Key West Commissioner Sam Kaufman joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
There was a fairly lengthy discussion at the May 7 commission meeting about the grand jury report.
Kaufman said, “These issues are so important to our community, and the big picture is we’re still in the process of trying to restore public trust in City Hall. Remember, just a year ago, we had three public officials taken out of city hall in handcuffs and indicted, and we needed to make the necessary changes in city hall so these types of misconduct would not happen again. And so it’s very unusual for a city to have even one grand jury report making statements about improvements and highlighting inefficiencies and problematic instances in how government is organized. Yet here we have a second report that came out within the last month. I’m happy to talk about it. There’s a lot to it, and one good thing is, and anyone out there who would want to contact me, I’d love to share a copy of the report. It’s eight to nine pages, and it’s very clearly written, and you yourself as a listener and as a community member can read exactly what the grand jury said. I most respectfully disagree with the city website that 91% of the first grand grand jury recommendations were implemented. Anyone who takes an objective, fair minded review of that will understand where I’m coming from. And I think there’s a lot of frustration in the community, because overall, there just seems to be a lack of openness, a lack of encouragement of public participation, a lot of decisions that are being made, whether it’s Mallory Square, whether it’s Higgs Beach, whether it’s the new fire assessment tax, whether whatever it is, it just seems like the public doesn’t have a lot of enough information, and so structurally, as far as city government is concerned, the first grand jury report had several very specific recommendations, and all of those recommendations were not implemented. For example, the first grand jury said you should have an internal auditor. Have an auditor that oversees your operations, that takes grievances and complaints seriously, that looks for inefficiencies, and for whatever reason, my colleagues on the City Commission chose not to pursue that. I thought it was probably the most important recommendation.”
Human resources were also part of the first grand jury report.
Kaufman said, “The first report also said human resources should be more independent, so that employees, and remember, we’ve had quite a number of high level employees make some very serious allegations about management practices and we didn’t have a whistleblower ordinance at the time, if your listeners will recall, so a lot of these things structurally needed to be be remedied. Now, obviously, it’s obvious to me that the second grand jury, it’s a whole new group of people, whole new group of 18 people that studied this for six months, took expert testimony over and over again, reviewed all the documents and became very familiar with these circumstances, and they said, look, city, you didn’t do enough. And so what they’ve recommended, it’s very simple. They’ve recommended a few things. One is they recommended convene a citizen led committee to review your structure, compare it to other like cities, and make recommendations for reform. Seems very straightforward to me. I think it’s great. The second thing they said is, convene a citizen led committee, review your city code, all your laws which are inconsistent, over and over again. The City Commission has been talking about that for many years, and make recommendations about how to move forward. Improve our legislation. Improve our code. It seems very straightforward to me again. The third thing they said is, look at your planning board. You have conflicts. You have people on there, maybe that have conflicts. Maybe when you select people for the planning board, you could be consistent with your code and have criteria so that we’re all moving in the right direction. And it seems, again, very straightforward to me. Unfortunately, I heard very little support to move any of this forward, except for one other Commissioner, and that’s problematic.”
Is there a conflict between our structure of government and the recommendations in the second grand jury report, whether it be conflicting with state law or the city charter or state statutes?
Kaufman said, “Certainly myself, as a lawyer and as a community member, no one wants the City to pursue a process that would be outside of bounds of law. We want to follow the law, of course. But also the city has a Charter Review Commission, which means that we can convene a meeting, we can have a committee that gives advice to the manager and to the Commission about the structure of our government. Look, we’re all concerned about taxes. We’re all concerned about our budget, and this year, we have to pay special attention to our budget and taxes. And so when the city manager now has three assistant city managers, for example, how did that happen? Why? Why do we have that? I mean, the last 10 years, for the most part, we had one assistant city manager. We have a new department called growth management, which was created by the city manager. Why do we have a new department? How many departments do we need? How many layers of management do we need? And that’s what the grand jury is really asking, and it’s a fair question. So why would we as a commission, the leadership of City Hall, why would the city manager not want to take a look at this and say we can be more efficient? And to me, the red flag is consistent with how the other members of the City Commission outside of one or two, they opposed having that internal auditor position or inspector general. We should be moving in that direction of more efficiency so that we can be better stewards of the taxpayer dollar and not just spend and spend and spend and raise taxes every year. As your listeners know, I am consistently against voting for higher taxes. I believe we need reduction in taxes and that’s very doable, and we’re going to see how that plays out, coming up in the budget workshops in July.”
What is the path forward? How is public trust restored?
