Unfinished jewel

Yes, the newly renovated Bayfront Park is looking great.

When you drive past it, the glimpses you see behind the fences give you a sense of something new and fresh, the way a room changes when you put a coat of new paint on the walls or when you discard the old furniture for new furniture in the living room.

When it’s completed, the finished renovation gives you a boost, creates excitement and curiosity. You want to see how it turned out. 

We wish that were 100% the case. There’s still a level of disappointment. Perhaps we know too much of the history of Bayfront Park not to be completely jubilant. 

Go back 20 years. That was a time when there were weekly, organized softball games on the ball diamond during season — when teams of seniors tried to play the way they used to play in earlier times. On a weeknight evening or Saturday mornings, Longboat Key even had enough young boys and girls to field a T-ball team, which practiced at the field. 

Longboat Key’s middle schoolers and freshmen high school students used to gather a couple times a year for mixers and dances at the Bayfront Park Recreation Center. And there were great Halloween parties for the Key’s kids, as well as Easter egg hunts.

The ball field, basketball court, pingpong table and recreation center teemed with kids during Longboat Key’s annual summer camps. Talk to young adults today who lived their youth on Longboat Key, and you’ll find many of them learned their first leadership lessons as camp counselors at Longboat’s summer camps.

Moms will tell you signing up their kids for the limited slots at summer camp were like Black Fridays. If you didn’t sign up on opening sign-up day, your kids would be shut out.

The highlight of summer camp was Super Duper Dirty Day — a child’s delight of squirting and smearing their camp friends with mustard, ketchup, honey, melted chocolate, mud and all kinds of harmless concoctions, and then using Longboat Key Fire Department hoses to wash down.

Headquarters for this summer fun and mayhem was the old recreation center building.

Ah yes, the beloved (and beleaguered) Bayfront Park Recreation Center Building. The workhorse of Bayfront Park.

Of all the amenities at Bayfront Park, that former Far Horizons Resort tennis pro-shop and clubhouse has been the park’s most utilized attraction. And still is.

It all started in 1984, when Dr. Murray “Murf” Klauber, owner of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort and purchaser of the Far Horizons Resort, donated the Far Horizons’ old tennis clubhouse to the not-for-profit Longboat Key Community Center Inc., the group that lobbied for Bayfront Park and gave birth to many of the modern youth activities on the Key.

Not only did that building house the Key’s youth activities, but hundreds (probably thousands) of Longboat residents have spent many joyful hours there for morning exercise classes with former Longboat Observer columnist, Aerobic Grandma Molly Schechter, and former Longboat Key Parks and Recreation Director Sherry Fideler, among other popular instructors.

Those classes are the one activity that actually generate revenue for the town.

During many afternoons, the recreation center was converted into Longboat Key’s card room for its many bridge-playing devotees. And at least one night every February, the recreation center has served as the gathering place for a candidate forum with Longboat’s Town Commission candidates.

Throughout its 33 years at Bayfront Park that old tennis clubhouse has undergone a smattering of renovations — in the past decade, interior and exterior painting; improved handicap ramp; new front stairs; removal of the popcorn ceiling; and replacement of its interior lighting.

Beloved and nostalgic as the recreation center building may be, it’s difficult to reconcile how the town and Sarasota County will have spent $3.5 million and 14 years — 14 years! — to renovate Bayfront Park, and yet, when the renovation is completed, that old tennis clubhouse will still be standing — a relic amid the new.

Why?

As these public projects often do, choices and tradeoffs are connected to money. 

Some Longboat Key residents may recall the renovation of Bayfront Park came about after town commissioners went to the mainland and expressed their disappointment to Sarasota County commissioners that Longboat taxpayers annually send more than $25 million in property taxes to Sarasota County and receive so little in return. 

The County Commission eventually responded, purchasing in 2007 for $7.9 million the 3.88 acres just next to Bayfront Park, what was then known as the Albritton property. Discussions and public meetings followed over how the park should look.

But it wasn’t until 2015 that Longboat Key Town Manager Dave Bullock secured another $2 million from the county for park improvements. The town’s portion would be $1.2 million. 

At one point, when plans showed the cost for improvements to the town would approach $3 million, Bullock, a fiscally conservative manager, balked at the cost. To be sure, he was well aware how Longboaters felt in 2004 when they rejected spending $6.4 million on a proposed community center at the park.

Hindsight, of course, is 20-20. The town should have pressed the county for a commitment of more funding to redevelop or renovate the recreation center into a structure that is less of a makeshift recreation center.

Some might argue the town should have used funds from its Land Acquisition Fund for the recreation center rather than acquire the two parcels next to the Longboat Key Public Tennis Center for a future cultural community center. 

All decisions are tradeoffs.

When the Colony property is redeveloped, and if Ocean Properties Ltd. renovates and expands its islandside facilities, those two projects will replenish the Land Acquisition Fund, whose cash is earmarked for town parks. But who knows how long those two projects will take.

Meantime, before Bullock retires in January, perhaps he and Mayor Terry Gans can go back to Sarasota County and impress upon commissioners Longboat Key is still sending $25 million a year to the county and expects a return on that taxes. 

 When you start a job, finish it.