Longboat’s hot topic: A garage

Thank goodness for Longboat Key resident Bob Gault. He is what we all should be: passionately and patriotically engaged in the affairs of his town, state and country. 

Some might say too involved. Judging from the emails he sends our way, Gault seemingly must be monitoring and reading the content of two dozen or more news sources 24-7. But that’s OK. 

If you know Gault, you know the retired CEO of Universal Studios-Orlando and Sea World is a constitutionalist and free-marketeer. And he doesn’t hesitate to let local politicians know how he feels about the issues of the day. Indeed, we would be much better off as a country if more people were watchdogging government as doggedly as Gault.

On most issues, Gault’s political philosophy and ours are in perfect sync. But there is one issue on which we are not: The proposed parking garage for the new St. Regis hotel and resort. 

Gault is adamantly opposed to the garage — as noted in his letter to the editor last week in the Observer. He wrote another letter this week to Longboat Key commissioners, urging them to reject the two-story St. Regis parking garage at the commission’s June 5 meeting. He says it would be “a major deviation” from the vision Longboat Key residents have expressed year after year in citizen surveys to “Keep Longboat Longboat.”

One of the comments Gault has made is he thinks the Marriott Corp., operator of the St. Regis hotel, must be pressuring developer Chuck Whittall and his Unicorp Developments to scrap the original car lift plans in favor of building a garage.

So we went to the source — Whittall himself — and asked if he is acquiescing to Marriott’s demands. Here’s what he told us:

“St. Regis (Marriott) didn’t pressure me into anything. 

“Marriott has been saying it expects this hotel to do significantly better than we anticipated because of the desire of people to travel to Florida now.

“When I was at the (planning and zoning) hearing, a guy gets up and says: ‘Why are you asking for this change. Nothing has changed.’ And I said, ‘Well, no, that’s not accurate.’ I said, ‘The world has changed, because ever since COVID, Florida growth has exploded.’

“People are staying on Longboat Key longer. People are there more permanently than before. 

“We just think this hotel is going to be so successful that we want to make sure we can accommodate everybody. Because I know the locals are going to want to come and have dinner. 

“When I go to the Salty Dog, and I see you’re going to have an hour wait or an hour-and-a-half wait at the Dry Dock, there is a demand for restaurants out there.

“If the hotel is full and our parking lot is full, we will have to turn people away. We just don’t want to have to turn anybody away. And so we want to make sure we have adequate parking.

“It’s going to be hidden by landscaping. It’s going to be part of a five-star hotel.” (Whittall audibly exhales in apparent exasperation.) “People jump off on these tangents for some reason. It’s just crazy.

“(Marriott is) not pressuring me in the least. We’ve just had conversations, and everybody believes the hotel is going to be so successful that we really want to make sure we have enough parking. It’s to accommodate not only our guests, but the locals. 

“Everybody at the hearing was saying, ‘We love the hotel. We’re definitely going to be there.’ If they say they’re going to be there, and I run out of parking spaces, what do you want me to do? I’d have nothing else to do but turn people away.”

To add to Whittall’s comments, Sarasota attorney Brenda Patten, who represents Unicorp, told us: 

“There are many good reasons why the two-story garage (parking on grade-ground level, parking on roof of the first floor and parking on roof of the second floor — no third story) will be a better solution than 62 parking lifts in the podium garage:

“Did you know the total height of the new garage will be only 27 feet, 4 ½ inches high? The allowable height of a single-family residence on LBK is 30 feet! 

“This garage will not be as tall as a typical two-story residence on Longboat Key. The garage will not be visible to residents driving by on GMD because of landscaping, site grade, etc.” 

Patten went on to cite David Green, chair of the Longboat Planning and Zoning Board. Paraphrasing Green’s comments at a recent board meeting, Green said people are seeing the development at the worst possible time. It is just concrete going up with no landscaping. Unless you’re a developer, you cannot envision what it will look like at completion.

For Gault, it’s more than that. He worries about the next developer and the one after that who will cite the St. Regis garage as justification for their free-standing garages. 

We’ve tried to assuage Mr. Gault that the likelihood of large parking garages proliferating on Longboat is almost nil. The only other place where there is enough land for that to occur is at the Resort at Longboat Key Club. In fact, the resort’s previous owners designed a parking garage in their proposed $400 million expansion plans in 2010.

We’re with Unicorp’s Whittall. Relax. The St. Regis is going to be a landmark addition to Longboat Key in a great way. In our humble opinion, that one garage will not destroy or detract from the “Keep Longboat Longboat” vision.