Kaufman said, “I think that we’re going to have to do that after the election, quite frankly. Because in order to really come to the best decisions, it is proven, it’s our experience that bringing people into City Hall, bringing those with the concerns, and addressing those concerns head on, that’s how we build public trust. Take, for example, at our City Commission meeting, we had the item of the Southern Most Point redevelopment, the entire neighborhood was really up in arms. Why is this happening? How did we get here? The people who live in that neighborhood have legitimate concerns, and they told the commission, they said, you’re not listening to us. You didn’t tell us what’s happening. And by the way, if you look at the agenda, very, very concerning. There was not even the drawings or the conceptual depictions of what that four and a half million dollar allocation was going to be. That’s just one example. These examples are over and over and over again. So the path forward is to emphasize, first and foremost, public participation in every single decision we make. And it’s incremental. We’re going to do it step by step, neighbor by neighbor, neighborhood by neighborhood, and whatever your issue is that you care about, if it’s the roadway, if it’s your street, if it’s garbage collection, if it’s parking, that you come to City Hall, we’re going to plug you in to the committee, the place to get the answers and to improve the situation, because we can all work together to get that done. But that’s the culture that needs to change in City Hall. The city hall that we have now is decisions are made behind closed doors, and even as a commissioner, I don’t know how they’re making these decisions. So I understand the frustration of these community members, but I see it even more profoundly because I see it over and over and over again.”
What’s the next step in terms of the grand jury recommendations?
Kaufman said, “I really appreciate the opportunity to work with the city attorney’s office. They have made themselves available. We’re working on a first draft to the fullest extent that we can adopt the recommendations, and we’ll see what the vote is. I think four or five of the other city commissioners said that they were not going to be in favor of adopting these recommendations, which wasn’t really mentioned in the newspaper article. But those who watched the meeting and observed the debate, I’m hopeful that there will be a different perspective brought at the next City Commission meeting, but I’m certainly moving forward with those recommendations, and we’ll see what happens.”
Were there reasons given as far as why there may be objections to some of those recommendations?
Kaufman said, “The overall reason I heard was we’re already doing all these things. Number one, grand jury report number one shows that we’re not already doing those things. Number two, again, this word we hear all the time, transparency is really questionable to me, because none of us, including as a commissioner, are seeing any of this work being done, and we’re told that it’s all tied to the budget process, that documentation, that review, that we can look to see what actually the city is doing, we’ll see in July. We’re still in the beginning of May. And those of us who’ve been asking for these things have been asking for a series of months, and so again, it’s not emphasizing public participation, and that’s again, that is at the root of a lot of our problems.”
What happened with the Mole Pier lease being terminated by the Navy?
Kaufman said, “Unfortunately, this happened very quickly. I think it took city staff by surprise, and as your listeners know, this has serious potential economic impact on our boat races and events and local businesses can be affected. But what happened was the city manager first sent a letter to the Navy Commander stating that there was an interest in terminating the lease. My concern was that should have first come to the City Commission, and it didn’t. Regardless, the Navy Commander sent a letter back and said, really you cannot do that unilaterally. And by the way, city, if you cancel the lease, then that puts potentially the boat races at risk and we have other other concerns. It seemed that that was the end of it, because there was no further pursuit of terminating the lease on the part of the city. But then, within a month, the Navy sends the letter saying, we are terminating the lease, which they can do. So unfortunately, this puts the city in a difficult position to support the boat races, because the Navy commander says in his letter that you all need to secure a real estate agreement with the Navy in order to use the outer Mole for the boat races. So this has put the boat races in jeopardy. I’m sure that the organizers are working with the city diligently to try to scramble to get this done. But this has not been handled in the best way, obviously. And we’ll how the boat races and what they look like this year.”
The Lower Florida Keys Hospital District held a board meeting yesterday.
Kaufman said, “I attended the meeting just like I have over the last two and a half years, all of the meetings. First of all, we have a great board appointed by the governor. It’s the lower Florida Keys Hospital District board. A new member was seated at this meeting. That’s Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer. I expect him to be a great board member. He replaced Nancy Swift. Nancy Swift was an excellent board member. I publicly stated, I really hope she reapplies to the board, because she really added a lot of value to the board and that was the big news, partially, of the meeting. The other big news out of the meeting was that there is a delay. There’s some technical reasons under Florida Statutes that the attorneys uncovered that are advising the board from the Akerman firm, and basically it is expected at the next meeting in June that they will finalize the request for proposals for the new operator for the hospital, but it won’t be published until July because of the time frame that’s needed for these technical notices that need to go out, and another report that needs to be brought concerning the fair market value of the hospital. There’s a lot of technicalities to this, but I’m very pleased overall, the RFP looks really good, and it’s so important to so many members of our community, that we have a strong hospital and we have the health care that we need so that we can stay here. Many people are moving away, and one of the main reasons I hear is because of the need for health care. So this is a major focus of mine, and will continue to be.”