Request For Proposal (RFP)

Wow, three weeks have past since my last post -- shows how us "woking stiffs" actually have a life to deal with and can't spend all our time pursuing issues like this, despite the importance to the community at large. The FKACC has people who are retired with "disposable time" to spend on it. They have money behind them (witness all of the newspaper and radio ads before the election) to help them push THEIR agenda and to hire people to put together plans that meet THEIR agenda. Those of us who want to see something better than they have offered have very little time and no money behind us.

Thus it's very important that everyone who sees what's happening needs to find ways to do their part to make sure that the big give-away with little benefit that the FKACC is trying to foist onto the community doesn't go uncontested. The election was NOT the final word on this issue. The fight must now move to the City itself.

The next step toward providing more Assisted Living in Key West is the preparation of a "Request For Proposal" ("RFP") asking for outside groups to submit "proposals" for how they would build and run the facilities on the land at the waterfront that has been granted for this purpose. The RFP gives the parameters that the proposals will be designed around. Thus the proposals that are submitted by the outside groups will reflect what "we" ask for.

There are two problems:

1. The "we" involved is not really US (the citizens of Key West), it's the small private group who make up the FKACC. Nobody elected these people, they selected themselves. They appointed themselves to decide what's best for all of us. And they never showed us any alternatives to select from, just their overblown plan to give away most of their allotted free land as expensive retirment homes that hardly any of us will ever be able to afford.
   
   
2. Unless we do something about it, the RFP will reflect what the FKACC people want, not what's best for the community at large. They are only asking for a measly 20 affordable units for assisted care, barely more than what's already being offered at Bayshore Manor. On all that land. We can do much better than that!

We must give our input on the RFP, to make sure that any proposals that do come in will incorporate more affordable assisted living units. We must insist that the intention of the referendum that was approved by the voters was NOT to build a big expensive retirement community, but to provide average citizens a reasonable chance to get assisted care when their time comes.

If you think the above is hyperbole, read the earlier posts to this blog to get the real story. Regardless of how the FKACC people have tried to disguise it, their plan is to provide a bunch of NON-assisted retirement homes to people of means looking to retire to a nice waterfront area of Key West. Yeah, their plan includes a few affordable assisted living units in the back of the property, but overall the RFP that they want to issue won't reflect what the rest of Key West really wants. Don't let them get away with it.

Follow-up posts here will describe how you can influence the RFP process.