Letter to the Key West City Commission

(Since I am probably not going to be able to make it to tomorrow night's Key West City Commission meeting, I sent the following letter to the Citry Clerk to be read into the record during the discussion of "Resolution A", Mayor McPhearson's move to establish a role for the FKACC in defining the assisted living project.)

To the City Clerk: Pursuant to Agenda item "(a)" of the Key West City Commission meeting of Tuesday, Deember 4, 2007, please read the comments below into the record. Thank you.     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From: David Lybrand, Key West, Florida To: The members of the Key West City Commission There is a major imbalance between affordable assisted care facilities verses expensive NON-assisted care retirement housing in the current FKACC plan. It is important that the resolution assigning them as overseers of the assisted living facility be amended before passage by the commission. The current FKACC proposal provides free land subsidies to the wealthy who wish to get into a nice NON-ASSISTED retirement home at the waterfront. In contrast, the plan is very light on providing actual affordable assisted care facilities. It includes 87 expensive retirement homes -- some costing over one million dollars -- for people who can still drive and work and live without assistance. But it only provides 20 affordable rooms for those actually needing assisted care. The other 20 assisted care rooms are planned to be MARKET RATE, which few average Key Westers would be able to afford. This imbalance must be corrected in the RFP process. I urge the commission to amend the resolution to add language directing the FKACC to correct their proposal to include MORE affordable assisted living facilities, and LESS expensive NON-assisted retirement homes. With over 5 free acres to work with, there's no excuse for only providing our average citizenry with 20 more affordable assisted rooms. Please make sure that the FKACC understands this. Thank you. David Lybrand Key West

Citizen Letter to the Editor (November 18, 2007)

Add affordable assisted units to senior facility proposal Last month the voters in Key West approved a referendum to allow a 99 year lease on property at the Truman Waterfront for a facility for seniors. The referendum was rigorously promoted by the Florida Keys Assisted Care Coalition (FKACC), who promoted a plan that was heavy on subsidizing (by providing free land to) the wealthy wishing to get into a nice retirement home but light on providing actual affordable assisted care. It's not too late to guide this plan back on track toward providing more support for the average citizens of Key West. The development is about be put into the "request for proposal" (RFP) process to invite developers to submit plans for the development. The developers' proposals must met the RFP that the City will issue. How that RFP is written is the key. Our job is to demand that the city, while writing the RFP, must fix the problems with the plan that the FKACC has been trying to slip by us. They want to include 87 expensive retirement homes (some worth over $1M) for people who can still drive and work, but only 20 affordable rooms for those actually needing assisted care. (They also include 20 more MARKET RATE assisted units that few average Key Westers would be able to afford). This imbalance must be corrected in the RFP process. See http://www.keywestseniorcare.com/ for the full background on the problems with the current plan if you haven't kept up with the issues involved. And please attend next week's City Commission meeting and/or let your commissioners know that they must take off the blinders and look closer at what the FKACC is trying to pull off. Take back the Truman Waterfront! David Lybrand Key West

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.