A plan to distribute hundreds of new building permits throughout the Florida Keys will wait another month as commissioners work to satisfy state objections, while discussions of traffic studies also filled a busy agenda at the Monroe County Commission’s Oct. 21 session.
ROGO revisions
Earlier this year, state legislation allowed for up to 900 new building rights to be distributed throughout the Keys on a timeline of at least 10 years, accomplished by raising the island chain’s allowable hurricane evacuation clearance time from 24 to 24.5 hours and designating the rights solely for use on vacant, but buildable, properties.
Of those new rights, 657 were earmarked for use in unincorporated Monroe County, with staff originally planning to split the award into 120 market-rate units and 537 for a newly-coined “market rate workforce” category.
Eschewing the financial limitations of traditional deed-restricted affordable housing, commissioners and staff touted the new classification as a way to promote local homeownership while allowing residents to build equity and benefit from spikes in property values.
The rights would be reserved exclusively for owners earning 70% or more of their income in Monroe County and carry a 99-year deed restriction.
But following state review of the county’s proposed amendment to its comprehensive plan, needed to accept and distribute the rights, an Objections, Recommendations and Comments (ORC) report from FloridaCommerce identified two issues – a proposed expansion to allow affordable housing construction in high-hazard V-zones as designated by FEMA, and a lack of housing rights set aside for traditional affordable housing.
In the report, authored by bureau chief of community planning and growth Yazmin Valdez, state review teams wrote that county staff had not adequately justified removing the county’s existing ban on building affordable housing in “high-risk coastal flood areas,” adding that the county’s own scoring system for awarding building rights subtracts significant points for projects planned in these zones.
A second objection targeted the exclusion of traditional deed-restricted affordable housing rights from the new distribution schedule.
Addressing the commission, planning director Devin Tolpin said the original omission of traditional rights, and high proportion of workforce market rate rights, was intentional to prioritize feasible projects for rights that could be only awarded on a one-per-vacant-lot basis.
Over the last five years, she said, the county has issued only six affordable housing rights for use in single-family projects, versus 426 for multifamily builds. High land and construction costs force developers to chase economies of scale via more financially viable larger builds.
“What (those numbers) show me is that our local market does not appear to be very conducive to large-scale single-family affordable housing developments,” Tolpin said. “Our concern, if we preserved a greater number for affordable housing, is that they would not be able to be utilized.”
To satisfy the state, commissioners supported staff’s recommendation to reserve 33 allocations, or 5% of the total, exclusively for affordable housing, while preserving the prohibition on V-zone construction.
Other changes include replacing quarterly ROGO allocation periods with semiannual distributions and allowing qualifying applicants already in the system a one-year opportunity to switch categories without losing their original application dates.
The modified distribution plan will return for consideration Nov. 17 in Key West.
Traffic study debates
A new U.S. 1 traffic study found that travel speeds throughout the Keys remain above the county’s minimum standard. But numerous residents and environmental organizations blasted the methodology behind the measurements, saying the study fails to reflect the reality of life in a one-highway island chain with constant construction.
Tasked with conducting the study that would partially inform new development decisions throughout the island chain, consultant AECOM reported an overall median travel speed of 46.2 mph, up from 45.6 mph in 2025 and above the county’s 45-mph threshold for an acceptable level of service.
Of 24 highway segments measured, only one in Islamorada – from the Tea Table Relief Bridge to Whale Harbor Bridge – received a failing grade of D, with a median travel speed of 39.2 miles per hour. Eighteen of the 24 measured segments showed faster median travel speeds, while the other six slowed down.
But representatives of Keys Last Stand and other organizations argued that the decades-old study methodology artificially inflates speeds by excluding unavoidable delays, including road construction, school zones, buses and drawbridge openings.
“You’re measuring a fantasy,” said Key Deer Protection Alliance president Hareen Gershman, criticizing the exclusion of recurring traffic disruptions. “If you remove (those delays), you aren’t measuring the Florida Keys anymore.”
Sugarloaf Shores Property Owners representative Jan Diamondstone said the methodology used in the study excluded four and a half hours of traffic delays while making two critical assumptions that don’t apply to Keys traffic as they would on the mainland.
“(The study) assumes there are detours and alternative routes – true in the mainland, but not in the Keys,” she said. “The second assumes that construction is supposed to be temporary. … We know, for example, that FKAA water main construction is projected to continue for decades. The location will move, but there will always be an FKAA project somewhere along U.S. 1. It’s nuts to ignore this in the overall level-of-service grade.”
Last Stand representative Stuart Schaffer said a citizens’ committee had enlisted a Miami-based traffic consultant to review the methodology, which he argued fails to capture the congestion drivers actually experience.
Committee concerns were outlined in a letter to the commission the week before Wednesday’s meeting, supported by 24 activist organizations throughout the Keys. Groups urged commissioners to reconvene a U.S. 1 level-of-service task force for a more comprehensive review.
The most recent study also faced a technical problem: Data from one of 28 scheduled travel runs was corrupted. AECOM presented several options to compensate for the missing information, all producing essentially the same overall results.
Commissioner David Rice said that several options to alleviate traffic in key areas weren’t supported by residents, including a four-lane expansion through historically slow sections of Islamorada.
“We could move traffic, (but) we might negatively impact our quality of life in our communities,” he said. “We’re kind of locked into restrictions of what can and can’t be done while living with those constraints.”
“There’s not a big conspiracy to work this study to benefit the speed of traffic,” added commissioner Craig Cates. “The methodology is good the way it is, but it might be able to be better, and I don’t argue that.”
Commissioners unanimously voted to accept a revised study using a duplicate of the run with the longest travel time to replace the corrupted data, a conservative approach to be incorporated into a report returning next month.
They directed staff to explore the feasibility and costs of reconvening a task force or hiring outside traffic consultants in preparation for a follow-up study in either 2027 or 2028.
