Pirate's Cove

There would be no need for raising the roads, or even roads, if you would just stop driving a fossil fueled vehicle

Florida Keys guts road-raising projects, slashes jobs. Budget cuts derail climate plans

Facing federal uncertainty about hurricane relief funds and budget holes, the Florida Keys went on a slashing spree: gutting funding for its landmark road-raising program, exiting a decade-old regional climate change compact and cutting emergency staff roles designed to help prepare for storms.

President Donald Trump’s administration has vowed to gut and remake the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including lowering how much cash the federal agency gives states to rebuild after a disaster.

Specifically, a leaked memo from FEMA suggests the agency is considering dramatically raising the threshold for what qualifies as a disaster, which would lock local governments out from any federal cash if a disaster were small enough, like a hurricane that only brushes Key West but not the rest of the Keys. That could put Monroe on the hook for up to $174 million for a single hurricane.

“We would have zero reimbursement. That could be devastating for the Keys,” said Christine Hurley, Monroe County’s administrator.

I remember in my lifetime when states where not so reliant on the federal government during emergencies, either for aid, rebuilding, or money. When states didn’t immediately demand tons of help. And we shouldn’t be so darned reliant on Los Federales

To make that happen, the Keys cut 40 staff roles, including a floodplain mitigation manager, one employee in the resilience department and cut and consolidated several emergency management roles, just ahead of the peak of hurricane season.

Sounds mostly like scam jobs.

But perhaps the biggest hit of Monroe’s tightening of its purse strings is to its nationally leading program to raise roads ahead of sea level rise, which is already swamping a handful of Keys neighborhoods and expected to inundate up to 90 of them in the next few decades alone.

Key West shows a steady 2.64mm a year in sea rise, equivalent to .87 feet per hundred years, which is slightly above average during the Holocene and below expected during a Holocene warm period. It’s a very good station going back to 1913. Do they need to eventually raise roads? Sure. Because you also have erosion, and the Keys are primarily coral based islands created when the seas were much higher, and you cannot expect stability out in the ocean like that. Plus, land subsistence.

So far, Monroe has spent nearly $300 million to raise roads in just seven communities. The total project list compiled by the county would cost an estimated $4.7 billion — a staggering price for a county of around 80,000 people with an annual budget of about $680 million.

Sounds like they were overspending. I wonder who was get fat at the government trough.

When do they get rid of the airports, cruise ship ports, fossil fueled boats, and so forth?