Mayor Pro Tem of Monroe County Michelle Lincoln joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
The Board of County Commissioners met yesterday where ROGOs were still very much the topic.
Lincoln said, “At our meeting in December, when we agreed on the magic number of how many allocations we were comfortable with asking for and what evacuation hours we were comfortable with, and we did that up to 26 hours and accepting up to 3,050 units. In doing that, staff also asked us to consider a moratorium while this was all being processed over the next year, not giving out any more building permits, and at that time in December, there wasn’t an appetite for it, and also because it had been presented to us there, not on the agenda, it needed a super majority vote. We agreed to put it back on the agenda for this month for a deeper discussion and at first in December, we all thought, oh, we can just do a monthly update on this and decide each month maybe we do need to flip that switch. But then after the meeting and after staff reviewed it a little more, staff reached back out, and they’re like, we need a definite number of how many units we have so that when we do our comprehensive plan amendment, it will have that exact number and if we do a moratorium, that number will be different than if we just continue to give out our allocations. But you all need to make up your mind in the January meeting. This can’t be something that every month you bring back as a discussion item. So that was kind of why we had to do the vote we did yesterday. I kept coming back to the fact that all the people who have been meeting with Secretary Alex Kelly from the Department of Commerce have heard the exact same thing. They have heard that we need to use the units we have. We need to show how we are allocating the units we have, and also there is this priority for workforce units. So with all that said, as the debate went on yesterday, I think it became clear that we all heard Alex Kelly say, use what you have, and if we put a moratorium in place, that’s not showing how we’re using our units, that’s showing that we’re saving our units and spreading out our units, but doing everything but what he’s requested us to do. So in the discussion the city of Marathon, the manager of Marathon, George Garrett, and the city attorney Steve Williams, as well as a few other people, were in the audience, and so they came up and also spoke, because they also had conversations with Secretary Kelly and they heard the exact same thing and we asked them, was there any discussion about a moratorium? They said that word was never mentioned. So it was never mentioned. It is not really what the state is demanding us to do. What they want us to do is show how we are using the units we have and how we are prioritizing workforce. So at the end of the day, it was a 3-2 vote to continue the way we’ve been handing out building permits to people who own property in our county who have requested permission to build a home here. So that’s what we’re doing. If four months from now, we see the writing on the wall that we’re not going to get any more units, well, then we can readdress this situation.”
So will the county request the maximum of 3,550 new residential permit allocations?
Lincoln said, “That is my understanding, that was the resolution that that we passed, that is what we’ve asked for. I think we’re all going to be very flexible going into legislative session with Representative Mooney and with Senator Rodriguez. We’re going to see what bill they produce. At the end of the day, we all come together. We are the Keys. We work with our municipalities, we work with everybody, and we will be a united front when we’re in Tallahassee, and I know this isn’t going to be the last discussion on this, and as things progress through session and as staff, as the Florida commerce staff, and as the governor’s staff, get to know us better and understand ROGO better, then maybe they’ll also soften their stances. Anywhere else in the state of Florida, you don’t have ROGO, you don’t have a rate of growth ordinance. You have this is how many vacant lots you have. This is the constitutional right of a property owner and when they’re ready to build, they go in, they get their building permit, they follow the building code, and they build their home. So it’s very difficult for staff people in Tallahassee to even understand how unique we are. So I really am confident that as session progresses, we’ll get some better back and forth.”
At the meeting yesterday there were also discussions about first floor dwellings and the limitations on square footage.
Lincoln said, “If you recall, this has been several years. It’s embarrassing sometimes how slow government works. But we were approached in 2022 by the Builders Association and our contractors, and they’re like we are wondering, why is unincorporated Monroe County being punished and have to limit the square footage to 299 feet below elevated homes, and why they have all these additional regulations on them that that the incorporated areas don’t. It was the whole long story of back in 2014 when FEMA came in, so this is federal government, not state, when FEMA came in and found all of these illegal downstairs and homes and everything wasn’t the way it should have been, and so they put all of these sanctions on us. After that is when Marathon and Islamorada became corporations, became their own municipalities. So they didn’t have these sanctions, these restrictions placed on them. I believe that over the past 10 years, we have shown where we have cleaned up our act, where we have taken code violations and resolved them, and we’ve been asking for two years now to please remove this mediation plan from the unincorporated area, and let us be on the same living level playing field as the municipalities, which then makes it easier for a homeowner when they want to do a home improvement project, or somebody wants to buy a home here and renovate it and or our construction teams that do work up and down the Keys, our private construction guys that are like this rule is different here. It’s so confusing. So long story short, we’ve been having meetings with FEMA. They came up with a list of, I think it was like 1,500 homes that they felt were in violation of their sanctions they put on us and we have gone through all of those and found them all to be in compliant, fixed up anything that needed to be fixed up and we’re ready to move forward again and ask FEMA to please eliminate us from these sanctions. So we all agreed, yes, let’s continue to move forward. But then we’re like, why are we just asking to remove one or two of them? Why not ask them to remove all five of them? So that’s where we are on that. It’s looking good.”
How would special classification for workforce housing potentially help us with the ROGO situation?
Lincoln said, “I’m so excited about this because one of our fears of right now is the fact that we cannot regulate vacation rental homes. We are cuffed with whatever our rules were when the legislators said, no, you can’t put rules on where and how many vacation rental homes can be in a community. That has really impacted the Florida Keys and homes that might have normally been a home that would have gone to a middle class family are now in a vacation rental pool. So we want to protect all of the new growth and new homes that are being built so that they can be for our workforce, for people who live here in the Florida Keys and derive an income from working here in the Keys. So this new allocation, this new pool of units, is going to be called the workforce market rate units. So it’s not going to have an affordability cap on it, so it can be for a middle class family who live here, who maybe one parent is a school teacher, maybe one works in the bank, and they’re in that area where they’re competing to get a building allocation with everyone else, and they just can’t make it to the top. So we are going to protect 70% of these building permits we have and classify them as this workforce market rate unit. I’m super excited about this. That again, shows the governor and the Department of Commerce that we are prioritizing our workforce.”
Insurance affordability also continues to be a topic of discussion.
Lincoln said, “We support FIRM and everything that they’re doing and all of their efforts, and it’s definitely been an uphill battle, but it is one that we firmly believe we’ll keep fighting for. So yes, there’s definitely a lot on all of our plates. I’m always available if anybody wants to speak with me.”