Documents indicate SOS Community Kitchen lease was done properly

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Key West City Commissioner Margaret Romero said she is still looking into the timeline of a decision to turn over a city-owned building to a local non-profit organization and hasn’t made her mind up yet whether the $1 a year lease recently granted by city commissioners to Star of the Sea Outreach Mission (SOS) for its free meal program is cause for concern.

However, an examination by Konk Life of the documents she had to use the federal Freedom of Information Act to access appear to indicate that city officials did not go behind city commissioners’ backs and finalize a lease deal with SOS before commissioners had a chance to vote on it. Negotiations with SOS to build a commercial kitchen in the abandoned gym locker room building behind City Hall did speed faster than normal because of a deadline for using a 10-person volunteer construction team offered by the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC). However, neither NCCC or SOS was promised the use of the building before city commissioners voted to finalize the deal on Feb. 22.

The draft lease drawn up by city staffers proposed that SOS lease out the locker room building for ten years at $1 a year as the new home for its community kitchen, an industrial food prep center capable of making between 500 and 1,000 meals a day that are delivered free to 15 sites in the Lower Keys, including the Bayshore Manor senior citizen facility and the Key West Boys & Girls Club. In return, SOS said it would contribute $500,000 to renovate the abandoned building, demolishing walls, raising the floor and installing a commercial-grade kitchen using the help of the NCCC volunteers as well as hired contractors.

Romero voiced her concerns last month that the lease agreement was fast-tracked through the city vetting process and SOS was planning to move into the locker room before commissioners had a chance to approve the proposed deal. But a timeline laid out through emails between Tom Callahan, SOS executive director, and Mindy Brown, a project manager at NCCC, show that while SOS was scrambling to find a new location for the kitchen in order not to lose the NCCC construction team – the first location on Big Coppitt Key had fallen through – city officials had only offered a draft lease to SOS prior to the Feb. 22 city commission vote, not a formal deal.

While city planning staff had drawn up a detailed proposed lease, it still had to be vetted by the city legal department before going to the commission for a final vote. In fact, city attorneys pulled the proposed lease off the Feb. 7 commission agenda because they didn’t think the language was clear enough. As a result, the lease proposal was moved to the Feb. 22 meeting.

That delay raised the level of anxiety at SOS and NCCC, which on Dec. 23 had committed a 10-person volunteer construction team to the original SOS kitchen location in Big Coppitt. The team was slated to start work on Feb. 26 and NCCC’s Mindy Brown sent a worried email to Callahan on Feb. 10 after he sent her a copy of the draft lease that had been hammered out with city planners.

“Tom – I can’t tell from the attachment – has the lease been accepted and signed? And we will still need an amended work plan… We just need to have something on file before we can release the team,” Brown wrote in her email.

“They [NCCC] were nervous, I admit,” Callahan said in a phone conversation with Konk Life. “But they gave us latitude between Jan. 20 [when Callahan first told Brown about the new kitchen location] and the commission vote on the lease. They trusted we would have a project.”

When Callahan first applied to NCCC for a construction crew in October 2016, SOS was in the process of purchasing a building at 501 Overseas Highway in Big Coppitt and put that location on the application. However, the owner of the building decided to lease it to another party and Callahan had to frantically look for another location in December. Shortly after that, NCCC, on Dec. 23, approved the original project location and scheduled the volunteer workers.

Callahan admits that he didn’t initially tell NCCC that he had lost the Big Coppitt building, fearing they would cancel the construction team, worth about $200,000 in free labor. He first told Brown in a Jan. 20 email about the new location in the former locker room.

“We have great news all around with respect to our community kitchen project. The city of Key West is offering us a 10-year lease at a dollar per year on a 4000-ft. building located on the City Hall campus itself,” Callahan said in the email.

In hindsight, and perhaps fueling Romero’s concerns, Callahan’s email to Brown was jumping the gun, saying the city was “offering” the building, not proposing to offer it. But Callahan said he was trying to put his best foot forward and not jeopardize the NCCC work team.

“You can always accuse me of hyperbole. I’m a salesman. I presented it as the best thing in the world to the people who were involved,” Callahan said.

Romero, in a telephone interview, said she still has “concerns” about the lease but wouldn’t divulge what they are. She is looking through the information she had to request through the Freedom of Information Act – information Callahan would not give to her because of her initial objection to the kitchen project – and said she did not know when she would finalize her research.

“I’m putting all my ducks in a row. There are a few things I am working on to verify the information is correct,” she said, adding, “There’s some information I can’t get any quicker than I’m getting it. I want to make sure I’m getting answers spontaneously.” She would not clarify what she meant by “spontaneously.”

Callahan acknowledges that because of the scramble to find a second location for the community kitchen, some of the normal planning steps with NCCC were not taken.

“Margaret [Romero] is right. We should have had site inspections and hand-off calls [from NCCC]. But because they knew it was all up in the air, they gave me latitude,” he said.

Brown has since transferred away from the project. But an email from her successor, Joel Barsky, assistant program director, to SOS after Callahan had related the successful lease vote indicates that NCCC was waiting to hear the results and was happy with the outcome.

“That is exciting news. Thank you so much for updating us on this issue. I look forward in seeing an electronic copy of the executed lease once you receive it,” Barsky said in a Feb. 23 email to SOS.

Romero said she is currently involved with planning two weddings and is “not working on it 24 hours a day.” Callahan, meanwhile, blames Romero for using her initial objection to the kitchen (it is located in her district and she was the lone commissioner to vote against the project) to put roadblocks in front of an endeavor that has been approved by her colleagues.

“She has proven she’s completely inefficient as a commissioner,” he said. “She will never be able to build a consensus because she has isolated herself from the other commissioners.”

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