Eight candidates enter the race for one of four seats on the Islamorada Village Council. The election is pivotal in a village facing major issues, including workforce housing shortages, traffic congestion, aged infrastructure and declining nearshore water quality.
Recently, the Islamorada Chamber of Commerce hosted a forum to ask candidates the big questions facing the village. Every Thursday, the Keys Weekly will highlight those questions and the candidate responses in leadup to the Nov. 5 general election.
Question 1: Local businesses are struggling to find employees, creating a vicious cycle involving workforce availability, workforce housing and transportation. How do you propose addressing these interconnected challenges to ensure the sustainability of our business community? What steps would take to prevent further strain on local businesses due to these workforce issues?
Question 2: The village has recently made several land acquisitions. What is your stance on the village continuing these types of purchases? How do you believe the village should manage the parcels it has purchased and what do you think is an appropriate use for future land acquisitions?
SEAT 1
Buddy Pinder
1. I would say we need to work with other interlocal governments starting with Tallahassee. Danny Perez is our incoming speaker of the House. Let’s go talk to some of these people. I’ve been in meetings where they are very successful in certain cities doing this. We just gotta take the bull by the horn and get it done. The money is there. You gotta go ask for the money. If you don’t ask for it you can’t receive it. You gotta get proactive.
2. I would say that the property we’ve already purchased, we should look at the majority of it for workforce housing. Island Silver and Spice, there could be parking there too. We already own this property. There are vendors who will build. You give them the property, they build them, they manage them, they operate them and we get paid for that. Also, we need to continue buying preservation land. We need to protect our green space, just like the Glynn property that the village purchased, those 90 acres. I think we should continue that, but I think personally we need to look at the properties we own for workforce housing.
Van Cadenhead
1. We need some major changes in our planning department. We are allowing at the present time moderately-priced hotel rooms of 400 and 500 square feet to be sold off as TDRs to developers for 10,000-square-foot mansions on the ocean. This is not how we’re going to solve this problem. We’re going to solve this problem by assuring that 400- and 500-square-foot motel rooms are used for affordable workforce housing.
2. I think we should continue to get as many large tracts of pristine habitat that we can preserve and buy that and put that under our control. As far as Island Silver and Spice property, that could safely and has shown to be able to handle 16 to 18 affordable housing units. We could have a hybrid project of 18 units there or 16 units and a municipal parking and a recharge station for electric vehicles. That’s under the control of the Village of Islands now, and for us to make the most use of it, I think a hybrid operation might serve us the best because it’s a prime piece of property in the center of town, and we need parking and affordable housing. I would put this with the new comp plan firm we have and see what they do with it.
SEAT 2
Anna Richards
- I think that is one of the most important things we have to deal with right now. I know my children are facing the same issues, they can hardly afford to live here. We need to chase grants, whatever we need to … working together with everybody and the community to try to figure where a good place is for affordable housing and where we can put these people.
- I think if we’re going to spend the money, which is all of our tax dollars that we worked hard for, that we should spend it wisely and purchase all the sensitive land we have out there that we don’t want built on. We have a lot of wetland properties out there. I see it out there every day. I deal with it. I don’t think we should be spending our money on very expensive commercial land when we could be buying up property we could preserve and keep forever.
Steve Friedman
- As a full-time fishing guide, I interact daily with the workers who are the backbone of our economy at gas stations, bait shops, hotels, marinas, etc. When firefighters and teachers cannot afford to live here, it’s because we have failed them. Working-class families deserve a fair shot at affordable housing. The Village must prioritize work-force housing within our new comprehensive plan by thinking outside-the-box and using every tool and funding source available.Workers must be able to commute efficiently. We must continue coordinating transit bus logistics with other municipalities and meet regularly with workers to invite feedback on transportation issues.
- It’s been almost a quarter-of-a-century since the Village updated its comprehensive plan which is intended to serve as a guidepost for Council decisions on all future residential and commercial development, including land acquisitions. Moving forward, we must develop plans for the land we already have as well as plan and budget (not impulse buy) for any future purchases. We should strive to only purchase land for conservation purposes and/or solving our affordable housing crisis.
SEAT 3
Deb Gillis
- Affordable housing is probably the most critical issue we have going on and there are ways of building it. We need to find the land, which the village owns about three lots that I know of that are big enough to do 10 to 20 units on. These can be built with federal money so that it doesn’t raise our taxes. We need to work very hard at finding out how to do this.
- We do have at least three pieces of land: the Island Silver and Spice property, the church property and the Machado property. All three would be eligible for affordable housing. The one in particular I checked, it’s about 17 units you could build on Island Silver and Spice. There are companies that would help us with that. I do think it should be some kind of mixed use if we can figure out the parking and paid parking. Businesses need some place to put their employees so they could leave regular spaces for their guests, their customers. I do think we ought to buy environmentally-sensitive land but we need to spend the money wisely.
Mary Barley
- Delay is not a solution and they have been delaying these things for years now. But tourist tax … some of that should come back. What is a tourist? That’s a working force. I don’t care what you’re doing, if you’re a fireman or whatever, we’re serving not only residents but tourists. Part of that tax should be used and come back to the village and help us make workforce housing, not affordable housing, which is different. If you get federal and state money, they have all kinds of criteria and we can’t meet them because our cost of living here is too high.
- I think it’s amazing that here we are talking about buying land with biodiversity. After all these years we’ve been talking about for how long we’ve been a village. It’s time to actually do something. I think I went to a meeting and heard Rob Cole tell us he needed $1 million to go and buy the land that was on the list to start. They (the council) wouldn’t even give him $1 million to start buying the land. If we can’t make those kinds of decisions we are never going to get to where we want to be. Delay is not a solution and that is what keeps happening in this village. We keep delaying all the important decisions we need to make for workforce housing, we need to concentrate on the workforce. There’s a big difference between affordable housing and workforce housing. I think Silver and Spice is a perfect place to start that.
SEAT 4
Don Horton
- I think that we need to develop workforce housing initiatives. Some of the things we’ve run across is the cost of permits and building affordable housing units. I think that we need to look into funding and getting funding, having opportunities to have public and private partnerships and open up these permits where they’re available to us instead of squirreling them away like the last council has done.
- I have questioned a couple of the purchases we have made in the past, although we can make good out of them. I believe the Island Silver and Spice should be a municipal parking lot. I think most cities, small or large, have a municipal parking lot. And that’s a perfect place for us to have that in the business center of downtown Islamorada. I’m not saying it should be a free parking lot; I think it should be paid parking. Certainly the citizens should get a major discount when they use that. We need to focus on purchasing lands for preservation and let free business and free enterprise buy the commercial lands we have that are already developed. We need to focus on the environment and saving our lands that are environmentally sensitive.
Tom Raffanello
- I’ve recently been informed the TDC got $35 million. I don’t know how it’s been split up for workforce housing. Here’s something that I said before, if we don’t like the way the TDC is doing business, go to the legislature. If we don’t like the way workforce housing is being handled and rules are too prohibitive, that’s what you have legislation for and that’s why you have people in Washington. Tell them what you need; they’re there to help us. We don’t do that.
- I’m not for buying land and speculating. Both pieces of land are in commercial areas. We should get rid of them. We should sell them hopefully at a profit. If we’re going to buy land, maybe we can buy land for affordable housing. I don’t like for the village to get into the land purchasing business. I think there are better things to do with the money. If you have that much money, give some back to the taxpayers. I’m all for preserving what we have, but that should come through a solid comp plan with the input of the citizens to keep things the way we want them.
