Sunday, August 29, 2010

Showers can be fixed without closing KOTS

This is a follow-up on [Key West City] Commissioner [Mark] Rossi's comments at the Aug. 17 City Commission meeting concerning the condition of the showers at the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter (KOTS). Since I was given the responsibility for the location, design, construction and overseeing the management of the facility when I was assistant city manager, I told Commissioner Rossi that I would investigate. It seemed to me as if his comments were directed at the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition (FKOC), which manages the facility. Not so! I found that his comments were a chastisement of city staff for its lack of maintenance for the facility.

For the record, FKOC is only responsible for the operation of the facility. The facility is owned by the city of Key West on land leased from the Monroe County Sheriff's Office. The city is responsible for the maintenance of it.

FKOC personnel perform the daily management, which includes assigning beds, furnishing bedding, towels and soap and monitoring the residences and overseeing jail trustees who immaculately clean the facility and wash the bedding each morning. It's definitely not the Holiday Inn, but it's a clean, safe place to take a shower and sleep for a night.

I found the shower facilities, which are located in a converted [mobile home], to be very clean and functional but in need of repair. It's almost a miracle that a unit containing nine bath facilities, each consisting of a shower, sink and toilet, used by over 100 persons per night, 365 days per year for over seven years, is still operational.

Thanks to the overall management by FKOC and the efforts of the personnel involved, including the jail trustees, homeless users and city maintenance (seems as the budget crunch in the recent years caused it to slip), it is.

The good news is it can be repaired for a reasonable cost without closing the facility.

John Jones

Key West

Professional press is essential to democracy

Our legislative branch of government makes the laws, the executive branch implements them and the judicial branch interprets their meaning and constitutionality. This limited description of our system of checks and balances, however, ignores those most critical to a democracy -- informed citizens.

The three branches are designed to serve the people, but the power of the people to hold their government accountable depends on universal access to accurate and unbiased information. Achieving this goal requires independent investigations of, and professional reporting about, government, politics, business, labor, religions and those who don't want the public to know the truth.

Recently, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the quantity of "news" (as well as sources of information) and accuracy. The more there is, the less truth we seem to know, and agree upon.

Those who created our democracy worried about government tyranny threatening freedom of the press. Today, we should be more concerned about corporate, political and special interest influence eroding professional journalism, editorial independence and the essential function of the press. Democracy, as we've known it, can't long survive without a healthy, independent and meticulously professional fourth estate.

Roger C. Kostmayer

Key West

Palms are 'trunk' line of coconut telegraph

Dan Quayle once said, "We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur." I am not so sure. Island drums are beating in protest over the prospect of losing the coconut palms along North Roosevelt Boulevard. So far no one has mentioned the biggest loss of all -- the coconut telegraph.

Everything useful or interesting that I have found out in Key West has always been via the coconut telegraph (sorry Key West Citizen, too slow). Just ask anyone who has ever been stopped for DUI. The news circles via the telegraph faster than the speed of light. Not even Einstein could explain it.

What will happen to the telegraph without the trees on North Roosevelt? I'll tell you what, we'll be just like everywhere else and have to use the Internet. Those trees form the main "trunk" line of the coconut telegraph, and without them, we all lose the news.

So, if you want to keep up with who did dis and who said dat, you'd better speak up now. We island folk must stick together. So take a cool sip of coconut water and keep spreading the news. Coconut telegraph, she too important to lose.

Michael Larson

Key West