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 issues facing the county.
A special ROGO workshop was held today at 10 a.m.
Schemper said, “The meeting will start out with a presentation by John Rizzo, who we all know and love from the National Weather Service, Key West. He’s going to give a presentation about hurricane forecasting. I was given sort of a briefing on it, and it’s very interesting information. That is the basis for the numbers behind ROGO at this point in time. So it is a very important and critical factor in the decision making process. You’ll recall that the Florida Department of Commerce ran their updated hurricane evacuation modeling in 2023 based on the 2020 census, and their results showed that county wide, so unincorporated county and all the incorporated jurisdictions, could add an additional 220 dwelling units without exceeding the required 24 hour evacuation time frame for the whole Keys. So what the board’s been discussing over the last year is, do we, the unincorporated county and the incorporated jurisdictions, do we need and or want more than 220 dwelling units? And if we do, then we need to work with the state to figure out how to make that happen and what the impacts would be.”
Has the hurricane intensity or frequency been a factor in some of this analysis?
Schemper said, “I don’t want to speak for (John Rizzo), but he is going to give some information about how things have evolved over the last, 10, 20, years, even more and then he’s got some interesting historical data regarding hurricane that have specifically impacted the Keys. So that will be a great presentation.”
What else is on the agenda?
Schemper swaid, “The second official item on the agenda is the update on all of the ROGO data. So over the last, six to eight months, periodically, I’ve been presenting information to the board about privately owned vacant parcels, and the analysis on that has continued because that’s also another factor that’s important to consider in how many more residential units could we possibly need and or fit into the Keys, and what would be the impact? So I’ll go over some additional analysis of that. The board had asked to break things down by date of purchase, which has been brought up by several community members. If someone purchased their property after this whole ROGO system started, do they really have an expectation that they’ll absolutely get a permit? That’s one of the questions. There’s no decisions made on that, but I have broken down all the information for them so that they have the numbers in front of them. It will be a numbers heavy meeting. So lots of numbers to look at, but we’ll also look at some considerations for future distribution. If they do decide to request additional units, what would the rate of distribution be? Would you reserve some of those for the workforce or for affordable households? What could that look like? Then we’ll also give a summary of the results. We held three public town hall meetings the first week of November. We had one in Key West, one in Marathon, and one in Key Largo. So we’ll recap those and our final online survey. We had one more online survey with sort of the planning based questions for ROGO. So we’ll go over the results of that as well, and then the upcoming timeline.”
What about takings cases?
Schemper said, “That’s the background for all of this vacant parcel analysis, it’s trying to figure out what is the level of risk that the board and the community is comfortable with for those potential takings claims. Not every vacant parcel in the county is going to have a successful takings claim. Not every vacant parcel is even going to file a claim against the county, but they do need to look at what could be the maximum number of those and how risky is it? There’s analysis of whether a parcel is buildable, and then there’s analysis of how risky is that parcel for a takings claim. So we will talk about some of those factors as well.”
There are some upcoming dates for further discussion on the issue. Schemper said, “Islamorada met last night, and they decided that they will be hopefully choosing a recommended number for the village of Islamorada on December 10. Marathon, also, they’ve set a special workshop on December 3 and then their regular meeting on December 10. Marathon also is hoping to come up with a recommended number for the city of Marathon, so that, I don’t want to say works nicely, because it is a compressed time frame, but we’re all doing our best here. That that is the day before the next BOCC meeting. So December 11, the board will hear results of an infrastructure analysis that we have a private consultant working on. Then on December 19, there’s a special BOCC meeting specifically for the purpose of sort of a final discussion of the ROGO numbers and what should the recommendation to the state be? So they’re hoping and assuming they’ll make some sort of decision on December 19. But even with that, there are more decisions then to be made afterwards in terms of distribution, locations, how it’s all going to work. December 10, the village and the city. December 11, the board has an infrastructure presentation, and then December 19 is the special board meeting to hopefully adopt a resolution with the number of units to request from the state. I just want to encourage people to tune in for that. Even if you can’t make it, it will be on MC TV live, and also you can weigh in by Zoom, either to watch or to participate. There will be a time for public comment as well.”