State wants local sewer funding plan

Florida officials have given Monroe County the next 15 days to provide them a plan that leads to 100 percent financing of the Cudjoe Regional Wastewater system through local sources.

After that, the county might not get a good review during its annual work program review from the newly formed Department of Economic Opportunity in front of the state’s Administrative Commission made up of the Governor and elected Cabinet. That yearly review is part of the county’s requirements for being an Area of Critical State Concern. Once all aspects of the work program are completed Monroe County could ask to be released from the nearly four-decade-old ASCS designation.

County officials received a letter from Doug Darling, executive director of DEO Dec. 5 that questioned the county’s ability to fund the development of the Cudjoe Regional system within the existing deadline of Dec. 2015.

Former Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority Executive Director Jim Reynolds has publicly stated several times that the Dec. 15 deadline cannot be met. In light of that, several county officials have already said they feel they will have to go back to the state Legislature next year, possibly this year, for a further extension.

Still, the state’s hard-nosed attitude came as somewhat of a shock to local officials.

Normally Monroe County does its yearly review in November. It was delayed this year, and that’s how the county got in trouble with state overseers, says County Administrator Roman Gastesi.

“If we had gone to Tallahassee in November as we usually do, we would have gotten a ‘good job’ and gone about our business with the plan we have in place,” said Gastesi. “But we recently questioned the state’s recommendation to give Marathon 100 transient rental Rate-of-Growth-Ordinance allocations outside of our annual stipend. This is the answer we got back.”

The county’s three-pronged attack to funding the Cudjoe Regional system, estimated to cost $150 million, includes levying a $5,700 per EDU (equivalent dwelling unit or normal single-family home) charge on property owners. For duplexes, that charge would be doubled. For commercial properties, the number of EDUs will be based on historical water usage with an extra EDU for each single-family normal rise in incremental water use.

The second prong is to ask voters next year to extend a one-cent infrastructure sales tax for another 15 to 20 years. It is that tax that has paid for large portions of the existing wastewater systems in unincorporated Monroe County but it will sunset in 2018.

The Board of County Commissioners has said it will be placing that referendum on the November ballot next year during the Presidential election, but wouldn’t be ale to begin collecting the money until 2018. Officials have said that there may be ways to restructure existing debt to get the Cudjoe Regional off the ground prior to the influx of new money, but the system still won’t meet the 2015 deadline.

The third prong has always been to ask the state to cut loose the $200 million in bond money it promised four years ago to aid in the building of the county’s remaining wastewater systems, estimated at that time to be closer to $350 million. The state has yet to allocate any of that bond money and DEO officials have said that they don’t feel it will be forthcoming.

The fall back plan should the state money never come through with the money has been to charge user fees an additional capital fee until bonds necessary to pay off the system have been retired.

That’s a fall back plan that the current county commission has said it simply does not and will not support.

And given the state’s recent shot across the bow from DEO, Gastesi says he does not plan to stray from the original proposal to hound the state for the promised money.

“The state has said they will support our efforts to develop wastewater. In recent years they’ve said they understand the burden it would place on our residents to do this on our own. The expectation all along has been that we wouldn’t be doing this on our own, now the state says we have to come up with a way to do it on our own,” said Gastesi.

“We have to ask the question, what’s changed?” he said.

Gastesi said he plans to recommend to the BOCC that they send a letter of response to DEO that the county stick with its original plan.

“We can’t ask our residents to shoulder this on their own. We need the state’s help, they know we need their help,” said Gastesi.

He said he isn’t sure what response that would garner from the Administrative Commission.

“That’s something we have to wait to see,” said Gastesi.

County officials are expected to go before the Administrative Commission in January, and other than the local funding plan for the Cudjoe Regional, the county is anticipating a good grade on the work plan.

“We’ve made a lot of progress. The state recognizes that in private conversations, they just haven’t publicly cut loose with any of the promised money,” said Gastesi.

Even if the state does cut loose the money, the county won’t be the recipient of all the funds. Under a funding agreement reached years ago the county only gets 39 percent of the money.

“Maybe we can reach an agreement with the other municipalities that we get our share up front, or the lion’s share up front, and they get theirs on the back end so we can get on with the project,” said Gastesi.

Wednesday, the BOCC agreed with the administrator’s recommendation, agreeing that a letter pointing out the state’s lack of participation in the entire process hasn’t been exactly stellar.

“We went to them and asked them for an additional one cent sales tax for wastewater and they wouldn’t even let us ask the question of the voter,” said Commissioner Heather Carruthers. “They haven’t supported the possibility of a US 1 toll at all. What do they want from us?”

If the state gets extremely hard-nosed about the future funding issues, the last gasp of the local elected officials might be to levy a special property tax to pay for wastewater.

Every commissioner said that’s unacceptable.

“I don’t think the current administration in Tallahassee wants us to put a tax on every property in the Keys to pay for wastewater. We can’t do that. It wasn’t our mandate, it was theirs,” said Commissioner Wigington.

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