by Linda Grist Cunningham | Mar 24, 2014 |
Remember that childhood story, The Three Little Pigs, where the wolf huffed and puffed and blew away the houses built of sand and sticks?
It’s something of an allegory for those of us who’ve chosen to live and work on river banks, lake shores and seaside dunes. Ah, waterfront property. Two words that evoke daydreams and pump thousands of market value dollars into even a modest bungalow on the Jersey Shore, in the Keys, beside Lake Michigan or along the mighty Mississippi.
And, then along comes the big bad wolf. Think Hurricane Sandy or Katrina. Think Storm Surge Wilma in Key West in 2005. Pity old Henry Flagler whose railroad connected Key West to the mainland and fell apart forever in the 1935 hurricane.
Ought we allow any development in flood plains? Probably not. There’s not a lick of sense in building multistory high rises on a sand dune. Miami, Chicago and New York City come to mind, not to mention the bungalows of New Orleans and Key West. Even less sense in rebuilding it. But that dog done left the yard.
We are water-facing people and we pave over, build on top of and next to watersheds and flood plains. We plant a house and follow up with businesses to support it and entertain us. We look askance at the sprawl along the Outer Banks of North Carolina — and promptly rent a vacation home on the beach in September.
No one has the stomach for restoring the U.S. flood plains to pre-1492. It’s just not going to happen, so we best be exploring alternatives. For now, unfortunately, what we’re stuck with is federally subsidized flood insurance — and it’s broke.
In 2012, the U.S. Congress approved the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which was supposed to raise flood insurance rates high enough to replenish the National Flood Insurance Program. The federal government wanted out of the business of subsidizing flood insurance.
Then came the big “oops.” Oops, we had no idea how economically devastating those increases would be on home owners and businesses. So, after months of political wrangling, on March 21, President Barack Obama signed a relief bill that mitigates some of the rate increases built into Biggert-Waters.
Home owners who actually live in their flood plain homes will see their rates increase, but not at the staggering levels called for in Biggert-Waters. Instead of going up 25 percent per year for(almost)ever, they’ll increase a maximum of 18 percent annually.
Second home owners, businesses, houses of worship, not-for-profits and others, such as condos and rentals, remain on the 25-percent so-called glide path to full value premiums.
No matter how one computes it, if one has a mortgage on a property in a flood plain that requires insurance, the bills are headed up. Flood insurance premiums can climb from a few hundred to tens of thousands annually.
As they should, say the critics of federally subsidized insurance and many environmentalists. Build one’s house or business on sand? Next to water that big winds whip into monsters? Well, why should the rest of us pay for your folly?
(See previous paragraphs about the dog that left the yard for the answer).
Subsidized federal insurance is part of the solution. With last week’s relief bill, there are opportunities to find solutions that can protect the economic engines that line our shores, protect the home owner’s investment, while requiring equitable “skin in the game,” and protect the fragile environment.
But, if Obamacare dissonance becomes the script for national flood policies, we’re in for some very unpleasant political theater.
Linda Grist Cunningham is editor and proprietor of KeyWestWatch Media, a project management company. She lives in Key West (in house only a few feet about sea level and she pays for flood insurance even though it’s not required.)
by Linda Grist Cunningham | Jan 20, 2014 |
With a wry grin and a big swoop of arms urban forestry manager Karen DeMaria calls herself a tree hugger Key West style.
“So, I’m out there one day,” she tells the gathered group of Key West Garden Club members, “with my arms all wrapped around one of those huge poincianas and I notice a couple of tourists out the corner of my eye. ”
Key West tree hugger, she explained. Pretty sure the tourists thought she was part of the local ambiance.
DeMaria does, indeed, hug trees. She’s measuring circumference so she can multiply by Pi and figure out the value of Key West’s trees. DeMaria is the city’s keeper of the canopy.
It’s a title fraught with conflicts and results not apparent for years.
Before we move on, put a picture of Key West in your brain. Swaying palms and blood red, towering Poinciana trees. Colorful hibiscus and bougainvillea. Pretty, huh? Now think deadly coconut cannonballs and roots that’ll lift your foundation a couple feet out of the sand. Think homesick mainlanders pining for, well, pines and azaleas and rhododendrons, not to mention a sturdy oak.
Southern Living landscaping doesn’t fare all that well in the sub-tropics. We need trees and plants that are drought tolerate, that adore salt water, appreciate sun, humidity and withering heat, that don’t mind sandy, coral-laced soil with nary a nutrient to be found without some serious searching.
And, those aren’t exactly lovely for landscaping, nor are they cheap. One doesn’t usually pick up a deal on sabal or buccaneer palms at the local big box nursery. Even the ubiquitous coconut palm isn’t native to Key West, though there are thousands planted around the island. That cute, 15-foot coconut palm turns into a 50-foot, bomb throwing monster along about hurricane season — unless one climbs the sucker and cuts out the coconuts.
