City may be considering lawsuit over homeless shelter location

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Key West City officials might be playing a game of brinksmanship with the county regarding where, when and how the city will find a new location for its homeless shelter.

Commissioner Margaret Romero questioned City Manager Jim Scholl at the June 5 commission meeting about something she found in a stack of documents she had requested relating to the March 13 referendum when voters approved a height variance for the Stock Island city-owned property that was originally envisioned as the new site for the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter (KOTS).

“When I went through that large stack of documentation, I found a comment that said, ‘let’s wait until the lawsuit for the homeless shelter.’ My question to you is are we going to look at a homeless shelter as was in the first RFP that went out last September but then got pulled back,” Romero asked Scholl.

City officials had originally envisioned the 2.6-acre property on College Road as the site of the court-ordered new location for KOTS, as well as a location for a proposed affordable housing complex. But after Hurricane Irma decimated approximately 3,000 homes in Monroe County last September, including homes occupied by local workers, city commissioners agreed to use the Stock Island parcel entirely for affordable workforce housing.

That left the sticky question of where KOTS would go. Mayor Craig Cates earlier proposed moving the 16 elderly residents in Key West’s Bayshore Manor into the new Poinciana Gardens Senior Living Facility, 1664 Dunlap Drive, then using the Bayshore building to house the area homeless. But the immediate outcry from Bayshore residents and staff against the idea was enough to convince county commissioners to reject that trial balloon, straining relations with the city.

Since then, détente has prevailed. Scholl told Romero that he and “several of the staff” have been talking with county officials about the location issue.

“The homeless shelter is still a work in progress as to a location. But we believe the critical need at this point is for workforce housing,” he said, adding, “We’re not ready to present an option [for a new KOTS] at this point.”

Romero, who delights in finding arcane information about city operations, wondered if part of the city’s strategy was to effectively strong-arm the county to contribute space for the new KOTS.

“I really don’t want to see us get into a lawsuit situation regarding the homeless shelter,” she said. “I see lots of moving parts that don’t make sense.”

Key West was ordered by a judge in 2013 to move KOTS to a new location as a result of a lawsuit brought by the neighboring Sunset Marina condominium association, which argued the city did not follow its own permitting practices when it decided to put the current KOTS on College Road next to the marina condos. Area residents as well as Sheriff Rick Ramsey have complained frequently about homeless men and women wandering in the area.

Mayor Cates has said that the KOTS location issue needs to be solved before an RFP for the College Road housing project can go out to developers. If the shelter has nowhere else to go other than College Road, it will reduce the number of potential workforce units and possibly discourage some developers from responding to the RFP, he said.

Commissioners voted unanimously at their June 5 meeting to hire architect William Horn to develop a concept design and preliminary cost estimate to build 104 units of affordable workforce housing on the College Road parcel. Horn will be paid $30,400 for his services. Originally, it was estimated that approximately 75 housing units could be built on the parcel. But voters approved a referendum in March allowing the maximum height to be increased from 25 to 40 feet, allowing for a second story in the proposed development. The referendum passed by a 58-42 percent margin.

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