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In today’s Key West Citizen, my uninvited interjected thoughts in bold italics, I add the pics:
bay side part of Peary Court subdivision, Key West
Monday, November 30, 2015
Final Peary Court vote before leaders
BY GWEN FILOSA Citizen Staff
gfilosa@keysnews.com
City leaders have the second and final vote over the proposed $55 million Peary Court buy going to voters in March on their agenda Wednesday night.
Still, the city commission’s upcoming vote over the deal merely places the issue on the ballot, in the form of two questions asking whether Key West should buy the 157-unit complex to preserve it as workforce housing and also borrow the money.
Borrow the money to o pay for it from the net rents, after costs of maintenance and repairs. Er, pardon me, but what exactly is the “definition” of “workforce housing”? I have asked around, and I keep getting different answers. It seems, to the mayor and the city commissioners, “workforce housing” is any housing in which people who work, live. That could mean, housing in which a deck hand lives, or housing in which an architect lives, or housing in which a city meter reader lives, or housing in which a veterinarian lives, or housing in which a Faustos Food Palace employee lives, or housing in which a school teacher lives, or housing in which a city sanitation worker lives, or housing in which a city policeman or fireman or rescue worker lives. Or, what might be correct, simple all it the Peary Court WORKFARCE Housing referendum.
“All it is, is a vote to put it on the ballot,” said City Commissioner Sam Kaufman. “Let the voters decide. I put out on the table all of my various serious concerns about it.”
And, you said, Sam, “very reluctantly”, you voted to put it out to the voters to decide it. How many voters, Sam, do you think know what you said at the city commission? How many voters do you think know your specific reservations? Dang, Sam, my friend and my attorney. If you were very reluctant, why did you vote to pass the buck to the voters? Were you not elected to make the tough calls for the city and its people? If not, why even have am elected mayor and city commissioners, who each have one vote at City Commission meetings? Why not just have a City Manager, who is elected by the voters - or a king, or a queen?
Commissioners meet at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Old City Hall, bumping their only meeting in December one day so as not to coincide with Tuesday’s World AIDS Day ceremony at the White Street Pier.
In addition to the $55 million price tag, which would require a down payment of $10 million that could possibly drain the city’s county land authority funds, Kaufman said the Peary Court buy doesn’t add housing units to Key West.
“It doesn’t add additional housing stock and that’s a big thing for me,” Kaufman said. “Ninety-five percent of the people living there, according to the plan, will continue to live there.”
And, you said, Sam, which the Citizen has yet to report, that it will take an $80,000-plus annual income to afford the $2,450 rents at Peary Court, and how many workers in Key West make that much money? You nailed it, Sam, when you asked that question. And you nailed it, when you said you wished the purchase price was a lot less, because that would reduce the amount of money the city had to borrow, which would enable the city to reduce the rents, which are what the city is banking on to pay the mortgate payments and maintenance and repairs on woodframe housing, which has a lot of plywood in it, which termites love and Key West has a huge termite problem, and, according to local architect Michael Miller, who lives ina Peary Court unit, the units have mold amdjave not been well-maintained by the developer. A Key West Historical Architectural Review Board commissioner, as HARC’s Chairman, Michael Miller presided over several defeats of the Peary Court developers’ various plans to raze the existing housing and build upscale housing in what essentially would be a gated community, which Key West came to loathe after Pritam Singh, represented by Jim Hendrick, built Truman Annex on land Singh purchased from the Navy after the city had declined a chance to buy that land from the Navy. Hendrick and his wife Donna Bosold represented the Peary Court developers before HARC and the Key West Planning Board. They still represent the Peary Court developers on the 48 units, and I bet, behind the scenens, on the entire transacton. I repeat what I stated at the previous City Commission meeting: any time the city does business with someone Jim Hendrick represents, the city gets fleeced.
Jimmy Weekley
City Commissioner Jimmy Weekley, who first approached the property’s owners to see if they would consider selling to the city, calls the purchase an opportunity to preserve workforce housing in Key West.
“We own the property once we purchase it,” Weekley has said. “We can control the rents that are there.”