I know. I’ve got a couple of coconuts that have to be climbed at least once a year to the tune of several hundred dollars. I am steadily replacing the ornamental, non-native stuff leftover from previous owners with native palms, shrubs and flowers. They’re thriving — without spending a fortune in water, fertilizer and gardeners.
Key West, like most cities, layers in dozens of rules and regulations about what can and can’t be planted where and when — and requires a permit for just about everything from planting to removal and replacement. That junk tree at the corner of my yard would have disappeared on a Saturday afternoon up north. Today it sports a green ribbon and a Tree Commission permit. It’s coming down to be replaced by something on the commission’s approved list.
That’s where DeMaria’s job gets dicey. She’s the one who shows up at your house or business, wraps her arms around your tree and explains the too-often convoluted, time consuming, frustrating and darned expensive task of abiding by the Tree Commission’s rule book.
Tree commissions are woven into the warp and woof of almost every scenic city and town. Most of us rarely muck with our trees and plants so we don’t routinely run afoul of the rulebook. But in Key West managing the landscaping is a full-time job. Things grow really fast and that cute plant seemingly overnight became a monster bush impeding folks along the sidewalk or hanging over the neighbor’s roof.
“We get landscapers from the mainland who recommend magnolias and live oaks,” said DiMaria. “We don’t do magnolias in Key West — much less live oaks But they, and many homeowners, don’t understand that.”
DiMaria’s only been in this job for a couple years. She’s updating the rules and regs; she’s taking stock of what’s growing, what’s not and what’s at risk. She’s out there wrapping her arms around trees and multiplying by Pi. Just because it grows nicely in central, even south, Florida, says DiMaria, doesn’t means it’s a good fit for Key West.
Libertarians would argue that one ought to be free to landscape as one pleases, tree commission bedeviled. Personally, I’m glad DiMaria is out there hugging and multiplying. She’s keeping the canopy and a couple decades from now, we’ll be darn glad she did.
by Linda Grist Cunningham | Oct 27, 2013 |
Iguanas and chickens. There was a time when one could start a lively — if not particularly enlightening — Key West cocktail conversation with the invocation of just one of our free-ranging critters. No longer. Iguana and chickens are so last year. We are onto squirrels.
You know. Those cute things with the fuzzy question mark tails that eat all the pumpkin seeds out of the bird feeders on your Martha’s Vineyard deck? Squirrels. Like Rocky the Flying?
The past couple weeks Key Westers have been tripping over themselves to report the sighting (sightings?) of a GRAY SQUIRREL. Seriously, I heard reports half a dozen times this past week from folks who were not working under the delusion that it’s five o’clock somewhere. These sightings have made their ways into The Voice, the Key West Citizen newspaper’s anonymous, page two call-in column.
I saw the gray squirrel in the 1100 block of Grinnell two weeks ago.
That wasn’t a gray squirrel; it was a small old dude with a ponytail.
I missed the gray squirrel on Southard, but I did see a unicorn on Newton Street about three in the morning.
So was it a real Eastern gray squirrel, or just wishful thinking among East Coast Yankee transplants missing those acorn-hunting Fall friends? Assuming these folks did see a squirrel (and not riding astride the unicorn in the Fantasy Fest parade), it was most likely the Mexican gray (or red-bellied) squirrel, which was introduced in 1938 to Elliott Key by a local resident. The Eastern gray squirrel doesn’t make it this far; we don’t have the deciduous trees (think oaks not palms) in and on which they thrive. The Mexican gray is partial to coconut palms.
When Hurricane Andrew whipped through in 1992, state wildlife officials thought the squirrel was (to put it politely) extirpated. They found them alive and well again in 2005. (Hey, don’t take my word for it; read the original research.)
The Mexican gray squirrel is a native of Mexico (well, obviously) and Guatemala though if it’s made its way to Key West, then it’s more likely to have hitchhiked from Elliott Key, well over 100 miles up the Keys. Unless, of course, it swims like Diana Nyad.
Florida does have its own native, the Fox squirrel, and there’s about zero chance the squirrel siting here in Paradise was a Fox squirrel. Here’s what the Florida Fish and Wildlife experts say:
Fox squirrels are most common in the Panhandle and northern part of the state. Of the three subspecies found in Florida, two are listed as threatened or endangered. One of these, the Big Cypress fox squirrel, occurs only in an area south of the Caloosahatchee River in southwest Florida. The other, Sherman’s fox squirrel, is found from southeastern Florida to Georgia and west to about the Choctawhatchee River.
