George Garrett, city manager for the city of Marathon, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
With the power outage yesterday, it was a good drill for any potential storms that could be coming our way this year.
Garrett said, “I know my dog was sitting at home in a crate while my wife was out somewhere. So I was like, well, not only am I going to go check the generator, but I want to make sure the house is not 90 degrees or something, but yeah, it is a good exercise. With that note, honestly, in terms of what’s happening in the city of Marathon, our fourth Tuesday this month, which I believe is the 24th here at City Hall, will be a workshop concerning hurricane preparation.”
John Rizzo with the Weather Service will speak to the group.
Garrett said, “It really is, is one of the only places in the country, in fact, I think it’s the only place in the country where you’ve got a weather service venue that serves nothing but this county, in fact, the Florida Keys, and not even just this county. They become kind of an outpost, if you will, for the Hurricane Center in Miami, because they do have that extra region with their radars. But anyway, bottom line is, 24th we’ll have John Rizzo. We’ll have the Interim Director of Emergency Management County. It’s going to have our fire chief, which for the sake of an emergency event, he is the incident commander. It will have my planning director here. Normally, he is the planning chief for an incident and then, of course, the rest of us, obviously, I play a role there too. So that will be kind of the high level stuff, and what we know about hurricanes, how we predict them, the information that John Rizzo can give us all the way down to our fire chief and incident commander, and what you should be doing for your own personal safety during an event. So if you’re interested watch or come to the meeting on the 24th with city council.”
Council had a meeting last night.
Garrett said, “We had Sara Matthis, everybody knows her from her experiences or time with the Weekly has been our Public Information Officer for two, three years now and she’s stepped away from that role with us, continues to help out when she can, but so last night, we hired a new PIO, Carlos Garcia, somebody that I think if you’ve been around Islamorada, more, in fact, around the sheriff’s department, you frequently will see him filming events that happen within those agencies. So we’re hiring Carlos as kind of a one man band, but with some backup amongst his peers and so on, to do the same sort of work, certainly to be available to film events, video events, but also to write short scripts about them, to get them out to the press, put them on our websites, Public Information Services, etc. I think in the long run, we’ll be part of a team that will be redoing the city’s website to make it more both legally sufficient and also easier to work through. So that happened last night. We’ll see him actually in a staff meeting this morning, so he’s going to come on board that fast.”
Council also talked about change orders with a project on Sombrero Boulevard.
Garrett said the project is “actually well underway. I think we’ve done at least one phase of that project now. It is about a nine month or a year project, started about a month ago in terms of actually digging shovels in the ground and the change order last night, almost at the outset of the project, which was why some of it was of concern to the council, had to do with the fact that we’re putting in a stormwater system which will have piping. It’ll run probably about 1000, 1500 feet in total, from Sombrero Beach Road all the way up to where the Country Club is. There’s other pipe in the ground and and that was the unknown here. We knew it was there. We knew roughly where it was horizontally. So if you’re standing on the ground looking left or right, we more or less knew that we’re sitting on top of the pipe. We didn’t know how deep the pipe was. And as we began to figure that out, we realized that there were going to be some conflicts that were unanticipated. So that’s the change order. So we got through the change order last night, and the real message here is, regardless of that, nothing’s really slowed down in terms of the project and that Sombrero Boulevard stormwater drainage project is cruising. There’s no loss of time because of the change order, and we actually are ahead of schedule already. It’s going to get done and resolve a problem for us in that area. Seriously, you get a good rainstorm, we’ve had a five inch rainstorm a couple weeks ago and one lane going on two lanes, so that that street in that area, we’re covered with water, and it’s because everything runs from one side of this street to the other and gets blocked by a berm now, and we’ve got to resolve the problem. Every problem is a big one for those people facing the problem. But honestly, as I look to some of the other flooding issues, Key West, up in Key Largo, some of which is tidal, some of which is just rain driven events, I realized that even Sombrero Boulevard, as much as it is very important to the people who live back in that area is really by no means the worst case situation or scenario in the Keys. We just need to get it done, and I know we’ll make a lot of people happy when it’s finished.”
Funding was dispersed to nonprofits from the city last week.