If the referendum passes, the rents will stay the same, because the rents will pay the mortgage debt and cover maintenance and repairs. Or, the rents will rise as maintenance and repair expenses rise. If the purchase price were lower, Jimmy, the mortgage payments would be lower, and your idea for the city to buy Peary Court would be moving toward affordable rental housing, which is a term people understand a lot better than “workforce housing”, which is a political shell game, as you well know. Unfortunatley, Jimmy, as I got you to prove out of your own mouth at the previous city commisison meeting, the purchase price of $55,000,000 was not negotiated by you and the city manager and the city attorney. That number just seems to have appeared out of thin air, after you first met with the developer and the Citizen reported what you had tentatively gotten the developer to agree to do. I asked you at the city commission meeting, at what higher price had the developer started?, and you were unable to tell me at what higher price. Not even yet, after reporting on this subject several times since that city commission meeting, has the Citizen reported what I dragged out of you at that city commission meeting. Don’t you think it’s shameful that the Citizen doesn’t want the voters to know the $55,000,000 price was not negotiated?
Only Commissioner Margaret Romero voted against the Peary Court referendum in the first vote taken Nov. 17, questioning why city staff has already been meeting with developers without prior approval from the commission or voters.
Romero said her reason for voting no was she had not received city staff’s back up in time before the city commission meeting, to analyse it and make an intelligent decision. She had earlier made a motion for the item to be postponed, to give her, the mayor and other city commissioners time to study the back up, and there was no second of her motion.
Peary Court, built in the late 1990s as military family housing, is a collection of two-bedroom townhomes in Old Town on 24 acres. After ordering two appraisals, city staff found the value for the complex pegged at about $55 million: $350,319 per unit or $275 per square foot.
That’s not a bad price for the units, in Key West. But is the city supposed to buy and save privately-owned housing for middle class and upper middle class singles and twp or three incomes families? When will another developer want the city to take a lemon off his hands, for “workforce housing”? Is not the city’s problem that poor people cannot afford where they even now live? Was that not City Planner Don Craig’s point, when he told the City Commission before he moved to Colorado about, what, a year ago?, that the city was short 6,000 affordable housing units? Craig was not talking about architects, and school teachers, and firemen and policemen, and veterinarians. He was talking about people who were, and still are, unable to afford their present housing in Key West. People such as, hmm, all of the store employees in City Commissioner Jimmy Weekley’s family business, Faustos Food Palace; all city sanitation and street workers, all city meter readers, all yard workers, all deck hands, all maids, all hotel housekeepers, all dishwashers - the city’s INFRASTRUCTURE workers, without whom Key West would come to a screeching halt and be uninhabitable. Yes? No?
Over the years, three units at Peary Court burned, which would leave the city with the option to build them back, making it an even 160 apartments, which rent for about $2,400 a month. All but eight units measure 1,285 square feet and the rest are at least 1,000 square feet.
What would it cost the city to rebuild those 3 units at today’s prices. Where is any mention of those 3 units in the referendum summary, or in its back up? Where would the money come from to build those 3 units? There was no mention of those 3 units at the previous city commission meeting.
White Street Partners bought the property in 2013 for $35 million, planning to demolish everything to make way for luxury single-family homes. But failing to win over the Historic Architectural Review Commission despite several attempts, the developers gave up and decided to become landlords.
By being defeated. The developers were left with no other outcome, unless it was to put the units on the market under very long term leases, or by selling the units but not the underlying land, with the developers retaining ownership of the underlying land. To sell the land, I believe the developers would have to turn Peary Court into a platted subdivision, so each lot could be sold off? Which would require going back through HARC and the Planning Board, and then the City Commission? Which did not work out so swell for the developers several times already. Because HARC and the Planning Board insisted Southard Street would run straight through Peary Court into Palm Avenue, which was hemlock to the developers’ dream of an upscale essentially gated community. Under any of the current potential scenarios, Southard Street will end at Peary Court, like it does now, and Peary Court will remain essentially a gated community.
The developers, however, still plan to add 48 units of affordable housing to the property and would keep those if the city’s purchase plan goes through.
