Fool Me Once

 

Today a 3-judge appeals tribunal handed the Longboat Key commission a stunning defeat. The town lawyer's land use litigation losing streak remains intact. The town might finally look elsewhere for legal advice. The primary duty of a municipal attorney is to keep that municipality out of expensive court proceedings; especially if the municipality will lose. 

 

The latest appeals court loss may expose the town to law suits and costly litigation from property owners who have been denied unfettered access to the real estate markets due the the town's ill-advised legal gambits against its own residents.

 

Judge Roberts, and now the Florida appeals court, have ruled that the LBK commissioners broke the law when they zealously advanced the interests of the Key Club. Bob White and the members of IPOC are to be congratulated for their unflinching conviction that the town commission had violated the property owner's legal rights.

 

Those on the commission and the town's previous planning director, who opposed the Key Club expansion as being inappropriate and needlessly dense, have been vindicated. It has been stated before, I was always in favor of improvements at the Key Club, but not at the expense of surrounding property owners.

 

While on the commission, I requested that the commissioners retain an outside, disinterested land use attorney to advise the commission concerning the Key Club proposal. I had lost faith in the two lawyers retained by the town. At that time I expressed my doubts that the town was on firm legal footing if they approved the KC expansion. Unfortunately, there was no support for this proposal, most especially from the town lawyer. If the commission had insisted that the Key Club proposal be adjusted to the point where the surrounding community was comfortable, the Key Club expansion would already be in its 3rd year and close to being completed. Instead we have had a paralysed real estate market on the south end. Who in their right mind would not be cautious about investing while there was a lawsuit pending on the property.

 

Unfortunately for our residents, this commission will try to get around this resounding slam by the Florida courts by shamelessly gutting our comprehensive plan and those building codes specifically needing change to specifically address the Key Club expansion. If the commissioners once again look to the town lawyer's advice, they should also look at his win/loss record in land use litigation he has managed on behalf of our community.

 

If the new Key Club owners really want to add value for themselves and for our community, they should work with the affected property owners and the commission to create a win-win design that is more appropriate for Longboat Key, keeps the process out of the courts, and hastens the completion of the entire process.

 

The town could now retain an expert land use attorney to advise the town how to avoid another court defeat that could be even more destructive to our property owners than the most recent rout. There is that old saying - Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.

 

This commission, and sadly Longboat Key, will now be immortalized in the law journals and legal precedents citations as a Goat Rodeo. We can do better than that. We need some changes and we need them before more damage is done.

The Power Of Community In Marketing

Previously I have written several articles encouraging the town government to refocus its efforts away from commercial tourism development and towards improved and increased marketing of what is obviously an already popular exclusive seasonal community. For certain politicians to suggest that we are not like The Hamptons, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod is both unproductive and denying the obvious.

Longboat Key has become, over three decades, a winter playground for the well-to-do from many countries. One has only to observe the current mega-home building trend on the island to realize the momentum towards affluency is slowly gobbling up more and more prime properties. To me this is a good thing. One thing is for sure, homeowners on Longboat Key did not come here on a tourist bus.

The same politicians who preach commercial tourism, as the salvation for aging properties on our island, fail to look at the average age of structures in all the other exclusive communities I referenced earlier in the article.

There are two ways we can grow. One is tasteful the other is not.







Panama City Beach tourist hotel

tourist hotel on Martha's Vineyard

Which would you prefer for our community?

Which one will attract desirable visitors?

We recently were visited by an Indian couple from Ft. Lauderdale. The husband is a Motorola executive. We had them stay in one of the "Old Florida" motels on the north end. We kayaked around Sister's Keys and along the northern gulf-side beach. We dined in local restaurants and we went to our beautiful beaches. We partied with local friends and neighbors. They loved Longboat Key. They are exactly the sort of forty-year-old couple we want to attract to our community.

Our friends from Ft. Lauderdale saw Longboat Key differently than someone who stays at the Key Club. Our friends experienced a warm, friendly, inviting Longboat Key. Longboat Key does not have a social/cultural center where visitors can meet and mingle with residents. For the most part Longboat Key is made up of self-contained and gated condominiums. Additionally the town never opened our twelve miles of breathtaking beaches to it's own residents, much less any perspective home buyers. The Key Club doesn't have any beachfront and relies on the private owners of the Inn to offer any sort of beach experience to newcomers to our island community.

Being a beach community that offers little to no access to the beach is perhaps the greatest obstacle to attracting people to our island. The town commission needs to find a way of offering visitors a greater beach experience. When I was on the commission I spoke to numerous visitors about their experience on our island. A prevalent comment was that Longboat Key appeared to be unfriendly with its gates and lack of a city center. Visitors wanted greater access to what the community has to offer. Our friends from Ft. Lauderdale saw a far different and more inviting community than the average visitor. We may want to look at how we can improve our image.