And, thus ends today’s lesson. You now have exactly enough information to add squirrels to the iguanas and chickens for your next aimless sunset cocktail party. Personally, I’m headed out to hunt that unicorn.
by Linda Grist Cunningham | Oct 9, 2013 |
On Oct. 1, Key West thumbed its collective nose at cruise ships and turned its back on an almost $90 million annual revenue stream. By saying “no” to a feasibility and environmental impact study, voters made it clear: no study; no dredging; no widening; no cruise ships — and while you’re at it no tick-tacky passengers in T-shirts either.
At issue in the grinding, six-month long referendum campaign was whether Key West could eventually widen its channel, which lies within the Florida Keys Marine Sanctuary, to accommodate longer, modern cruise ships that are replacing the smaller, older (and less green) ones currently docking in Key West. Without a channel widening, the new ships can’t get into the harbor safely. Not today, or next year, but certainly within two decades, cruise ships won’t stop in Key West.
Now, not everyone who voted against doing a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers feasibility study on widening a mile-long segment of the main shipping channel by 150-feet did so for the same reasons. It was, as they say complicated. The 4,000-plus “no study” voters brought together a quintessentially Key West assortment of the cliched strange bedfellows.
Sincere environmentalists and the semi-unemployed. Wealthy (think rarer than the run-of-the-mill one percenter) second homeowners and political gadflies. Fans of exclusionary zoning and local small business owners. Retirees and energy company and investment executives. The “no study” vote carried every Key West neighborhood to a resounding defeat of the Chamber of Commerce-backed Support the Study political action committee.
Despite outspending its opposition significantly, the Support the Study PAC was unable to convince voters that doing the study did not automatically mean widening the channel. That was, however, the opposition’s message, often couched in hyperventilated advertising that included references to Italy, greedy business owners, dead sea turtles, fat, lazy tourists and the particularly offensive self-made video comparing those supporting the study to Nazis and Hitler.
I supported the study because I think the study would have, for $750,000, given Key West the information it needs to determine its environmental, economic and quality of life future. I think Key West will come to regret the decision to forgo the detailed, comprehensive research on which to craft its future. And, just to make it clear: My company did paid media consulting work for the support the study PAC.
But… Key West voters said no.
Hard feelings on both sides are apparent 10 days after the vote. But, unless the no voters can stop chortling “nah-nah-nah-nah” and the yes voters can stop eying them as careless, clueless pitchfork people, Key West is in for a long, slow economic decline.
by Linda Grist Cunningham | Aug 21, 2013 |
Way up on the mainland, folks in search of a little something to say talk about the weather. “How ’bout that (rain), (wind), (snow)” is appropriate. In Key West where no one much checks the forecast until seven minutes before a hurricane, weather is not a conversational option.
That doesn’t meant Key West has nothing to share over coffee. On the short list: chickens, homeless people, fat tourist families, corrupt (fill in the blank), once-a-week garbage collections, cruise ships, bicycles, scooters, lack of assisted living facilities, mandatory recycling, traffic on North Roosevelt Boulevard during the three-year, four-lane reconstruction, and the never-enlightening delineations among Conch, Bubba, Local, Snowbird and who-cares.
That’s enough. I did say short list. Oh, one more.
This summer’s snarler is the Oct. 1 study-on-channel-widening referendum. The Key West City Commission punted the binding referendum to city voters last October. The language boils down to this: Do you want the city to ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do a study on the effects of widening a one-mile stretch of the main ship channel.
I know about this one first hand because my company in April took on a piece of the communications plans for the political action committee that supports the study. Seemed pretty simple to me: It’s a study. Not a decision. Figure out the latest on environment, economy and quality of life so the city can make smart decisions over the next two decades.
Widening the channel might be a very bad idea. Or a good one. Or a “who knows” one. That’s the problem. We don’t know. And, for the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone could be against finding out.
They are. Those opposed to any changes in the channel and the Florida Keys Marine Sanctuary in which it lies have positioned the ballot question as “do you want to widen the channel.” Not, do you want to gather enough facts and figures to decide whether widening the channel is a good idea.
If the opposition were based mostly in environmental concerns, I could understand. But environmental preservation barely masks an arrogant sneering over tourists who arrive on cruise ships. For too many opponents, tourists without private planes ought not spend much time in Key West. I overheard an opponent say in June: “I’d happily pay seven percent more in taxes just to get rid of the cruise ships.”
No many of us have the spare cash.
Cruise ship tourists and crew pump almost $90 million a year into Key West’s local businesses. An additional $5 million goes into government coffers, including schools. The state gets that much, too. There aren’t enough eco-tours, boutique sail boats and wealthy second-homers in the world to plug the hole Key West would find if cruise ships disappeared.
The economy, the environment and our quality of life are not mutually exclusive. Just saying no precludes informed decisions and limits possibilities. The sooner we figure that out, the sooner we can get the study done and get back to groaning over the North Roosevelt traffic.
