Ron Saunders, village manager of the Village of Islamorada, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the village.
The budget process has begun.
Saunders said, “Our fiscal year starts October 1, so we have to start the process early. We’re going to have a couple, I think three budget workshops next month, two budget hearings in September. But the first step is you have to set a tentative millage rate, and that’s required by all local governments. And you start at something, you can only decrease it; you cannot increase it. So, in Tuesday’s village council meeting, we have once a month meetings. They decided to start the millage rate at 2.8. Last year we started at 3, and we moved it down to 2.65. This year we’re starting at 2.8, and we’re going to still try to keep moving it down. We can’t move it up; we can only move it down. So we’ll be having some hearings and figure out where we can save money and cut costs, etc. So we’ll be publishing those workshops, getting public input, so the budget process is very important. We’re getting some increases in our tax rolls because the values have gone up in Islamorada throughout the Keys. That’s the good news. The bad news is our costs have gone up.”
The sheriff’s office saw an increase of about $200,000 passed on Islamorada because of salary increases.
Saunders said, “So our costs are going up as well as for everybody out there in the community. So the budget process is a big one. We invite everybody’s input. We’re also looking at ways to try to increase revenues. One thing we did do is we approved a two-dollar rider fare for Freebee. Freebee, as the name implies, has been a free service. It’s a point-to-point on-demand rideshare program that we’ve had since I think 2018, and basically the taxpayers have been subsidizing because it’s been free. At this point, because we want to make sure we are maximizing our budget impacts, we have instituted the $2 rider fees. We’ll start next Monday, July 20th. So, Freebee has been notifying riders. We’ve been publicizing it, obviously letting people know, and then go on the Freebee website, and they’ve been giving them all the details on how to do that.”
What’s going on with the Founders Park baseball field and the school district?
Saunders said, “It’s been over a year, I think we’re close, and we’ve been asking for a while to have a joint meeting, and that didn’t happen. But finally, both sides realized we want to bring this home. We need to probably meet one time and just kind of finalize everything. So that meeting will be next Tuesday, July 21st. It’s before a school board meeting. The school board had a regular scheduled meeting at the Marathon High School at 5o’clock on Tuesday the 21st. So we have scheduled with the school board a joint meeting beginning at 1:30. We hopefully won’t take more than an hour or two, but that’ll be 1:30 at Marathon High School, where they usually meet in their Marathon meeting. So hopefully we’ll get some agreement on that. Another big thing that we did last week was also we had a charter review committee that met and and had several meetings, got a lot of input. They made some suggestions of what should be changes to the charter. Charter changes have to come before the council, then go on the ballot in November for voter approval. And so we had four of them up on our agenda last week, and they approved three of the four. The one they did not approve was an increase in their salaries. Right now, council members make $1,000 a month. The proposal was to increase it to $1.500 a month, and I think the thought of at least the majority of the council was that probably wasn’t going to pass anyway. It just is not a good time to be asking voters to approve an increase in council salaries, and so they on their own decided not to put it on the ballot.”
One item that was approved was three-year staggered terms for council members.
Saunders said, “Right now, we have five council members. All five are up every two years. So this November, all five council members are up. Now they have all filed to run. They haven’t got any opponents yet. They still could. We have until August until we know for sure. And then if somebody gets an opponent, they’ll be on the November ballot. But theoretically, every two years you can have a brand new council. That’s kind of tough for the manager and for the staff. And so, what the suggestion is is to go to three-year terms, and then some of them we get initially they get a two, and some we get a three. So that way, not all of them go up at the same time. So that’s going to be on the ballot in November, and we’re going to be getting some education on that.”
Another charter change is giving voters more authority on filling vacancies.
Saunders said, “We’ve had some issues in the past where council members died or resigned, and so we’re going to give voters more authority on that. And the third one is giving voters the right to demand a supermajority vote when the village is buying or selling property, because we’ve had some complaints in the past about why did you buy this? Why are you selling this? So all three of those recommendations will be on the ballot in November, not the August 18th, but the the November 3rd general election ballot. So a lot of issues are out there that they brought up last week. We approved a contractor for the North Plantation Key booster pump station. We’ve had issues with our wastewater in the past. DEP will work with us to try to resolve those problems, and we got approval to proceed with Reynolds Construction that was selected as the as one of the we had four bids submitted, and they selected Rentals Reynolds Construction about a $7 million project, so it’s not cheap, and we have a lot of state and federal grants that’ll cover most of it. But it’s important to get that wastewater system fixed because we’ve had some problems in the past, and we’re trying to be proactive in fixing that. So, like I said, a lot of things are going on there, and we just want to try to make sure we get the word out there that things are going well, and we want to keep it that way.”
Could the ballpark issue be decided on the 21st?
Saunders said, “What we hopefully will do on Tuesday is we’ll have a a proposed agreement that we’re trying to get the attorneys to work out the wording, and then we’ll discuss that proposed agreement on Tuesday at the workshop meeting. Then the school board-I don’t know if they’ll discuss it. They have a meeting scheduled on the 28th in Key West. So we didn’t want to wait because we’re getting kind of close. We want to get that field done before next baseball season that starts in January. We need to get this agreement in place. So what we’ve decided to do is we’ll have our special call meeting. It’s probably the 27th. It could change, but we have to give 72-hour notice. But tentatively speaking, it’d be on the 27th, assuming we have an agreement. The village council could pass it on the 27th. Then the next day, at their regular scheduled meeting on the 28th in Key West, the school board passed it. So on the 28th, both the district school board and the village council would have the same agreement. It’s just like a legislative bill. The House and Senate have to have an identical bill. If they change one word, there’s no bill. Same as if it’s not an identical agreement approved by both, there’s no agreement. So once again, hopefully on the 21st we’ll have some tentative agreement that a majority of both boards say they can support the 27th. We would pass it if that’s agreed to, and then on 28th, the school board pass it, and then we would be able to proceed with the instruction. We’ve narrowed down the project right now, just the baseball field, the fences, and the dugouts because we had some issues about the concession stand and all that. We decided to put that on hold for now. If the school district wants to keep that in there later on, we can keep talking, but the main thing was getting that field done because the field is not in great shape now. It’s a grass field, and both sides of a grade is going to be artificial turf, but we want to make sure that it gets installed prior to baseball season. I watched the field down at Bayview Park get done, and it’s possible to do it in three or four months, but we’d have to start at the end of this month, and so that’s why we’re kind of pushing to get this agreement done.”
Does Coral Shores have an alternative site if this doesn’t work out with the Village of Almira for baseball?
Saunders said, “Short answer is no. They’ve looked up and down the Keys. Large parcels of property are very rare, and the ones that are out there are very expensive. We’ve had the baseball field here for 25 years. It’s worked out well. The problem is now that in the time that Coral Shores added other sports programs that didn’t even exist as far as 25 years ago, like lacrosse things like that, that are using the fields behind the high school, and you move the baseball field over there, what happens to all those other sports? And so that’s been the problem. I think most people agree that the ball field should stay here, but we’ve had issues because they’re spending almost $4 million in the field, and they want to have a lot of input on it, which is understandable. On the other hand, we own the property, and we want a lot of input, and so it’s been ongoing back and forth, and obviously the community’s had a lot of input on it too. But I think we’re getting close, and fingers are crossed that we’ll have an agreement next week. We appreciate everybody’s input. I have a newsletter every Monday, so go online to our village website. You can subscribe to the newsletter. We try to get a lot of information there too, and we appreciate you giving the opportunity to come out and talk to your listeners.”
For more information, click here: https://www.islamorada.fl.us/