Key West Mayor Teri Johnston joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the city.
The Veterans Day celebrations in the Keys were incredibly poignant.
Johnston said, “There were there were events up and down the Keys. But we had a wonderful memorial as 11 o’clock at Bayview Park. Then we went right into the Veterans Day parade down on Duvall Street and again, it’s just one of our most well attended parades, I think next to our holiday parade, and people come out, both visitors and residents and it’s nice to see everyone. We had the Key West marching band and we had all different branches of the service there. It’s a really nice way to honor our veterans both past and present.”
The city commission is planning for the last meeting of the year in December.
Johnston said, “We are about two weeks away from the end of hurricane season and we will be burning that flag gleefully down on the Truman Waterfront and hurricane season. We’ve been very blessed this year. So, it could have been much, much worse, and we were very blessed. But we are also a community that’s very prepared. We finished up the powerboat races, and I know we have several residents that are very concerned because basically this powerboat racing, takes over our entire Truman Waterfront for about a week’s period of time. But we do have a contract with them. Our city manager, I’m sure with our assistant city manager and our community services director will be walking that property as soon as all the vehicles have left to make sure that there has not been any damage done to the Truman Waterfront caused by any member of that organization. If there has been, they are obligated to pay for that and repair it. So I just wanted to assure our citizens of that because that’s a beloved area for the city of Key West and particularly the children of Key West with our splashpad and the green space down there. So just be assured that if there’s any damage there, it will be repaired by the organization. It brought a lot of people into Key West. Again, it certainly is a bolster to our economy. Hopefully, we will continue to look for events that bring in new groups of people into the city of Key West, a new source of revenue, but is also very cognizant of our residents, and their right to privacy and to have a quality of life here. So those are the events that I’m looking for, those events that do both.”
Both Fantasy Fest and the powerboat races have helped what has been a slow time in the Keys to become prosperous for businesses.
Johnston said, “It just keeps going from here on out and the nice thing about this is we now get into our local events. We’re going to have the lighting of the tree at Bayview Park on Monday the 27th. Then we go into World AIDS Day and our beloved holiday parade on the first Saturday of December, on Truman and Duvall and then we’ll have the lighting of the menorah in Bayview Park. So we get into some real local events that involve our residents.”