a heavily urban area, by elevating that road could cause a lot of different issues, because you’d have to redo a lot of all the driveways and everything, and just wouldn’t fit in that type of environment. So this is actually a very different type of project where we’re going to take that two mile road and just restart it all over. We’re going to gut it out and replace that lime rock road base, because that allows, water to bubble up on the road and we’re going to replace it with an asphalt base, and asphalt won’t let that water bubble up. This is really more of a drainage project. So we’re going to have make a new road, but it’s really more of a drainage project where we’re going to put in a good base that’s not going to allow water to bubble up in the king tides. And then we’re going to put all that drainage stuff in, all the pipes and the culverts. So when the water falls on the road, it goes over to the side, and it’s standard stuff. We put the pump stations in them, to transport the water away from the road, and we’ve got to put it down underneath the ground through injection wells. That’s kind of what that is. And all that is expensive, $76 million estimated construction cost for that two miles.”
Are most roads in the county lime based roads?
Haag confirmed, “Yes. That’s because when they were first built, it was the simplest, cheapest solution. We didn’t have rising sea levels back then. But now, any new roads, we’ll probably be using that asphalt base.”
Water can actually come up through the lime based roads.
Haag said, “It can, and it also can wash away, especially when it’s underwater for several weeks at a time, that lime base can start washing away. And so we want to make sure that that doesn’t happen either. Also during the king tides, it comes back up through the all the stormwater management systems. So we’re going to make sure that that doesn’t happen. The only way the water is going to go is out and down, not come back up through the drains on the road.
What about canal restoration projects?
Haag said, “This is our big week for canal restoration too. So we’re applying for several of them there for our friends, over on Canal 266, over between Avenues J and I. They were the first canal restoration project several years ago and we came in and took out five feet of muck. That canal was really, really bad. But what we didn’t do is we didn’t come in and back fill it. So that canal is actually about 16, 17 feet deep, and it’s too deep for to get good oxygen flushing. So we’re going to come back in and do a backfill, and then they’ll have a nice, perfect canal, hopefully, if we get that money. Then another one is we call it Canal 255 that’s located between Louise and Geraldine streets on Big Pine Key. Same thing there. Hopefully we get the money for the organic muck removal and backfill and air curtain. We’ve already met with those residents, and they voted yes to go forward. So hopefully we’ll get that money. And then there’s a few more, one up in Key Largo, where we’re going to do just a back fill. That’s real close to the jetty repair project. So, with the jetty repair, we’re going to be putting in the air curtain. So this would be doing the restoration, and there’s quite a few more on Geiger Key. There’s a whole system there. There’s like five canals where we want to just come in and apply for the design funds to do a combination of organic muck removal and air curtain.”
What does an air curtain do?
Haag said, “An air curtain is when you have a canal at the canal mouth, we get a lot of floating Sargassum, or seaweed that comes into these canals. So what an air curtain is, you just think of it as a big bubbler. If you run a line of bubblers along the bottom of the canal mouth, real strong ones. It’s not little ones, but a real strong bubbler. And you blow air up through it, and then that keeps out the floating vegetation in most cases. Now, if you start getting 40, 50 mile an hour winds, it won’t work then. But it works really well. We have several already in the county. Islamorada has several. So now, what we do every time, if we’re going to spend $2, $3, $4 million on a canal restoration, we want to make sure we maintain it. So we include that as part of the restoration.”
With all the cutbacks are grants still attainable?
Haag said, “The canal grants, there’s a $20 million allocation every year that our legislative director, Lisa Tennison and Christine Hurley, they work really hard to keep that allocation going. It used to be allocated out to the counties and city with a specific amount, but they’ve changed that this year, and now the entire 20 million is open competition, which just makes us work all the harder in our grant applications, and so we’ll see what happens. But that has not reduced. Now what has reduced is the other pot of state grant funds for the resilient Florida resilience projects, and we anticipated that. So that started out several years ago. I mean, I think they had, maybe 300, 400 million but they were including some federal ARPA funds back then. So now it’s settling down into, I think they have to do a minimum of 100 million a year. I forgot what they did last year, maybe 150 but we expected that. Of course, the competition is increasing every year because of all the cities and counties, they’re all finishing their vulnerability assessments, and so they have their own project list. Even the municipalities down here are going to be putting in their projects for street elevation, because we’re just wrapping up that study for all the municipalities. So a little bit less money in some instances, and a lot more competition.”
Are Stewardship funds part of it?
Haag said, “Stewardship funds are the canals. It does other water quality projects too. I think the municipalities, some do like wastewater and things like that.”
Is sea level rise and road elevation still a priority at the state level?
Haag said, “I think so, the state just announced their new chief resilience officer. He’s the former director of the resilient Florida program. We talk to him all the time. He’s very familiar with the technical details. And so we were happy to see that, and at the county level, we’re just as committed to the road elevation project. We just don’t have the local county funds to help supplement these projects. That’s why we’re setting up this new program where we hope that residents can help supplement any differentials between the grants we get, but we’re still trying for the grants. This is a $22 million grant we’re putting in this week for Flagler Avenue. We don’t want to slow down our grant applications, because we want to rely 100% on grants, if possible.”
Have any other communities stepped up to help?
Haag said, “The Winston Waterways has reached out to us. We’ve had a couple of meetings with them already. We’re probably going to be reaching out to the other ones, like Big Coppitt and a couple of the other ones that already have grants. So hopefully we can hang on to those grant funds. We already have grant funds for the landscape for those projects. In as far as the new ones, I think we need to get what we have underway, because we have $300 million already of projects that are underway in design and permitting, and so before we do a lot of new ones, other than Flagler, I’m pretty sure we want to try to get these underway and funded and get them built because we learn a lot from building them, we’re learning a lot at the Twin Lakes demonstration project. I probably would say in the next couple years, we’re going to maintain what we’re doing and try to get those done, and then see where we go. When you have a road elevation project, there’s always going to be operations and maintenance to pay for the pump station, so that’s absolutely required. The other question is just whether there’s going to be any differential in the amount of construction funding to actually build the project. That’s always a little up in the air. We never know until we get them all.”