Lynn Landry, mayor of the city of Marathon, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5 FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
A lot of projects have seen forward momentum in Marathon.
Landry said, “The projects, we’re so happy to see. It’s been a couple of years. We’ve been trying to push some of these projects along for quite some time, but it’s great. The skate park has been demoed there, and they’re waiting on the final permits that come out so they can get building on that. The splash pad at community park will be shortly to follow. They’re doing a little bit different engineering. They kind of went a little bit over budget, but we’re looking at ways to bring that down, to continue building that splash pad, hopefully by the end of the year, first part of next year. We just did a repair on our Grassy Key Sunset Park up there. The kayak launch had been broken since the winter, so we did a repair on that, and that’s kind of temporary until we can get some more pilings driven up there, because there’s a lot of wind shear that happens during the winter months from the wind out of the north, and it was putting a lot of stress on that. But it is repaired and people can use it up there, which is a good thing. Then we did get our fitness equipment finally installed behind city hall at oceanfront park, that had been ongoing for a little while. So that’s good to see all that installed and people using it already. Then we have let the contracts out for the dock repair at Seven Mile Marina, which is something that’s been sitting on there for quite some time. DOT had held up the process a little bit with some of the leases down there that finally got worked out. So that’s moving forward. I believe the quay project for the docks up there should be going out to bid shortly. They had to pull it back in and do a little bit of, I guess, value engineering or re engineering of that. But that’s going back out to bid. So hopefully that’ll be moving forward pretty quickly as well. So lot of good things going on in the city of Marathon.”
There is a city council meeting tonight at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall.
Landry said, “We’ve kind of tried to get people to, especially our ongoing annual events, to get those approvals in as early as possible, so we don’t run into the roadblocks as we get closer to those events. But July 4 is a good one, because it’s always on July 4.”
Will there be cutbacks?
Landry said, “We got our DOGE letter like everybody else, and our finance director filled it all out and sent it back. But, I mean, as far as the city of Marathon goes, I think we’re in pretty good shape. We have a good reserve. We did set the millage a little bit high for the pre meeting to set the millage, but we can always go down. It looks like we’re moving back toward going back to hold the line from last year, which would be somewhere around a six and a half 7% increase. We might actually use a little bit of reserve to do that, because we’re sitting on more than 12 months of reserve. But staff internally has been working diligently on that. We’ve been meeting internally. We can see some movement, cutting some stuff out of the budget, but I think overall, we’re in a really good position here in the city of Marathon for that.”
What about the BPAS and ROGOs?
Landry said, “They should all be divvied out, and I think it’s going to be based on vacant lots, what they actually have, I believe in that response, but it’ll be over 10 years. So the biggest part of that that really hurts the city of Marathon is the one unit per lot, which a lot of this was done in response to takings. But the city of Marathon has a little bit different density issue in our comprehensive plan and land development regulations. We desperately need to continue to build affordable housing, and specifically workforce housing for the city of Marathon and a lot of surrounding areas. But the way the legislation is written, if we have extra allocations and we want to use those as affordable, it can still only be one unit per lot, which makes it prohibitive, simply because the cost that you incur trying to build these units. It looks like the Stewardship money is going to be out of the portal this year. So I think all the municipalities in the county are all applying in that portal for that money that they have allocated from Stewardship. We are still trying to work on an ILA. I’m not sure where that’s going to go, but right now, for this year, it’s in the portal for sure and everybody is doing all their applications and getting all that in for that money.”
School is starting tomorrow and the district received an A rating from the state.
Landry said, “That’s a great thing from the school district to hear that. Welcome Ed Tierney to the new position there at the Monroe County School Board, so I think he’s going to do a fantastic job. I’ve had the opportunity to meet him briefly, so we’re looking forward to his continued growth here in the school district.”
September 16 and 23rd will be Marathon’s two public meetings on the budget.