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.
The Food Truck Jamboree occurred recently and saw a great turnout.
Landry said, “We recently had some employees get together mainly just to provide more service from the city for community events, to bring this community together. And so the kickoff was the food truck jamboree midweek, and we really didn’t know what to expect. I’ll tell you, the turnout was amazing. I think we had nine or 10 food trucks out there and it really wasn’t about the food trucks as much as just the community getting together, people talking, people waiting in line and catching up, seeing people you haven’t seen in a long time, but great first event for this committee, and I think it’s it was great for the city of Marathon, and they’re moving that into with Parks and Rec, doing a September Saturday movie in the park. This Saturday they’re going to do Inside Out 2, so there’ll be no food or anything for sale there. So bring your blankets, bring some snacks, and socialize with all your neighbors and watch the movie Saturday night in the park. So it’s going to be a great event. Moving that through September, on the 20th, I think they’re showing If. The 27th is going to be How to Train Your Dragon. And then October gets a little bit interesting. Matt from the Lagoon has partnered with us. We’re going to do a float in at the Lagoon, and they’re going to watch, of course, Jaws. We hired a PIO, Carlos Garcia, who’s been doing a fantastic job tying all our departments together, and we’re doing city of Marathon official, which is the new Facebook page, Instagram, with a couple other outlets, but we’re regularly putting out information from what happened at the council meetings to what’s happening in the city. Most recently, they just put out the first newsletter, which is going to come out once a month, so you can go on the city website and sign up for that, and we will email you once a month, kind of what’s going on, a recap of everything we’ve been putting out on social media, especially for those people who really don’t subscribe to social media these days.”
A temporary sign ordinance will be discussed soon.
Landry said, “It’s election season. We don’t really have an election sign code. It’s a temporary sign code. And just to note a little bit of it, for residentially zoned property, you can have no more than four temporary signs. But the catch there is not to exceed six square feet on a property. So there’s a couple other things they couldn’t be more than three feet in height, and the ordinance only allows for temporary signs for 60 days in a calendar year. The other side of it is the non residentially zoned properties, which gives you a little bit more flexibility. You can have three signs, but they cannot exceed 12 square feet. Same caveat as well. Can’t be more than three feet in height, and only can be utilized for 60 days per year. So just wanted to get that out there as something we’ve been talking about. I know that all the candidates have been emailed this particular part of the temporary sign code, so I just wanted to spread that word a little bit this morning.”
BPAS allocations have been awarded.
Landry said, “We’re awarding two market rates and one owner occupied market rate, which we normally do two, but there was only one person on the list this time. Also we’re awarding one affordable so we’re only doing four this round instead of five. So we’re looking at that. Hopefully we’re going to be moving along with the allocations coming from Tallahassee, and we’re going to be looking at probably redoing a little bit of our system and trying to give priority to owner occupied dwellings when that occurs.”
The budget also will have hearings.
Landry said, “We’ve been working on the budget. The original proposed from staff was a millage rate of 2.22 which would have put us at the millage rate for last year, which is not rollback. We looked at it. We wanted to give because when we set the budget and the millage the first time, it’s by law, and we can set it, but we can no longer go up. We can only go down from the original millage we set that meeting. So we set it at 2.3434 which was about a 13% increase over last year. But we’re working toward, I’m pretty sure we’re going to land on 2.22 which is little over 7%. We were able to get some different things that were sitting in the budget that really weren’t needed at this point, so we pulled those out of the budget. We may go a little bit lower, but we’ll wait and see what happens on the 16th and 23rd. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of discussion, but for the city overall, we’re sitting in a really good position. We have well over 12 months of reserves. So this budget might run a little bit of a shortfall, but we’re able to do that because we’re sitting on a really nice reserve for the city, and that’ll allow us to not increase taxes anymore than we have to. Every year when costs go up, the cost to run the city by the day goes up as well. So those numbers will drop every year, just because of the costs that are incurred to run the city on a daily basis.”
There has also been momentum on capital projects.
Landry said, “We’re currently actively working on the skate park. They’ve done a lot of demo there. We’re just waiting on some final permits to get started on the final construction. Hopefully that will be finished before the first of the year. We’re currently actively working on the engineering and the budget for the splash pad, which should follow fairly shortly behind the skate park. That was through a gracious donation of $500,000. It was beautiful for the city of Marathon, but looking forward to that. I know that we have actually been trying to do a good job on our vacation rental compliance. Our code department is a compliance department. It’s not an enforcement department. The clamoring in the city was to try and enforce our ordinances a little bit better. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that. We’ve staffed up a couple of positions as well for that. Sombrero Boulevard is moving along. I think we fell behind a little bit with all the rain we’ve been having, but it’s still on schedule. But it was ahead of schedule before all the rain we had the last few weeks, but it’s moving along very well. We’re also starting to do some design phase on 92nd street. We’ve got some grants to do that, because that street has been flooding for quite some time, and we’re trying to get that worked out so we can get that street raised as well. But it’s nice to see capital projects moving forward.”