While local governmental attorneys and others involved in the seemingly endless battle over the potential electrification of No Name Key seem to believe that last month’s ruling by Circuit Court Judge David Audlin abdicating jurisdiction to the Public Service Commission leaves some potentially litigious decisions still on the table, General Counsel for the PSC Kurt Kiser says that’s not the case in their halls.
“I hear that the county attorney and Keys Energy Attorney believe that Judge Audlin’s dismissal leaves some things unsettled concerning No Name Key regardless of the PSC actions taken,” said Kiser. “We don’t necessarily believe that to be the case.”
Kiser said he believes that a decision made by the PSC would supersede all other jurisdictional questions.
The Public Service Commission, he says, was formed in the days of the railroad barons to prevent the railroads, which had a monopoly on transit by rail, from showing bias against the types of goods to be transported, the companies they would transport for, and to prevent rates that would harm the general public.
The PSC evolved from that early mission into what it is today, he says, but its overriding mission is the same.
That mission, he says, is to bring an unbiased eye to the table, one capable of looking at the “total picture” with the expertise and experience to do just that.
“We deal with issues like this all the time,” said Kiser.
Kiser says that the PSC’s jurisdiction derives from the federal Sherman Anti-Trust laws through the state legislature.
Multiple studies over multiple decades have pointed to residential canals as being one of the reasons for below average near-shore water quality in the Keys.
Continue reading ‘County agrees to start canal enhancement project’
Monroe County commissioners have agreed to join with Keys Energy in defending an action by No Name Key resident Robert Reynolds in front of the state Public Service Commission.
Local and federal officials have been left scrambling in recent days trying to figure out a way to keep Monroe County, and potentially other Florida coastal communities, in the National Flood Insurance Program following a new state regulation currently on the Governor’s desk for signature.
That regulation prohibits local governments from requiring development applicants to first get approval from state or federal regulatory agencies before the local government issues a building allocation.
And that puts a blanket on recent county efforts to work out a means to avoid the potential of $60-plus million in takings cases as the result of a court settlement.
The settlement was the end result of a two-decade old lawsuit by environmental groups against the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the NFIP, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, claiming that the latter was abdicating its responsibilities for endangered species protection by allowing the former to continue to issue flood insurance policies in sensitive habitat.
In few, if any, areas of Florida are there higher percentages of environmentally sensitive land than the Keys.
To settle the suit, a federal judge allowed the two federal agencies to agree that Monroe County would become the enforcement and monitoring gurus for the endangered species act locally.
Of course, Monroe County wasn’t asked its opinion. And at stake is potential suspension from the NFIP with a loss of federally subsidized flood insurance for local homeowners, and a possible loss of FEMA pre-storm mitigation dollars and post-storm clean up dollars.
Monroe County’s elected commissioners were pretty adamant Wednesday that any new hurricane evacuation scenario would have to include mobile home residents as part of the permanent resident phase of storm evacuations.
Monroe County is under state mandate to keep the evacuation clearance time for permanent residents under 24 hours. Mandatory evacuation takes place for any hurricane forecasted to be Category 3 or above.
Continue reading ‘BOCC says include trailers in evacuation models’
Just as Monroe County officials were beginning to make headway on some onerous new development issues with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state Legislature fired a shot across the bow that might have sunk any hope for an agreement that keeps the county out of the line of fire for potential takings cases that could run into the tens of millions of dollars.
The saga started more than 20 years when environmental groups sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service and FEMA claiming that the former federal agency was abdicating its responsibility for the protection of endangered species in Monroe County by allowing the former federal agency to continue to issue flood insurance policies in sensitive habitat areas.
A federal judge agreed with that claim and over nearly a decade, the two federal behemoths tried to work out a plan that the plaintiffs would agree on.
They hit on one. The only hitch for Monroe County was that the agreement reached made the county the enforcement agency for protection of sensitive habitat under the oversight of USFWS.
Long-term infrastructure may have taken hit
With the end of Florida’s spiny lobster harvest season just two weeks away, the current has probably produced about all it’s going to.
That’s the thought of Cudjoe Key’s Fanci Seafood owner Bobby Holloway.
“Most of the fishermen have their gear out of the water or are pulling the last of it now,” he said. “We don’t expect any large harvest numbers in the remaining two weeks.”
Lobster season 2011-2012 was a tale of two groups.
The county commission will spend a good deal of time Wednesday discussing new, still relevant, and possible future issues surrounding its newest threat to participation in the National Flood Insurance Program.
Monroe County was the reluctant, and incidentally unasked, recipient of the responsibility to monitor human development impact on endangered species habitat in the county late last year.
County officials received that dubious distinction as the result of a settlement agreement in a two-decade old law suit by environmental groups against the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The suit claimed that USFWS was abdicating its responsibility as the protector of species habitat by allowing FEMA to continue to issue flood insurance policies in sensitive habitat areas.
A federal judge agreed with that claim, and the three sides spent several years working out a mechanism to ensure that minimal impacts occurred over the next 20 years.
Their joint solution—stick Monroe County with the responsibility and threaten to toss it out of the NFIP if it didn’t some along willingly.
Continue reading ‘New plans from FEMA look better for county’
County officials are breathing a little easier today after news late last week that their request for $50 million in bond money from the state Legislature to jump-start the last remaining wastewater projects has been added to the Senate version of the state’s new budget proposal.
That money was critical to the plans to complete state mandated wastewater upgrades in the Cudjoe Regional service area for local officials who have run out of revenue streams from which to tap.
The Monroe County Planning Commission will get its first look at a new lower level enclosure inspection program March 28 that Growth Management Director Christine Hurley says is much friendlier to the homeowner than those in the past.
Gone will be the requirement to have a lower level enclosure inspection when pulling a building permit for other areas of the property.
Serving all the Communities of the Lower Keys
Recent articles
Past Issues
Recent Comments
Supplements
