Sam Kaufman, Key West City Commissioner for District II, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the city.
The holiday parade on Saturday was really wonderful.
Kaufman said, “So many people, families and everybody in town, look forward to this parade every year. Kudos to city staff that put it on and organize it and make sure everyone is safe and organized. Especially, public works after the parade, if you noticed, within an hour or two hours, the streets were entirely cleaned up. From the beginning of the parade route all the way to the end, just like they deal with Fantasy Fest. They’re hard at work. I’ve got to tell you, we’ve got a great city staff.”
Will the next City Commission meeting see appointments to the Housing Authority?
Kaufman said, “The city agenda for the City Commission meeting on December 14, is not published until Friday of this week. I assume and I think most people would assume the mayor will propose two new appointments. The city, the city code, and Florida Statute, allow a process where the mayor makes the nominations. But the actual appointment is approved by the City Commission, a majority the City Commission and the last round of nominees were not approved by the City Commission. So I assume that the mayor will put forward two new names and hopefully she will get the support to appoint two people. It’s a really important board. We need to have a fully staffed board of directors for the Housing Authority so they can carry on their work. It’s really important, and we need to have a great partnership and continue the great partnership we have between the city and the Housing Authority.”
Key West District Six will have a community meeting sponsored by Commissioner Clayton Lopez coming up on December 7 at 6 p.m.
Kaufman said, “Commissioner Lopez does a great job at having community meetings. I think he has them monthly. I’ll be having a District Two meeting sometime in January. Most of the commissioners have district meetings and always a topic is affordable housing. But we have to balance that with overdevelopment. Some of our residents think we’re fully overdeveloped already and we don’t want to have more housing, but we have this great need for affordable housing and we’re trying to find all the solutions and we’re working towards them. But it takes a community effort and we want to have input from our residents and have really good policies that we consider after hearing from everyone in the community. That’s part of the purpose of having these community meetings and having all the hearings and items during City Commission meetings.”
There are almost 50 items on the agenda for the City Commission meeting on December 14.
Kaufman said, “There’s all sorts of things that if members of the public are interested, take a brief look at the agenda and you’ll see there’s just a breadth of items, everything from maintaining and improving our sewer plant. There’ll be items about that. There’ll be items about the 3.2 development for affordable housing. We’ll be discussing affordable housing at the Poinciana housing community. We’ll be getting reports from everything from our police department and our fire department. There’s just a lot of activity with all of our departments and all of our employees doing everything we can to support everyone here in the community. We really encourage everybody to give their feedback either through email, you can look at the city website and contact the city clerk’s office if you want to email the commission or show up and then share your thoughts.”
For more information, click here: https://www.cityofkeywest-fl.gov/