Letters to the Editor

+ The Longboat Key Club’s taxes should be re-assessed
Dear Editor:

Now that our town administration has demonstrated its welcome to the expansion plans for the Longboat Key Club and Resort, and with the signing of the Ordinance 2009-25, created a valuable piece of property for the developer, it is appropriate that the Sarasota County Property Appraiser take a new look at the club’s valuation and tax assessment.

What’s new:
• A site for a five-star luxury hotel with 196 units and easy access off of our island in the event of a hurricane.
• Sites for 155 units of luxury apartments (including 76 on top of the hotel).
• A site for a wellness center
• A site for a meeting center.
• A site for a new and expanded clubhouse.
• A new and improved golf course.

All of the above are within a piece of land previously used as a golf course with some tennis courts and currently assessed at a measly $8,587,900.

Once new tax assessments are speedily online and starting to generate income for our beloved town, we will all be able to appreciate properly the value of this approval of the package. And, perhaps it will help to offset the diminution in value of the existing housing in Islandside.

The new total value of the total site should be easy to obtain, just track the correspondence between the Loeb organization and its investors. Its new contribution to our taxbase will allow all of us to share in this great bonanza that has been wrought upon our island.

And as our town commissioners juggle current millage rates, it would do well to look at the added benefit that would accrue to us if we readjusted the valuation now attached to the Key Club and Resort’s holdings in Harbourside.

After all, the 800 additional units that could now be constructed there would materially appreciate its value. Maybe that is the next thing our forward thinking Town Commission can accelerate.

Happy days are really here again.

Bradford Saivetz
Longboat Key resident and member of the Planning and Zoning Board

+ New signs not necessarily good signs for Longboat
Dear Editor:

As I drove onto Longboat Key the other day I couldn’t help but notice the new entrance signs and the workers ministering to the new vegetation planted at the entrances and on the sides of the road. Because we, the taxpayers of Longboat Key, will be responsible for this ongoing maintenance and, I might add, repairs if some unlucky soul were to drive through the new signs or planting, the question is why was this done? 

Were the old signs that bad looking or damaged that they needed replacement? The new plantings along the roadway only diminish visibility at intersections and some of them will inevitably not survive. In this time of reduced revenue for the town one has to ask, “What were they thinking?” 

One recent positive note on the budget: Because the Town Commission has taken over the duties of the Planning and Zoning staff, we should be seeing some reductions in payroll in Planning and Zoning in the near future. 

Thomas Jendrysik
Longboat Key

Editor’s note: The plantings and signs are part of a $500,000 beautification grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.