Bird Key Yacht Club forges ahead on rebuild

Sometimes, rejection is the best thing that can happen. 

Just ask the members of the Bird Key Yacht Club.

The club is building a new $20 million clubhouse that will open next year to replace its existing 67-year-old building. One of the major themes of the project is resilience, protecting the waterfront property from worsening hurricanes and flooding while making sure the needs — and wants — of members are met.

This means the new building will be farther back and on higher ground and will be built using materials better suited to withstand major hurricanes that appear to be coming with more frequency.

It’s a big undertaking that would not have been possible if a previous plan to renovate the clubhouse three years earlier had not been voted down by members.

“Fortunately, that failed,” says Dennis DeWitt, a board and project team member at the Bird Key Yacht Club. “It failed by something like six votes — it was very, very close — out of 375 members. So that was pretty amazing.”

The rejection worked in the club’s favor because it allowed for a reevaluation of the project and the decision to rebuild rather than renovate.

DeWitt says the discussion about how to proceed after the failed vote began about two years ago — at a time when Florida’s insurance crisis was worsening and the cost of insuring the property was becoming “prohibitively expensive.”

During that reevaluation process, the members working on the plan also learned about a Federal Emergency Management Agency rule that, DeWitt says, won’t allow you to spend more than half the value of a building if you build or renovate a property below its floodplain.

Which the Bird Key Yacht Club was.

Courtesy image

For example, let’s say the building is assessed at $7 million. A storm hits, caves in the roof and the insurance company issues a check for $6 million.

“We probably couldn’t rebuild the building,” DeWitt says as an explainer. “If they gave us $6 million, we couldn’t spend half of it. It’s a strange situation that we found ourselves in.”

With that scenario in mind and following the hiring of a local architect and meetings with members, the decision was made to rebuild the clubhouse rather than renovate it as originally planned.

And with that decision came resiliency. 

On that front, the yacht club isn’t alone. In Fort Myers Beach, which was hit hard by Hurricane Ian in 2022, Margaritaville Beach Resort built its complex with an eye toward resilient construction and nearby, The Beach Bar, a local institution, is being rebuilt to withstand stronger and more frequent hurricanes. 

Like those projects 100 miles south, the new BKYC clubhouse is being built, as best as possible, to protect the property from future hurricanes and floods.

DeWitt says the club hired Sarasota code consultants, architects, engineers and construction managers who have “extensive” experience with local codes.

Photo by Lori Sax

The work on the project began about a year ago, before Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the area. While the club didn’t suffer any significant damage from the storms, DeWitt says the hurricanes “only confirmed that we were moving in the right direction.”

That direction?

The one-story, 23,000-square-foot building is being constructed using concrete block and steel, with hurricane-rated windows and doors and a standing seam metal roof. It is also being built in a new spot — 15 feet farther inland and about 3 feet higher than the current building.

“It’s as hurricane resistant as anything we could do,” DeWitt says.

The groundbreaking for the construction is expected in May and the work will take up to 18 months. 

DeWitt sees the approach as simply “building to the current code.” Be that as it may, the elements that are going into the new clubhouse will provide much more protection for the property in the event of storms.

That’s especially significant considering the previous clubhouse was built in 1959.

Anyone visiting Fort Myers Beach after Hurricane Ian in 2022 would have seen a pattern amongst the devastation. Properties constructed to new building codes after Hurricane Andrew in the early 1990s fared much better than those built before Andrew.

“Just so you know, when we went to membership with this new concept, we had over 99% positive vote,” DeWitt says. “I mean, that’s unheard of, 99% of the membership said let’s do this and go into debt to do it.

“That vote was after the storms.”