The developers, whoever they are - city staff and Jimmy Weekley said at the previous city commission that they have no clue who the Peary Court owners are, or they don’t want to say who they are. The developers’ profit is whatever they make on the 48 new units, plus $20,000,000 they will make if the city buys the remaining part of Peary Court for $55,000,000. INSTEAD, the city could put its new homeless shelter on the soon to be vacated city bus terminal property across Palm Avenue from the upper end of Peary Court, and drive the market value of Peary Court down a bit, then negotiate to buy Peary Court at a lower price, requiring a smaller mortgage, resulting in lower rents. Or. the city could let present middle class Peary Court residents fend for themselves on the open market. The city COULD divert the $55,000,000 for Peary Court, and the $58,000,000 the city is proposed to spend putting in a city park on Truman Waterfront, which will not produce much, if any, revenue to recoup the cost of the park or its ongoing maintenance, $113,000,000, to building affordable rental housing managed by the Housing Authority, for the people who keep the city running, and without whom the city would be uninhabitable. Build that affordable rental housing on Truman Waterfront, on the city’s fallow land in front of the post Steam Plant Condominiums on Trumbo Road, on the city’s Sigsbee property, on the city’s Poinciana property, on the city’s Stock Island land where the Easter Seals building and the Mosquito Control branch operation now are. All brand new extral housing units, which would provide competition to landlords and, hopefully, bring down rents all over Key West. I’ll name a few more types of INFRASTRUCTURE workers who need such housing: city police officers, city fire and rescue line workers, city docks workers, retail outlet employees, grocery store employees, drug store employees, restaurant employees. My apologies for leaving out other INFRASTRUCTURE worker groups, which do not right now come into my thoughts.
gfilosa@keysnews.com
One last thing today about Peary Court. Jimmy Weekley and others on the City Commission and private citizens spoke during the previous commission meeting of the argument that once was made against the city buying what now is known as Key West Bight, it was too expensive, but the city bought it and look how great that turned out for the city. Well, those Key West Bight praisers did not say how many affordable housing units, trailers, low-rent apartments and liveaboard boaters were eliminated by that purchase. They did not describe the war Arnaud and Naja Girard told me they endured, which, as I recollect them saying, got Arnaud jailed 3, or was it 4?, times by city police on trumped up charges, after Arnaud and Naja had filed an administrative law court action challenging the city’s development permit, alleging state law requirements were not being met, which led to a settlement, under which: (1) the city had to keep and maintain a dingy dock, so people living on boats moored off Key West could make it to land, and so people living in Key West, who had boats they used for pleasure moored off of Key West, could get to their boats; and (2) the dockmasters had to start keeping a sign up list, which had not existed before, for people wanting to get in line to rent boat slips in Key West Bight. Before, the dockmasters played favorites and games to keep liveaboard residents moored off shore from getting in line to get boat slips to rent. Arnaud and Naja now publish every Friday online Key West the Newspaper (thebluepaper.com), which the city officials and KWPD and local developers and various county and state quasi-government and government authorities have come to love to hate.
While I’m on this tear, please tell me, Jimmy Weekly, and Mayor Cates and the other city commissioners who are not newly elected, and the new city commissioners, where was your zeal to save “workforce housing” before, and after, a developer bought the Simonton Court trailer court, which the city gave permission to evict all of those workers and their families and raze that trailer court and put in upscale living units?
The city buying Peary Court to preserve “workforce housing” just doesn’t pass my smell test. And when something doesn’t pass my smell test, that means it’s rigged.
looking up toward Alabama, I wrote in the recent snapshots from the Golden Flake, Joann Bashinsky, Sloan Young Bashinsky, Jr. saga post at goodmorningkeywest.com?
Golden Flake logo and mascot
“(I)n the early 1990s, Golden Flake [my father’s company] was having a rough time financially, and my father announced there could be no raises or bonuses that year, but if things improved, there would be raises. Employees were asked to work harder and more efficiently. They did that, and by the end of the year the company had a cash surplus. Instead of giving his employees bonuses for their sacrifices and hard work that year, my father declared the special dividend, 52 percent of which he received, because he controlled 52 percent of the company common stock through a trust.”
There was a great unhappiness in the company’s line employees when the special dividend was declared, instead of the surplus revenues being paid to the hardworking, loyal employees. Yesterday, it occurred to me that it was my father’s wife, my stepmother, a nearer to God than just about everyone else reborn Christian, who was behind the special dividend being declared, 52 percent of which my father received because he controlled, through a trust 52 percent of the company’s common stock.
