Thanks to an appropriation in the state’s 2022-2023 budget, the city of Key Colony Beach will continue to move toward a complete stormwater treatment system later this year.
According to city administrator David Turner, the $2.6 million approved in the record-high state budget should be enough to install treatment infrastructure on the few remaining streets in KCB that have yet to receive it: all of 12th Street, along with half of 9th and 11th Streets. The project’s completion should put a bow on a commitment started by the city 10 years ago, when installation began at the city’s east end.
“Eighty percent of the city is done,” said Turner, noting that Key Colony recently awarded the contract for 10th Street to Haack Excavating Inc. “We’re going to go right into this final phase and get it done.”
With the system, stormwater runoff is directed into culverts, cleaned and filtered, and sent 120 feet down into the coral rock via injection wells. The completed system should prevent significant runoff of oils, gas, fertilizer and rubber residue into the city’s canals.
“This really goes a long way to protecting our nearshore water quality,” said Key Colony Beach mayor Patti Trefry.
“When you’re standing in the back of your house, if you live on a canal and you’re looking at it after heavy rain, it’s not going to be cloudy,” said Turner. “We’re taking care of our environment, which is so critical down here.”
With a cost of just under $1 million per street, Key Colony officials are hopeful the $2.6 million appropriation will be enough to finish the three remaining streets in the project. When completed, KCB will be one of the first Keys municipalities to achieve complete management of its stormwater with a system of filtration and injection wells. With construction on 10th Street set to begin in July with Haack, Turner said the city aims to have engineering and drawings for the final three streets ready to be put out for bids by August or September.
Turner, Trefry and KCB vice mayor Tom Harding all thanked state Sens. Ana Maria Rodriguez and Ben Albritton as well as state Rep. Jim Mooney for their aid in getting the funding approved. Harding, who previously served on the city’s utility board when the project was in its earlier phases, spoke on the significance of the single large appropriation.
“Every two years, we would chip away at the big list of improvements. We had a long list of things to do … and the difficulty is the budget we had wasn’t adequate to make all the improvements,” he said. “Now we’ll be able to complete all that work in a very short amount of time.”
Harding said he hopes KCB’s system can set a precedent for other municipalities moving forward.
“I think this will be a good example of one city doing this, and then hopefully the rest of the cities can get the same cooperation that we did,” he said. “This is a great step forward. In the small community that we’re in, we wouldn’t have been able to afford this on our own, so to have the support from the state representatives is fantastic.”
