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For more information on this project, contact Bob Washam, Environmental Health Director, or Wendy Roberts, PACE EH Coordinator at the Martin County Health Department.

MARTIN COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT
August/September, 2005 PACE EH Report

To:              Daniel Parker, MSP, GAL
                    Assistant Division Director, Division of Environmental Health

From:         Wendy Roberts, PACE EH Coordinator

Date:          October 14, 2005

Subject:     August/September PACE EH Update

After being on a summer hiatus, GOMEZ CEHAT was up and running again. We had one meeting for the month of August. We invited Marty Miller, executive director, of Habitat for Humanity to come and speak. Marty gave a brief overview of Habitat for Humanity. “It’s a hand up not a hand out organization.” We had her come because of the issue vacant houses and she told the team that the owner’s of the houses could sell them to Habitat and along with SHIP, the houses could be repaired or rebuild. SHIP (state housing initiative partnership program) can offer more funding thus they have a partnership with Habitat. Eric Brent from SHIP also came our team meeting. He too gave an overview about SHIP. Eric also spoke about the Hurricane Housing Assistance Program which is modeled after SHIP. The major difference is the funding, eight million dollars, thus higher award amounts and it’s a one time deal. Another difference is mobile homes are covered, whereas with SHIP they are not. Mr. Brent said he could come another evening to assist residents with the application process. We will get the information out to the community to ascertain if they want to apply to either program.

For the month of September we had two scheduled meetings. On September 12, we had Michelle Owens and Larry Massing from the Martin County Building department to discuss the process of condemning and demolishing a home. Up until recently they had no program intact. Previously the county has been gun shy from condemning houses because of previous mistakes, it’s a methodical process. They are very active in getting the unsafe structures. The building official has to deem a home as an unsafe structure. Then it’s a matter of due process, the owner of the home, the mortgage holder, title search is done, and everyone has to be duly notified. There is an appeal process which just prolongs the process. There is a huge liability when the county wants to demolish a home. The county can be held liable if the house does not need to demolish and they go ahead and demolish the home. The process takes roughly 120 days from start to finish. They have identified 10 homes in Hobe Sound that are active in the condemnation process. The county will pay for the demolition of a house if they can’t get the owner to cooperate. They prefer the owner to pay because it‘s tax payers money that then covers the cost of the county to demolish a home. All the houses we submitted to the building department are in the demolition process except for one that was turned over to Code Enforcement. Big red signs are posted on the property to notify the public that the home is condemned.

One of the team members had her nephew draw a sign for the community which is quite similar to the Banner Lake Sign. We needed to find out the established date before submitting the design to the Board of County Commissioner’s. One of the team members said he could find out from some of the other people living in the community. He called the following day with a date. I thought it would be better to have an official date so I contacted the Historical Society of Martin County. I received a call two weeks later with a date of July 16, 1815. Don Eusebio M Gomez received a land grant at this time. This will be the date that will go on the sign.

After discussing the one of the top issues, fire hydrants, the census was to continue to keep it as a priority on our action plan.

We had a second meeting scheduled for September 26, with Teresa Lamar-Sarno from Growth Management, as a guest to speak about the CRA in Hobe Sound (Community Redevelopment Association). Unfortunately only two people showed up for the meeting so we decided to cancel the meeting. Teresa said she could attend our second meeting of this month.
 

February, 2005

March, 2005

April, 2005

May, 2005

June/July, 2005