The morning KCB City Commission was a hot one.

The commission voted to sign a contract with Monroe County for the next 3 years instead of signing a 5 year contract to continue services with Marathon Fire/EMS. The cost will be more, but three of our commissioners, DeNeale, Schmidt, Vorick, think we will get better service. The Mayor, and Geraldine Zahn wanted to continue with Marathon. There were some very hard feelings after the Marathon City Manager wrote a letter a few months ago asking for about $ 600,000 extra from the last contract because according to him we hadn't paid our fair share. Mayor Ginger Sneed from Marathon was at the meeting to try to convince them to go with Marathon, but it was to no avail. Marathon stands to lose $525, 000 a year from this decision. Emotions ran high, and it was well attended. Many from Key Colony feel that it is time for us to organize our own fire department, but this will take time. The plan is that two firefighter/EMS personel from the county would be placed on the island (at this point there is no place to house them) or on Crawl Key, about 2 miles away. Should be interesting to see what comes out of this for our island, and how the rest of Marathon will feel when they no longer have KCB helping to pay for their big new fire station. By the way, this photo, not taken by me, was at the fire at Rocket Man's house in Marathon 2 years ago. According to Mary Schmidt, last year there were 50 calls to KCB, 10 of them were false alarms, no fires, one cat in a tree, and the rest EMS calls. Last year there were 1600 calls to Marathon. She says Marathon pays $160. per household for fire protection and in KCB we pay $325.