That my stepmother was behind that dawned on me during a later Facebook chat with an retired Golden Flake management employee, who had retired from the company while my father was still alive, so he was not there when not long ago, instigated by my stepmother, instead of using money the company needed to spend on new over the road tractor trailers, to replace the old rolling stock which is wearing out and breaking down a lot, to insure the company can continue to get its products to his customers, “management” increased the dividend, 52 percent of which increase went to my stepmother, who had assumed control of the trust after my father passed over in August 2005.
The retired Golden Flake employee said he preferred that I not publish his and my Facebook chat, and I told him okay, but a nap dream yesterday had me telling my father, standing in the “executive” bathroom off the little hallway between his office and the Vice-President’s office at Golden Flake, that his super religious wife needed to GO! Then I said, “I love you, Daddy”, and he seemed not to be able to take all of that in. I called him Daddy when I was a boy, so the dream was about bloodlines, and it left me impressed the angels wanted me to publish my side of the Facebook chat with the retired Golden Flake employee, because it contains views and events I seriously doubt ever crossed the threshold at Golden Flake.
Sloan Bashinsky wrote.
As Y and I were winding down our conversation the other night, she was really not happy about how it is going at GF, I told her to call X, who always has plenty of laments about GF when we chat, and tell him that they both need to call you out west and tell him you two and your better halfs are moving out there to his village to live and leave all the GF stuff behind in Birmingham. Of course, you really can’t forget memories, the good ones and the not so fun ones, but I sorta did meant it, too. Thanks, hope life great for you out there in gila monster land.
Sloan Bashinsky wrote:
I don’t imagine making Wayne Pate president of the company proved helpful. Something very important died at Golden Flake when my father declared that special dividend, 52 percent went to him, instead of using the surplus for line employee bonuses or raises. Management never did seem to get it, without the line employees, there was no Golden Flake; I kept telling them that, in different ways, when I was there. They expected employees to die for Golden Flake, put it ahead of everything, but it did not work both ways.
Sloan Bashinsky wrote:
The special dividend, was a mortal wound to the company’s soul; making Pate president drove a stake into the company’s heart. But it was set up by management thinking it was more important than the line employees, that dividends to non-employees was more important than line employees pay checks. And, Frito-Lay bought shelf space left and right, paying outrageous sums, which Golden Flake could not match. In late 2005, I met a man in KW who had, he said, a patentable idea for a packaged meat product, a mix of beef and pork, which would be run through a cooker like a corn chip cooker and fried in the shape of a potato chip, then packaged and sold in the familiar ways. He asked me to introduce him to Golden Flake’s management. My father came to me in a dream all excited about it. I called Mark McCutcheon [Golden Flake’s CEO], he said to have the fellow call him. They then talked. Mark referred the fellow to some outfit in West Virginia, as I recall. Hell, that product could have turned GF around, if it had a patent on it. GF could have licensed the patent to Frito-Lay, for example. GF could have taken off like a rocket with a meat potato chip product, plain, BBQ, hot sauce, garlic, etc. That was my father’s attempt, from the beyond, to rejuvenate Golden Flake. I knew that then, as surely as I know I’m writing about it to you right now. It takes vision, it takes creativity, it takes seeing the Spirit at work, to see just how important that was for GF back then. Now look at the company. Headed toward the cemetery. Being a Christian, which is a very big deal with Joann Bashinsky, does not make you open to input and nudges from the Spirit. Ditto Wayne Pate. I dunno, maybe being a Christian crimps ability to receive from the Spirit, because Christians are saved, they don’t need, or think they don’t need, to receive from the Spirit? Not picking just on Christians. I could pick on the other religions, if they were applicable to GF.
So, while I’m on a roll, someone asked me a question about my earlier comment in this Facebook thread launched by someone else the other day:
Middle East Forum
Raymond Ibrahim: Christians fleeing Muslim persecution still face it after arriving in the West
Last today, comic relief furnished by my lady MissKari in the county jail.
When I visited with her this morning, I said I think it will be great for America to have Donald Trump as its president and Sarah Palin as its vice-president. Kari said she agreed, she likes Trump because he tells it like he sees it and America needs a business man to get it finances straightened out, and once she read a book about Palin and really liked it. I said, hmmm, I want them in the White House because I figure they will take America to hell soonest, and then maybe things will have a chance to start getting better in America, but then, maybe not.
sloanbashinsky@outlook.com
Kari Dangler pencil and notebook paper jail art
