Floridays' conundrum

Welcome to Longboat Key, Messrs. Angus Rogers and James Brearly.

As they quickly have learned, no good idea goes unpunished on Longboat Key. And Mr. Rogers could not have said it any better last week when he commented after a Town Commission meeting:

“The development business for this kind of project is not for the faint of heart.”

You could say that about any development project on Longboat Key.

Rogers and Brearly are the principals of Floridays Development Co., the firm that wants to develop a four-story boutique hotel complex on the 2.6 acres on Gulf of Mexico Drive on the north end of the Key. Everyone on Longboat knows the site all too well: It includes the long-vacant service station and bank building and the wooded lot to the south, at the southeast corner of Gulf of Mexico Drive and Broadway, one of the first sights to greet motorists when they come onto the Key.

Longboaters have dreamed for nearly a decade about those properties being revived or transformed into better use. 

So when Rogers and Brearly began floating the idea of a high-end boutique hotel, flutters of optimism spread over parts of the island.

That’s what they were — flutters — brief, wispy hope. It didn’t take long before the residents of Longbeach Village emerged with their standard response to change. And Rogers and Brearly experienced the full measure of that last week at the Town Commission meeting.

No way, said the Villagers. 

As expected, they opposed the Town Commission even voting to place on the Aug. 30 ballot a town-wide referendum on whether the property’s density and use can be changed from general commercial and office-institutional to hotel use.

Even though that referendum would be just the first of many steps in the process and would no way guarantee that Floridays would be able to develop, Villagers nonetheless were opposed to exercising what is prescribed in the Town Charter. 

Ever since the mid-1980s, if anyone seeks to increase the town’s density, the applicant must obtain voter approval. And that has always been a deterrent to developers and a difficult threshold to overcome. Historically, Longboaters strongly have resisted moves that would increase the number of residents or traffic beyond the zoning that was approved 30 years ago. All of this, of course, contributed to Longboat Key’s reputation at one time of being the most difficult place in the region to do business.

Knowing all that, if Rogers and Brearly are committed to bringing a needed and pleasant change to the north end, they might want to read the back issues of the Longboat Observer when the former owners of the Longboat Key Club and Resort wanted to redevelop their Islandside property. It was a long and costly war — five years and more than $2 million for Loeb Partners.

What a conundrum.

It’s safe to say virtually every Longboater would like to see that strip of property redeveloped into a use that would appropriately enhance the surroundings. But the fact those parcels are zoned for commercial and office use are a curse. 

Everyone knows there is a glut of commercial property on the Key; just look across the street at the Whitney Beach Plaza. It’s not ever likely anyone would attempt to develop or open a retail or office venture there. Which, in turn, sentences those properties to what they are now — sites of deteriorating, dysfunctional buildings.

The parcels need to be rezoned.

Along comes Floridays. But when Longboat Key residents from the Village south to the Manatee County border envision Floridays’ 120-room hotel at Broadway and Gulf of Mexico Drive, the only thing they see is an exacerbated traffic nightmare.

One of our readers, a 40-year resident of the Key, wrote to us: “Every afternoon, after, say, 2 p.m., it becomes a forever endeavor to get off the north end — to doctor’s appointments, shop, dine, for any reason … I can see how the older one becomes, and the more medical issues arise, this drives frustrations and makes one consider relocating off-Key — an awful choice.”

Suffice it to say, the Floridays developers probably can see: Unless the Florida Department of Transportation figures out how to reduce dramatically the traffic backups from Bradenton Beach onto Longboat Key, there is little likelihood of winning the support of voters on their density referendum. We’re just being frank.

At the same time, far be it from us to think we know more than Floridays about the best use for those 2.6 acres. But from what we’ve seen on Longboat Key over the years, we know that most Longboat hotel guests want direct access to the beach. It’s difficult to imagine families with children, or even adults with no children, wanting to pay top-dollar in a boutique hotel and have to traverse across Gulf of Mexico Drive and walk to the public beach access at the end of Broadway.

If Floridays is intent on developing that 2.6 acres, here’s another  idea, compliments of a unnamed, retired CEO who spent his professional career in the hospitality, resort and entertainment industry: See photo.

Far less traffic, far less density and perhaps much more amenable to those feisty Villagers.