Garrett said, “That’ll really is a cool thing that city council does, because the emphasis in the distribution of those funds every year is kids, and there’s all sorts of programs out there to deal with family and kid related things. Everybody’s got a piece of the pie or piece of the puzzle in terms of making sure that people are safe and have as good a life circumstance as they can, and whether it’s food or whether it’s shelter or whether it’s clothing, whether it’s education, whether it’s medical, essentially all of those topic areas and probably a few more were covered by the distribution of those funds, and the emphasis was definitely family and children. Last night, council has typically donated money through that process to FIRM, Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe. I think the recognition was, we give to the organization every year. It really is a different issue than the family and children issues that the rest of those funds go to. So last night was a commitment on part of the city to give them $15,000 per year. Now understand that they’ll get a check for $15,000 for their lobbying efforts on the issues that FIRM is associated with this year, and then, of course, appropriation has to happen in the next budget year for them to get it next year. But certainly from a budgetary standpoint, we passed a resolution last night, and staff will be putting that same $15,000 aside for them for next year, and presumably in future years if that resolution stand. It’s going to assure that the folks with FIRM have some help in the city of Marathon in making sure that we’re fighting a battle for fair insurance.”
With Tallahassee still not having a budget, things can get sticky for municipalities.
Garrett said, “I think one of the one of the things that didn’t solve the problem, but I think the mere fact that we are represented is fantastic. I know the governor placed Robert Spottswood Sr. on the Insurance Board, so we have somebody that represents us and the issues that we uniquely face down here on that group when we’re looking at those insurance issues. The other thing is that if you’re talking to my crystal ball holders up in Tallahassee, and I’ve got two or three of them up there, it looks like the budget is moving down the road, if everything goes the way we hope it will, by Monday, it may not have actually completely been passed, but it will have been moved far enough up the chain that essentially, it’ll be a done deal. Now for us, there’s a couple things in there, We recognize some of the tax issues the governor is dealing with. Every time you give somebody a tax break, it means we’ve got to make it up someplace. Of course, there was a lot of that this year. Fortunately, in my mind, and I think in the city’s mind, most of it didn’t pass. Taking away property taxes would have been insane, because that’s how we really derive most of our revenues. Taking away the tourist development taxes in support of then what might have been the replacement of property taxes was insane as well, because it’s not enough to cover the bill. So just some crazy stuff. But tax relief to homesteaded properties, well, that’s that’s been going on for a while. So it’ll happen for us. There’s $20 million in the budget for the Stewardship Act, and it looks like we’re going to go back to dealing with the distribution of those funds by an interlocal agreement between the jurisdictions in the Keys so that we’re not having to make an application to the DEP to get the money. It’ll be understood up front every year that when the appropriation is made, that say the city of Marathon gets 15% of whatever’s appropriate that year. I’m making the number up. But whatever that number ends up being by agreement with the jurisdictions and it simply would be distributed that way in the future. The other thing it looks like is going to happen is we asked for a special appropriation for some affordable housing and affordable housing project. I’m not sure precisely where that’s going to end up. It looks better yesterday afternoon than it did yesterday morning, so it’s a little bit the vagaries of the budget, but actually it’s possible that we’ll get about a million and a half dollars for an affordable housing project here.”
Do ROGO units still have to be individual units?
Garrett confirmed, “Yes. It’s absolutely a significant issue for the city of Marathon, because we have no allocations left. When I say that I am off by maybe two or three units. We have, I think one more round that we can go through to give out allocations, and I think we give out three allocations per semester, per half year, so we don’t have much left to do. The ability to do a larger affordable housing project, which is almost essential, considering the cost of construction down here, we have no ability currently, with the units we have. The village probably has the ability, because they have units still, and the county has units still that they can distribute the way they want. But Senate Bill 180 as it was written and then finally passed as a House bill as well, the governor still has to sign it, but we have no indication he won’t. So that limits now, it provides 900 units over 10 years, and it’s one unit per lot, which theoretically takes care of the takings cases, but it does absolutely nothing, and we’ve stated that every step of the way, does nothing for affordable housing. I had a promise through our lobbyist, with our state representative Jim Mooney, that we’ll work to try to fix that in the next session. So it’s a work in progress. The thing that we are very positive about is that, in fact, whatever the distribution of units is, it’ll be based on the number of vacant lots per jurisdiction. So it would be some percentage based on the number of vacant lots in each area, and we’ll have those available to us and that does, in fact, take away the the takings issues for the next 10 years, and maybe more, depending on how we choose to distribute them. Then we will go back and deal with the affordable housing issues. We’ll see where that all goes. But we got it through. It was a fight. I mean literally Senate Bill 180 which is where this was all housed in a much, much bigger set of language, didn’t pass until 4:30 on the last day of session, and then had to go to the House to get the similar passage, so it literally was down to the wire, and we’re pleased that it happened.”