Letters to the editor

+ The future of Longboat Key depends on the Key Club
Dear Editor:
I lived on Longboat Key for many years before moving to Plymouth Harbor in 2001. Recently, I went to Avenue of the Flowers for the first time in quite a few years. I was shocked by all the closed stores. It used to be the greatest shopping area.

As a former member of the Longboat Key Club, I really don’t care one way or another about its new plans. But for Longboat Key’s sake, I do. Longboat Key will go down the tube quickly if the club doesn’t go through with its plans. With the Holiday Inn closing, the Colony’s problems and the recession, the future of a healthy Longboat Key depends upon the expansion of the Longboat Key Club.
Betty Monroe
Sarasota

+ Reject the Longboat Key Club’s proposed plan
Editor’s note: This letter was sent to Mayor Lee Rothenberg and The Longboat Observer.
Dear Mayor Rothenberg: 
We are appalled and dismayed at the vastness of the Longboat Key Club and Resort’s proposed expansion plan. We bought a condo in the Sanctuary complex in 1990, moved to Regent Place a few years ago and started vacationing on the island in the late ’70s and ’80s. We were then — and still are — impressed with the strict zoning that has kept this island a special, aesthetically wonderful place and are in admiration of those town commissioners who have adhered to the best interests of the residents of this Key throughout the past decades.

To allow the Loeb expansion proposal would be to destroy the beauty and tranquility of this Key forever. We’ve been members of the Longboat Key Club since 1990 and have relied on and enjoyed the Islandside recreational activities since then; in fact, we bought behind the Islandside gates precisely because of those facilities and the quiet afforded by this stretch of land.

All that would be ruined by approving the current proposal. The proffered hotel and convention center alone are not in keeping with the character of the Key, and the traffic and environmental impact of the plan is enormous.

We do hope that you and the other town commissioners will reject the proposal or, at the least, demand significant reductions in the density and scope of the plan so as to conform to the goal of keeping our Key a lovely oasis in the midst of the kind of crass commercialism to which other areas in Florida have succumbed.
Geri and Ron Yonover
Longboat Key

+ Kudos for your editorial titled, ‘The Road to Prosperity’
Dear Editor:
Your editorial, “The Road to Prosperity,” was truly superb. The answer is simple: Let individual freedom reign and the world would be a better place for all.
Milan V. Adrian
Longboat Key