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

Miami Herald

18-07-2025

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.
READ MORE: Florida says it's ready for hurricane season, with or without FEMA's help
In response, Monroe County commissioners decided to quadruple the amount of money it has socked away for a rainy day, to $40 million.
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.
It also exited the Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact, a four-county agreement with Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach that was established in 2009 — during the great recession — to save $100,000 a year. The exit was first reported by WLRN News.
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.
The estimated cost is enormous.
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.
And each project has suffered from cost overruns as well. In the Stillwright Point neighborhood, which made headlines for flooding for 90 straight days, Monroe has secured $40 million in grants, but it still needs to come up with another $10 million to cover rising costs since it was first designed.
Massive shifts in price aren't uncommon for these kinds of projects. In Miami Beach, elevating just a small portion of the First Street neighborhood was initially estimated to cost $46 million in 2021, which rose to an expected $178 million by 2024.
The county already heavily relies on federal and state grants to fund the vast majority of the projects, but after about five years of funding even a small portion of each project, Monroe has officially decided to stop funneling county tax dollars toward these projects. Now, it says, residents will have to pick up the tab.
Many will face a big tab if the projects move ahead. County mapping shows that 42 neighborhoods will need their streets fixed in the next five to 10 years to stay above sea level, and up to 90 will need work in the next few decades, Hurley said.
In the case of Stillwright Point, that would mean the 20-or-so homeowners would be on the hook for the $10 million gap.
'Who's going to pay that deficit? Should it be all the taxpayers in the county, knowing that number multiplied by 42 or 90 neighborhoods is only going to grow and grow and grow?' she said.
The new policy requires neighborhoods to come together and ask the county for a project to protect their homes. Then, the county will seek out more grants to design and build the project, and have residents formally pledge to pay an assessment fee over the next 20 years to cover costs above and beyond the initial estimate, as well as operations and maintenance fees.
Making residents pay for part of these projects has always been on the table in the Keys. But first, the county wanted to levy a 1% sales tax on the entire county, pointed mainly at tourists, as a way to raise some of the funds. Tallahassee shot that down in 2023.
Now, the commission has decided that assessments — plus as much grant funding as possible — are the way forward.
'The county is still very much dedicated to rebuilding resiliently. We're not stopping what our effort is, but we're shifting from expecting all taxpayers in the county to fund these small neighborhood improvements,' Hurley said.
That could be an uphill battle in the Keys, where pushback against these projects, even if they're at no cost to residents, has been intense. Neighbors in the very first neighborhood to see its roads raised, Twin Lakes, recently complained about the $2,000 a year assessment the 200-or-so residents would have to pay to cover maintenance for the new pumps that keep the streets dry.
Hurley said that another project on Big Pine Key, for Father Tony Way, has been bid out twice, but it's so over budget that the county stopped pursuing the project.
'And they don't want it either. They came and protested it,' Hurley said.
Monroe says it still wants to work with neighborhoods that want the project, like most of the residents in Winston Waterways in Key Largo. It just wants them to sign formal agreements to pay for cost overruns and maintenance costs.
Those residents often cite concerns that repeated flooding could damage their property value, which could start to impact county budgets in places like the Keys, where there is no income tax. Monroe commissioners are aware of the risks, Hurley said, but for now, they think it's worth saving money where they can and pulling back on the flood protection projects.
'They know it can, but I don't think decreasing property values in a small neighborhood, even in the next 10 years, would be such a decrease that it would affect county revenue seriously,' she said. 'The 90 neighborhoods, eventually, would be a different story.'