OUR VIEW: North Trail hypocrisy

The politicians on the Sarasota City Commission talk a good talk about redeveloping North Trail. It was all the talk during the campaign. A top priority, we were told. Got to get the North Trail back to life.

But when it comes to walking the walk, well, they just walk away.

The latest example of a City Commission maintaining its gold standard of anti-business reputations is the request by developers of a Whitaker Bayou project to add some wet slips to their project to make it more viable and better able to attract a strong hotel brand.

A development group led by Kim Githler asked the city to allow it to create 16 wet slips as an accessory use to a hotel on the property. The slips would be next to the existing yacht club on the south side of the bayou. The idea is to expand the possibilities for the hotel so that boaters could arrive, park their boats in one of the slips and stay at the hotel.

Further, as the developers’ land planner, Joel Freedman, said, the boat slips would help the developers attract a higher quality hotel. It is the final piece that developers hope will make the project viable in this still difficult economy. The City Commission already approved the hotel, the yacht club and a fuel station at the yacht club.

“It’s time to move forward and complete this project,” Commissioner Suzanne Atwell said. “I don’t think we need any more barriers to creating momentum on the North Trail.”

We couldn’t agree more. During the campaign, candidates were all saying the same thing.

Yet despite the expert testimony presented by a fishing captain, engineers and the city’s staff; despite meeting the necessary legal criteria for the conditional use permit; despite the fact the developers own the submerged land under the bayou and pay taxes on it; despite the obvious trigger this project could be for North Trail, which is beset by old, run-down buildings and hookers; despite the avowed desired to stimulate growth on North Trail, every other commissioner said no.

Commissioner Terry Turner, a former economist and one who is supposedly wanting to create jobs, simply said he thought the boat slips were an “intense invasion” into a residential neighborhood. But the south side of the bayou where the project would go is not residential. It has a four-story LaQuinta Inn and Suites adjacent to the proposed hotel and yacht club next to the boat slips.

Vice Mayor Fredd Atkins, who has often come out of left field in his too-long tenure, stayed true to form, saying he is not prepared to support “another speculative venture.”

Huh? All new developments are speculative to some degree for the developer. But the city has no skin in this, it would not have been supporting speculation, it would have been granting a conditional use — the slips could only be built if the hotel was built. Not speculative at all and no risk to the city either way.
Mayor Kelly Kirschner has shown a remarkable capacity to be anti-development during his recession-long term and so voted no.

Commissioner Dick Clapp — who lives in the Indian Beach/Sapphire Shores neighborhood north of the bayou — raised the most objections, and maybe the most specious ones. Clapp honed in on a rule that says that boat slips and docks cannot intrude into the 50% center of a waterway. Although staff signed off on the measurements and math saying the slips were not violating that, Clapp used his keen eye to look at the map and say it looked like it was. Developers on the spot kicked off one slip and scaled back the size of several others in an attempt at appeasement. They were as successful as Neville Chamberlain.

Oh, and Clapp was concerned that while boaters could not refuel at the yacht club if they are not members, that a boater staying at the hotel could take a gas can, put gas in it, walk to his boat and put it in. “Sounds like a marina to me,” he said.

Did we mention specious?

This is a City Commission with a well-burnished reputation for being anti-business and anti-growth and by extension, anti-jobs. It was on full display last week and North Trail paid the price.

But here’s the good news. Three of the four no votes will be off the commission May 13. Sarasota voters had the good sense to send some new faces with perspectives that will actually help the entire city, and not keep Balkanizing it into neighborhood fiefdoms.

Sarasota will continue to shrink and become less prosperous if the thinking on the commission does not change. We hope it is about to do so with three new members.