A Closer Look
DON’T MISTAKE
HER KINDNESS
FOR NAIVETE
Teri Johnston may be
one of the best additions to the
Key West City Commission in
a long time. As the District V
representative, she brings to
the Commission a healthy skill
set including the ability and
willingness to listen and compromise.
But she’s no pushover.
She has a history of calling a
spade and spade and working
to affect important change in
any community of which she’s
been a part.
Teri began coming to Key
West in 1998 and became a
full-time resident in 2001 after
an especially nasty winter of
building new homes in Illinois’
30-degrees-below-zero wind
chill.
kwtn-test 
LOOKING BACK: A Review
December 28, 2007 — kwtnOf The Year That Was
THE BIG STORIES, THE NOT-SO-BIG
STORIES AND HOW SOME OF
THEM ARE LINKED
by Dennis Reeves Cooper
Looking back at 2008,
there is not just one Story of the
Year, there are at least two:
• Former City Manager
Julio Avael is finally out of City
government. But he didn’t go
quietly. And he left a legacy of
sleaze that the new City Manager
has not, so far apparently,
been able to figure out how to
clean up.
• But there is some hope.
The Clean Sweep continued in
this year’s City elections.
When we wrote our review
of 2006 last December,
the story of the year was that
City Manager Avael, after 10
years on the job, was finally
on the way out. But the Mayor
and City Commissioners were
doing it in pieces. In April
2006, rather than fire Avael on
the spot, they opted to give
him a one-year “transitional”
contract— supposedly to give
them a whole year to search for
a new City Manager.
Humiliated, Julio began
to tell the media that he had
planned to retire anyway.
Read the rest of this entry »