The evening of Oct. 4 found the Marathon Government Center filled with U.S. Congress, Florida State Representative and Marathon City Council candidates answering questions concerning the most pressing issues facing the Florida Keys and City of Marathon today. Presented by the Keys Weekly Newspapers and Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce, the night saw the 12 candidates in attendance answer more than 30 questions throughout the two-hour recorded forum.
Though the forum must be watched to be fully appreciated, a sampling of the candidates’ most poignant answers is below. Some answers have been condensed due to space limitations. For more voter information, including vote-by-mail and early voting requirements, see Keys Weekly’s Decision 2022 Guide or visit keyselections.org.
Do you think the city acted appropriately in handing out the 300 affordable housing units now in dispute with the 3rd District Court of Appeals?
JEFF SMITH
I’m not aware of the exact timelines of when these permits were allocated, whether the appeal was filed or not. I’ve asked that question, and I’ve not seen a detailed analysis of that. But if we were under appeal, and we did not issue some disclaimers during allocation of those permits to transfer some liability over to the recipients and perhaps request indemnification for the city, we may be having some exposure here. So I certainly will be looking at the timelines of those. If it was indeed under appeal, that shows a lot of institutional arrogance if we issued those permits, thinking that we’re always right because you never know when you go into court.
KENNY MATLOCK
To my knowledge, from what I’ve seen, the city knew that those permits weren’t 100% solidified. So yeah, I think it was, to be quite frank, a dumb decision to give them out. And now, like you said, we have the liability of lawsuits coming at us. So no, I don’t think it was smart.
MIKE LEONARD
The first thing I ask is, “Show me the disclaimer.” And I’ve yet to see the disclaimer. I agree with Jeff 100%. These lawsuits are extremely serious. Frankly, the lawsuits could create enormous financial problems for Marathon if we don’t get this result. This is a serious matter that must be taken seriously by everybody.
Controversial items have a history of landing on the city council’s consent agenda, meaning there is little or no discussion on important issues. What is the area you feel has the greatest need for transparency and how would you go about providing that to the public?
ROBYN STILL
Before items are pulled from consent, we’re not allowed to talk as council members because of the Sunshine Law. The only time we can talk about items is in front of the public. As far as transparency on other issues, my push for transparency is letting the public know how things work. If you file a code complaint, what are the next steps so a person gets issued a citation for that? What are the steps in obtaining a building permit? What are the steps in obtaining inspections? That’s my push for transparency, but as far as consent items as a council member, I cannot discuss that with my fellow council members or I violate Sunshine Law.
WAYNE QUARBERG
The council’s hands are tied because they can’t talk to each other. So the only thing we can do is talk to our residents, and we don’t have a good way of doing that either. They don’t know what’s going on, council finds out about it, they really don’t know what’s going on. It’s a quandary, so I have no real answer to that.
KEVIN MACAULAY
I think Robin touched on something very important involved in that. I think education goes hand in hand with transparency on this. People can’t possibly know about something they haven’t been told about. So, it’s about educating folks about exactly what’s going on, the issues that are happening day to day. We do have some resources to do that; it’s 2022. We have the internet, we have ways of getting information out to people in a more effective way than what they’re currently doing. I do think that education is a great way of solving that issue, and a lot of others.
What can the city do to ensure we have high-quality nearshore waters?
INGRID TYREE
I think the first thing we need to do is follow some of the rules that we have already. I know that they’re in the works with a new plan for our nearshore waters. We need to deal with all of our canals. We each go out in our canals and look and for the most part, all of them are dead and not growing, so they need to be refurbished. That would probably be the biggest part of what we can do to make that difference.
LYNN LANDRY
The city has already moved forward with our sewer project to help our nearshore water quality. There is a lawsuit pending that’s highly involved with the injection wells in our sewer systems. There has been some research done on that, and time will tell whether or not those injection wells are actually affecting our nearshore quality of water or not.
RICHARD TAMBORRINO
Conversations I’ve personally had with city wastewater director Dan Saus and Weiler Engineering have left me pretty confident that the city is meeting the law, and it’s below capacity on the sewer system. Some leaching is occurring on both the ocean and bay side. That’s normal, and stormwater runoff is almost impossible to manage. We are facing that FOLKS lawsuit as well, and that is going to be interesting to see because deep wells are going to cost the city a bunch of money for us to put in.
Other questions asked include:
- Do you feel the city acted appropriately by creating a special taxing district for the hospital, and should it continue?
- What are your feelings about vacation rentals affecting our economy and Marathon residents’ qualify of life?
- Do you believe the city has a responsibility to protect, subsidize or provide workforce housing?
- How should the city’s budget balance its building of reserves, alleviating tax burdens on the residents, and allowing the city to offer additional services?
- How do we restore Marathon’s building department’s ability to issue permits?
- What would you do to increase the interaction between the public and our city council?
- Do you feel as if the city does a good job enforcing its own code?
- What infrastructure upgrades or improvements would you like to see prioritized?
- Name one ordinance you would like to repeal, eliminate or revise, or one that you would propose or sponsor.
- As commercial development continues on U.S. 1, do you think there should be architectural standards that property owners need to follow?
- How do you feel the city of Marathon has done acting as an intermediary between its citizens and issues involving state government?
- In 2016, Marathon voters passed a non-binding referendum for city staff to explore the viability of a community swimming pool. Nothing has happened since. Is this a worthwhile endeavor to pursue?
- The city has a long history of creating task forces to tackle specific issues like architectural standards, beautification, workforce housing and charter review committees. However, the work done by these task forces rarely results in actions taken by council. How would you address this disconnect?
HOW TO WATCH
Reruns of the recorded forum are scheduled for Oct. 7, 14, 21 and 28 as well as Nov. 4, all at 5:30 p.m., on Monroe County TV. MCTV broadcasts on Comcast Channel 76, AT&T UVerse Channel 99, Hotwire Fision TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku and the MCTV app on iOS and Android. Scan the attached QR code to watch an online recording on demand.
https://cloud.castus.tv/vod/monroe
