Stop the annexation of Wisteria Island

I arrived in Key West in 1989 from Washington, D.C. I've lived in the same location and worked at the same places, mainly theaters, all the intervening years. ... I've never regretted coming here and staying.

Of course it's expensive, ... but the payback — walking out the door every morning, even the stormy ones, into one of the most beautiful places on the planet — has been worth every cent. To fly into our airport and smell the tropics as you trudge to the Casablanca terminal has made me know that as long as I live here, I'll be glad to come home.

I've always known that development is, unfortunately, inevitable. But I've also always believed that the more you can slow it down, the better a place Key West is to live. This has always been a hard-working population with a healthy sprinkling of artists and writers and performers and people who led full, successful lives somewhere else. ...

Starting about the year 2000, a huge onslaught of building began — some of it involving tearing up trailer parks and whole neighborhoods where people who worked hard and raised families and made up the fabric of Key West lived. Most were replaced by "market-rate housing," which almost no one in Key West can afford. Most of this development seems to be aimed at nice folks who don't know anything about Key West and want grand houses where they can go inside for the cold months and then leave for the rest of the year. ...

Now comes Wisteria Island (aka Christmas Tree Island) deserted, peaceful, just waiting for a 160-mansion gated community to be smashed down upon it. And what do the people of Key West get? The cost of protecting and policing it, particularly in the months the houses will be vacant and subject to break-ins and fires, dubious promises that the developers will provide all the water and electricity and garbage removal; and some undetermined tax revenues. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the tax revenues will not begin to cover the costs that will be borne not by the city but by the citizens of Key West.

When is the City Commission going to learn that making money for some people is not the serious job of the commission? The serious job is to keep this the most pleasant, well run, cleanest, user-friendly town for the people who work hard and volunteer in droves for every good cause, charity, artistic endeavor and needy individual.

When is the City Commission going to give us a break? When are we going to be relieved from the steady encroachment of suburbia? Key West isn't a suburb. It's an international symbol for beauty and literary history and romance. By the time it's a winter colony for the rich, all that will be gone. And so will most of us.

The City Commission is due to vote on annexation on July 17. Please be there.

Robin Deck, Key West