Monroe County Mayor Pro Tem Michelle Lincoln joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM yesterday morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
There was a pretty long county commissioners meeting on Wednesday.
Lincoln said, “That was a nine in the morning, I think until 3:30 or four in the afternoon meeting, and when you defer things for years and years and then all of a sudden, you’re at the end of the road, and the decisions have to be made and they’re not always easy decisions. The five of us commissioners that are on the dais right now, we’re the ones that are faced with making the votes that not everyone’s happy with and that’s kind of the reality of living in Monroe County, living on a chain of islands that are surrounded by water, and dealing with the water and sea level rise and king tides and seasonal flooding and hurricanes, and what are we going to do to make our community more resilient and who’s going to pay for that price tag of making counties resilient?”
The cost of mitigating sea level rise and the assessments in the Keys is always an issue.
Lincoln said, “We have been having meetings since before I was even a commissioner on this one particular neighborhood in Key Largo, and they needed help. It’s not easy, because of all of the regulations that fall on our county that you might not have anywhere else in the United States of America, because we are surrounded by water, and we are an area of critical state concern, and we are on a National Marine Sanctuary and the list goes on. So it’s not just this easy raise a road. It is, oh, we need permission from the south Florida Water Management District, and we need permission from the Environmental Protection Agencies, and they all have regulations of where’s that water going to go? Therefore, we need deep wells and we need pumps and it’s extraordinarily complex, and we’ve had multiple meetings over the years with engineers, and we think we have a solution. Twin Lakes is halfway through the completion of that project, and the cost came in much higher than we thought. More than 50% of it is being paid for by grant money, and we just need to figure out how we’re going to pay for the rest of it. Yesterday was discussion items we did not vote on anything. We’re going to have more meetings in May on this. Then for Stillwright Point, the other neighborhood in the Upper Keys, we’re having a community meeting on the 28th at, I think it says five o’clock at the Murray Government Center in Key Largo, so that we can have a further discussion with that neighborhood on where they are with that design process. Because not only is there cost involved in the one for Stillwright Point, but it also has some easement issues, because that road is smaller than most roads, and so we’re going to need a 10 foot easement from every neighbor in that community in order to do that project. So that meeting will be in next week. Then also the other project is the one on Sands Community in Big Pine which is at 100% design and we are going to, and I promised the residents yesterday in our meeting, I said, look, we’re going to have a community meeting in Big Pine, probably in May to discuss this further, to give that community an update of where that project is and what the price tag might be for that community, keeping in mind that that community is definitely the workforce of the entire county. That is where predominantly the workforce housing is located and maybe there is some kind of a funding source for the fiscally constrained neighborhood that we might be able to come up with. So it’s still all in the talking phase, but definitely we’re making decisions within the next four months.”
FEMA did recently support the elimination of Monroe County’s remedial plan, the 299 rule code amendments for storage enclosures.
Lincoln said, “It’s definitely not for anyone else to live in that area, not habitable, but it is definitely going to allow people to use the entire underside of their house, underneath their house, for parking and storage and I made a comment yesterday on the dais that as a commissioner, we set policies, and I sometimes think we pull out our magic wand and say, okay, make it happen staff, and this is one of those, but it has taken three years in this process to convince FEMA that we are following their rules and their guidelines and their regulations, and that there is no longer a need for them to have us in this remedial program. So when the commissioners first asked staff to do this, they had to go and set up meetings with FEMA and travel to Atlanta and meet with the department heads of those programs. Then they came back to us with a list of 1,200 properties that they felt were not in compliance and our building department staff had to go through every one of those and clean it all up and go back to FEMA, and this has been a several year process, and finally, last month, when staff went back to Atlanta, FEMA agreed and have allowed us now to unwind all of those remedial plans they had on us, the 299 feet, the extra inspection that needed to happen, but we caution everyone that it will now be an eight to 12 month process to change our comprehensive code and all of the statutes in our government that we need to change in order to implement this.”
Budget cuts at the state and national level are also a concern.
Lincoln said, “I know there was a huge cut in the education budget that is making our county real right now, I know that there was a cut in so many of the programs that are important to us here in the Keys. We are definitely watching it, and as the Florida Association of Counties, we have our team that is strategically located. Our office is a block away from the Capitol, and we have a staff of about six that are in there right now every day, walking the halls, working every different Senator and House Representative on the issues that are so important to us as a state, as all the county commissioners on anything having to do with home rule, so they have been extraordinarily busy this year, and as we’re coming down to the crunch of the last few weeks, things just disappear off of one bill that we didn’t want, but then reappear somewhere else on another bill. So we have definitely been busy up in Tallahassee, and hopefully we’ll have good news in a few more weeks from now.”
It looks like the Stewardship Act will hopefully be safe from the cutting board.
Lincoln said, “Our mooring ball bill looks like it’s safe as well. So that looks good. So that’s wonderful news for our county. We are still in a holding pattern to know what’s going to happen with the ROGO and BPAS number and the hurricane evacuation number. That’s still in a few different bills. So we’ll have to see what where it shakes out.”