Key West Mayor Dee Dee Henriquez joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
The Parks and Rec board meeting that was scheduled for this week has been canceled.
Henriquez said, “That was going to be planned for Thursday here at City Hall and I just want your listeners to know that that Parks and Rec Advisory Board meeting has been canceled for this week, and then they will go ahead and schedule again for next month. So that is very important. Today, starting at five o’clock in the chambers, there’s the citizen review board meeting, and that starts at 5pm. Tuesday, they’re going to meet for the first time, the advisory screening committee that’s to look for our new city attorney, that’s going to be at three o’clock, and they’ll have a committee orientation. They’ll probably elect a chair, a vice chair, and they’ll talk about a committee timeline. As of right now, we do have two applicants that have applied for this position. So I’m looking forward to getting that started, and then also the same day, on Tuesday, we have the HARC meeting, the historical Architectural Review Commission. That starts at five on Tuesday.”
The special city commission meeting for the grand jury report will happen at 5 p.m. on Wednesday.
Henriquez said, “We’re going to really have a great meeting on that. Thursday, we have the Development Review Committee, the DRC, which starts at 10am at City Hall. Following that, we have the code enforcement hearings starting at 1:30 also at City Hall, in the chambers on Thursday. We canceled the Parks and Rec Advisory Board meeting, so there will be no meeting for Parks and Rec. Then, of course, on Friday, we have the early bird cleanup at Simonton and Catherine, so everyone’s going to meet in the parking lot of First State Bank. It’s going to be hosted by First State Bank of the Florida Keys, which is at 1201 Simonton Street, and that starts at eight o’clock. Then Saturday, we have a busy weekend. Saturday, we have the Key West pride street fair and dance party. That’s a special event. There will be a street closure from the 700 to 900 block of Duval, and they will be closed from 7am until 11pm, so if you’re driving down Duval, you won’t be able to go through the 700 through 900 block and then on Sunday, we have the Key West Pride Parade, and that’s going to start at seven. There will be a street closure. The participants will line up at the Truman Waterfront Park, and they’ll head north, down Whitehead, go down Duval all the way down to United, so there’ll be street closures Sunday evening, starting at seven. Next Monday, we do have a special commission meeting, in reference to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is ICE and talking about the 287g program, and that’ll start at five o’clock. So as you can see, this week at City Hall, there’s meetings every day this week, and they’re very important meetings, and there’s a lot going on from starting today all the way through Sunday at 7pm.”
With the meeting about the grand jury report for the city, is there anything to highlight?
Henriquez said, “I am taking this grand jury report very, very seriously. When I did receive the grand jury report, and I read it, not two times, but I read it three times, and we have already, as a city, have already started implementing some of these already. So when we have this meeting Wednesday at five o’clock and we go through each one of these line items, people are going to see that we’ve already taken the initiative and that we are already moving forward. There’s some things that have already been taken care of, like, in reference to Ronald Ramsingh’s employment, the contract was terminated on April 24 by resolution. So you’ll see that some of them have already been implemented. Even with the ethics training. I believe that they’re getting the programs, and that’s going to start in July, where every employee is going to have to take an ethics training, just like elected officials. Every year we’re required four years of ethics training. Well now all of the employees are going to have ethics training here. So there’s just a lot going on. We’re going to go through each one. Some of them are going to require either a resolution or ordinance or some of them are just going to be a policy and procedure. So like I said, we are looking at this very seriously. I know the rest of the commission is looking at this very seriously. Our city manager is and we are going to address every single one of these recommendations.”
What would happen if HR becomes an independent charter position?
Henriquez said, “If the will of the commission decides to make that a charter position, that will have to go out for a referendum, because anything that we do with the charter, it goes out, like I said, for a referendum. So if that’s the will, it’ll have to go on the ballot, and it’ll be the will of the people to decide whether that will become a charter position or not, or it could be just an independent and decide on who’s going to oversee the HR department. So I’m sure we’ll have a lot of discussion with that. The whistleblower policy, we’ll have that in place. Public records, we’re going to have training on that, as far as having a public records request. There’s a lot. Referencing the permitting process, again, the city has already started investigating on those 35 that we had. I know there was seven that they were focusing on, but there was a list of 35 altogether and the city and the permitting department and the investigation team, they have already started investigating all of these permits. We did approve to go back from 2020 to 2025, and you’ll be surprised the information that you’re going to hear Wednesday and reference on how we’re already moving forward on a lot of these recommendations. We will have a discussion on adopting a new procedure in reference to establishing a citizen advisory committee. There will probably be a lot of conversation on that. But that will open up the trust and transparency and for us to move forward, then hopefully that will be the will of the commission.”
A special meeting on June 30 will discuss ICE.
Henriquez said, “There’s been a lot of discussion here on Facebook and in the Citizen and Keys Weekly. Then we’ll also have another special meeting in reference to our water quality. I believe they have determined that, because they were throwing some dates around, because there was a few commissioners that couldn’t make some of those dates, but I believe it may be held on July 23 and that will be after our budget meetings, because we do have our budget meeting scheduled. So look for a special meeting for our water quality RFP process. There’ll be lots of discussion there and interviewing the two entities that are RES and Mote Marine. Even though we don’t have a regular commission meeting in July, we do have a lot of meetings going on between now and the end of July.”