Chief Resilience Officer for Monroe County, Rhonda Haag, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
There will be a Climate Summit coming up in Monroe County.
Haag said, “This is the 16th annual summit. This is our turn. So I think this is our fourth one that we hosted. So it’s actually we always do three days. I figured that people are coming from so far away, I want to make sure they have a lot to hear. So we always do a three day summit. So it’s going to be really interesting. So the first day we devote to our municipalities and our businesses, our local businesses, and what they do is our own four municipalities and eight other ones, they get up there and say what they’ve been doing in the world of resilience and mitigation. So it’s not always the counties. We want to hear from our cities also, and Islamorada and Key West, all of ours will be speaking, Islamorada, Key West, Marathon, Key Colony Beach and Layton will each be getting up there and letting them know what’s been going on.”
There are new innovations in the world of resilience.
Haag said, “Especially with construction and things like that. I know I’ve met with probably at least a dozen vendors in the last year, and many of these will be coming to this summit, showing us what’s new in the world of resilience, like for wave retention, wave reduction, things like that, new concrete that can help capture carbon or help build resilient shorelines. So I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of these different businesses and their presentations, so that we can take that information and build it into our own road resilience and our other type of resilience activities here in the Keys. Then day two, we get into the more typical presentations we have. We start out with the state of the weather, State of the Climate. John Rizzo will be speaking and telling us what’s going on with the Keys and our local climatology here in the Florida Keys. We have our Tallahassee leaders coming down. Our science officer and our director of resilience and coastal protection from Tallahassee, those are the folks that help give out the money into the resilient Florida grant program. Over $1.5 billion has been awarded. We’ll be talking about what’s been going on there, and what’s the future of that? There’s just so much need there for that. Then our own chief resilience officers, me and the other ones from the other counties will be speaking about what the local efforts, each of the counties are having some really big billion dollar needs, just like we do with our $2 billion road elevation program and our two and a half billion dollar Army Corps program with flood proofing and home elevation. So it’s going to be interesting to hear what all the different counties are saying. And of course, I don’t want to leave out our fabulous mayors and county administrators, each of the mayors from the four counties, and then the county administrators get together, and that’s interesting and important too, because we learn from each other, and we learn what our needs are, and that helps us. We learn when we speak to each other at this conference, and then that helps us get our legislative package ready for the following year. So if there’s any unmet need, that’s where we can really focus.”
The summit will be December 16 through the 18th.
Haag said, “We have a lot of other local speakers. We’re talking about the reef and the Bay ecosystem. This is always one of the most popular panels, because everybody likes to hear what’s going on in the Keys and with the reef. It took a long three days, but you come out just with your head full of stuff.”
There has been some progress with the break water projects.
Haag said, “We have two breakwater projects in the Upper Keys. They’re $3 million worth of projects. These are, like the jetties offshore, rock walls that protect the ocean front from storm surge and during Irma those two rock walls, they were toppled over in the storm surge. So they haven’t had this protection since 2017 and so we got lucky a number of years ago, I think about three years ago, applied for some federal funds and were awarded these. So we bid it out. We’re ready to go, but the federal permits have been on hold since April. It’s just the way it is now in this world. There’s so many staffing changes that the permits are taking much, much longer to get now, and we have them all, except for the federal ones. But we heard they’re finally about to break loose, and hopefully we’ll have them soon, and we’ll be underway with construction in Rock Harbor and Tavernier, and we’re going to build the walls back up better and higher than they were before. So for the next hurricane, hopefully they’ll remain intact. I’m really excited about those. I’ve been waiting for so long to move forward with those.”
Canal restoration projects are another important topic.
Haag said, “This is almost December, so we’re hoping to get our $12 million grant for the canal restoration projects in Big Pine Key here in the next couple of months. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, and then there will be a lot of work back down in the Lower Keys for canal restoration.”
For more information on the Climate Summit, click here: https://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/event/16th-annual-southeast-florida-climate-leadership-summit/