Emily Schemper, Senior Director of Planning and Environmental Resources for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about our resources.
The deadline for the end of the year with ROGOs is approaching and the Board of County Commissioners will need to make a decision soon.
Schemper said, “We’ve been engaging in some survey work. Kimberly Matthews has had presentations to a bunch of different interest groups up and down the Keys, and they’ve completed questionnaires during those meetings. We’ve also had a number of online surveys. But now we’ve been gathering our data, organizing our data, and we’re getting to that point where we really need to package it for the board and the community to to figure out, what are we going to do? So next week, October 16, the Board of County Commissioners regular meeting, which starts at nine, but this item will be a time approximate of 10am. It’s in Marathon and on Zoom. We are having a ROGO update item and this month you will see that it’s a pretty full item. In the past, we’ve had the general updates of how the public process is going. This month, some of the items included will be results of the online surveys that people have been filling out online on the county’s website, results of those questionnaires that Kimberly’s been administering to different groups up and down the Keys. We have emergency management and John Rizzo from the National Weather Service, they are slated to give presentations about evacuation forecasting technology, the different model that emergency management uses versus the state’s model that’s used for development planning. We have updates on the private vacant land analysis. We also put together some answers to frequently asked questions. A lot of those are about modeling, the hurricane evacuation modeling and the survey results.”
What does the board need to do now?
Schemper said, “We’ll present this information, and then we do still have a few other pieces of information kind of rolling in. At the end of October, we’re going to do one last survey online, and this is what we anticipate, at least we have to get board approval on everything, but we’ll do one more survey that’s more focused on the actual planning pieces. So how many units? How much should be affordable? Where should they go, etc.? Then the first week of November, we are going to town hall meetings. The planning department will facilitate these. They will be in person, Key West, Key Largo, Marathon. That’s the week of the first week of November, the fourth, the sixth and the seventh, but that will all get posted on the county website in the evening. So we’re trying to accommodate as many people as possible to come share your thoughts, give your input, and we’ll also have some presentation boards. We’ll have some more information out there. We’ll be polling on different issues and trying to gather as much input as possible. Then we do have the board meeting in November, but we’re also hoping that they’ll call the special meeting just regarding ROGO, so that would potentially be November 20. We’ll be able to report on what we heard at those town hall meetings, and what did that planning survey tell us and show us, what were the results of that. So that will be another data rich meeting. The infrastructure analysis that we’ve been working on, that has been a real time crunch, because those types of studies take a long time. Usually, we were able to find a consultant who was willing to do it in a compressed timeframe, but we’re not expecting that until late November. So that will be presented at the December Board meeting. It will all be in the agenda, but this gives you an idea of the progression of and how quickly we have to move through things now. So December, we’ll get the infrastructure, fiscal analysis results, and then we’re actually hoping they’ll hold another special meeting on December 19, which could be the meeting where they actually decide, okay, how many allocations, how many new residential units do they think we want here in the Keys.”
The hurricane evacuation model from last fall did include a scenario that would set the evacuation time for the Keys for 24 hours.
Schemper said, “That would allow up to 220 additional permits to be issued, and we would not breach that 24 hour evacuation. So there is an option that the county and municipalities could say to the state, we at least want those 220 and that would not require a change to the law. The state would have to approve those for us, but it would not require a legislative change so that actually we have a separate timeline laid out to show if it’s just up to this 220, these other steps to take.”
But anything above 220 would require legislative action?
Schemper confirmed, “Exactly. Based on the modeling that Commerce did, anything more than 220 allocations would require a legislative change. So a change to Florida statute that the statute that requires all permanent residents in the Florida Keys to be able to evacuate within 24 hours, they would have to change that and say, okay, where they’re required to evacuate within 25 hours, for example and therefore you can have X number of additional housing units. Even 300, 400 I assume would require it to go up to, I think they said they do it by half hour increments. So that would require it to go up to 24 and a half hours, for example. We’re trying to give the board the opportunity to make informed decisions without doing analysis, analysis, analysis for the next three years. Because you could model different scenarios forever and we may need additional modeling, or the state may need to do it on their end, but we at least have a ballpark range based on what they gave us in 2023.”