As another hurricane season descends upon us, the yearly question of evacuation times for the Florida Keys has reared its head again.

Spokesmen from the state Department of Community Affairs Office have let the county know that they are not entirely comfortable with the series of paper shuffles the county has gone through in recent years to decrease evacuation times. Monroe County is under a mandate to be able to evacuate everyone in the county in a 24-hour period so they can be out of the way should a fast-forming major storm target our small island chain.

If the county is unable to evacuate everyone within 24 hours, the state has the option to cut off any more residential building allocations until the infrastructure catches up and the evac time can be reached.

More than a decade ago, the state and county realized they couldn’t meet that goal, so they changed the wording of the evacuation parameters to get under the goal.

As the county continued to grow, and more tourists poured in, the number was again exceeded.

Local emergency management officials instituted a phased evacuation policy that calls for tourists to be sent away early, mobile home park dwellers to be sent away early, and only the full number of permanent residents would count against the calculations.

Under the phased proposals, the county reached an evacuation time of just under 24 hours.

Not content with that, however, officials ran a different model that claimed since the island chain would be snowbird-less during the summer months, only about 75 percent of the units in the Keys would be occupied. They then asserted that no more than 75 percent of the population would actually evacuate in the face of a storm. Using those manufactured numbers, the Governor was told that the Keys could actually evacuate in just over 18 hours.

Evacuation planning for the Keys has always been based on the worst case scenario to protect the lives of the people who live here.

The new numbers the county was throwing out were based on a best case scenario.

The phased evacuation is, realistically, the only method to even approach a safe evacuation time.

Tourists are sent out so they’re gone 36 hours before anticipated landfall. Mobile home park dwellers are sent out so they’re gone in the same time frame, and then permanent residents are sent out in staged phases so they are off the roads at least 12 hours before storm-force winds hit the island chain.

All of this assumes that emergency management officials have at least 72 hours from realization of a potential strike to the strike.

That safety net has been exceeded more than once in the Keys’ history.

We have long been part of the group that says human safety cannot be compromised for development.

Former District Four County Commissioner David Rice perhaps said it best.

It was his contention that the evacuation safety margin for the Keys hadn’t existed since the 1970s, and that shuffling numbers to open up more evacuation time was just a sham. And, he claimed, that changing the numbers was nothing more than a shell game to get the state to give Monroe County more building permits.

The numbers of permits the state will issue are tied to the evacuation clearance time and how far below 24 hours it may be. The further under 24 hours, the more permits can be issued.

The worst case scenario says that a major storm forms close to South Florida and targets both the Keys and Miami-Dade, from whatever direction. Thus, say planners, the traffic in Florida City and nearby areas will directly impact evacuation of the Keys.

They are absolutely right.

We’ve never been enamored of the idea that we will always have ideal conditions under which to evacuate our people. Mother Nature doesn’t play the game that way.

New DCA Secretary Tom Pelham apparently doesn’t feel that human lives are worth more than the wining outcome in a shell game, either.

We applaud that stance, and hope that this latest policy shift will remain in place.