Presently the town commission is spending most if its time eliminating land use protections while doing absolutely nothing to encourage tasteful development. One wonders if they have any foresight whatsoever. Of the two tourist facilities pictured above, which do you believe is the most attractive to a profit-driven developer? Which would be more desirable for our community? Which one would you stay in?

Meanwhile our beaches are a mess. There does not appear to be any plan in place to protect property from storms. There is little money in the beach fund to repair storm-damaged segments of our coastline. The town manager has informed north-end waterfront property owners that the can "eat cake" as Marie Antoinette said. This is a disheartening message to north end taxpayers after paying taxes for decades into a beach fund that took care of certain properties, while apparently now abandoning other property owners. The town has been caught with its pants down. Did it not occur to the town government that there might be a storm or hurricane over the summer?

There are many things that only the town can do effectively to market our community. Having distressed beaches, threatened waterfront properties, fluctuating land use policies, community strife, the Colony, the stalled Key Club litigation and an appointed town government only harm our image to the outside world of possible future residents.

Longboat Key has spent more money on our beaches over the past three decades than any other part of our infrastructure. Yet our beaches have restricted access both for most residents and visitors. We are a beach community with a virtually unavailable beach.

I have one last plea. Not a very expensive plea. Can't the town do what was done at the new CVS site and hide the ghastly gas station and abandoned Market at the north end? After all we are talking about a few shrubs and trees.



Of Time and Technology

Despite much-hyped fears of low wage workers around the world taking American jobs, the real culprit is increasingly intelligent machinery.

I have been one of the culprits who has been running around for the past 40 years replacing humans with computer-driven machines. I have never met a businessperson who was not willing to trade workers for increased profits in our capitalist society. A futurist named Toffler  projected the advance of technology as being exponential. So far Mr. Toffler has been right-on-the-money. I guess it is good politics to blame "them" for our problems, but the truth of the matter is that it is your friendly businessperson who is at the root of high unemployment. It does not really matter whether the companies "off-shore" jobs or replace workers with intelligent machines. The end result is the same - unemployable workers with only a lifetime of television  to put on their resumes. The average aging American worker is facing competition from increasingly sophisticated intelligent systems at increasingly lower costs. I estimate that the average forty-year-old unemployed American worker needs to acquire the equivalent of a Masters Degree in a high-tech field to become once again employable. Technology will eventually encroach on the careers of even the highly educated. Foxconn, the company that assembles Apple devices, plans to install over 1 million robots in the next 3 years.



Where does all of this end? Have we reached the dawn of some sort of new age, where people no longer need to work? The "industrial revolution" only began in the late 18th century and has been accelerating ever since. You may well have to choose between hiring someone to clean your home or a one-time purchase of a domestic robot. The socio-economic implications of your decision will be amplified around the globe.



I recently had the eye-opening pleasure of spending 3 days with a few of the top theorists at Intel in Portland, Oregon. It seems we are only a few years away from producing computers that are slightly more capable than humans. A few years later the same compute power will be available on your hot new IPad. Your home and office, if you still go to an office, or even have a job, will be inhabited by robots of all sizes and descriptions. You will be amazed by technology as you are already.




I have written about the plight of the modern worker before. I see two paths that lay ahead for humanity. One continues to embrace Capitalism and corporate profits above all other social values. The other path involves re-thinking the role of human beings in a modern global society. Perhaps we have reached a time when human effort is no longer an essential ingredient in survival. If so, then we will need to re-engineer our social mores that require work as a validation of being alive. What will we all do with our lives if we no longer get to work? Will everyone be on "welfare"? Who will repair the robots that repair the robots? Will we as a species be able to fashion a new lifestyle where free time is all the time?


The "lost jobs" are most likely not coming back. These jobs will be replaced with menial tasks, not worth the economic investment to engineer a replacement intelligent system. I suspect unemployment will slowly increase as technology permiates into more and more areas of our everyday world. If I can make millions in a week on KickStarter, why do I need a career that may soon be cannibalized by a robot?


I am one of the "old people". I am a techie so I manage to keep up with technology trends. My grandchildren, who only "text", recently taught me a few bits of texting jargon so I do not appear as a complete dolt when I communicate with them in "their" world. One of the acronyms is "IKR" - I know, right?!!! My grandchildren have an innate sense of their future. It does not include a cubical or a boss or even a bank account.


As a famous person once said, "looking into the future, I think I know if you do not ask me to explain".