"Right you are if you think you are", a play by the absurdest genre playwright Pirandello. I think Longboat Key politics have become a community theatre of the absurd.
Community center - the $10 million speculative adventure being proposed by Mayor Brown is encountering a fair amount of community opposition, despite claims by the mayor that "the community is behind" his project. Several taxpayers have pointed out that in these difficult economic times, the town needs to be fiscally responsible. The commission should propose a public fundraising option to build a communty center rather than proceed with using taxpayer funds.
There is no defensible reason not to follow the successful private fundraising efforts used to create the Anna Maria Island community center and Christ Church here on Longboat Key. We are in more difficult economic times than we were when the proposal to build a community center was rejected by a referendum several years ago. The community may once again reject the efforts of our activist mayor and his efforts to spend much needed public funds on this multi-million dollar project. We need to pay down debt, not create more public debt. I wonder what Mayor Brown thinks has changed?
Commercial real estate - the current activist commission is strongly advocating that the town radically change our building codes and Comprehensive Plan, to the extent that the commercially zoned land at the north and south ends of the island will become too juicy to be ignored by developers. We are making it easy for developers to build whatever they please, regardless of the ambience or desires of the resident taxpayers. The commission is planning to give developers public streets, too, as we did at the Conrad Beach development, a project that is still unfinished after more than a decade.
What is being ignored by the commission is all the taxpayers who live at the north and south ends. Does the commission actually believe that legislating a seven story condo-tel at Whitney Plaza will do anything but adversely affect the north end ambiance? Based on what empirical evidence? Have they asked the local residents what they want, instead of assuming what some developer would want? Hand picking a group of like-minded business people and residents to carry out some sort of phony study does not constitute anything but a violation of the public trust. The commission should be ashamed of itself.
It may be time to consider reigning in the practice of the commission of using appointed, unofficial, committees to formulate, and supposedly validate, radical departures form existing town policies. Essentially this is stealth government and should be unacceptable in any community.
Granted the residents of Longboat Key have exactly the government they were too uninvolved to elect. An appointed government has no incentive to be responsive to the people. In our particular case, Longboat voters and residents are so uninvolved in their own local destinies, that the current people in power are relatively sure that their regime will last for decades of appointment after appointment to the town commission and planning board. I believe that most residents have abandoned any interest in local politics. Perhaps what is happening is a natural process that occurs when the residents reach a certain age demographic and are only seasonal residents.
Increasingly, spending $18,000 on a local election, with the major newspaper, the real estate community, the Chamber of Commerce, PIC and the garden club behind the incumbent pro-business candidate, each for their own political ends, is a waste of taxpayer money. The development and business interests now own Longboat Key. The voters of the island appear not to care anymore and have abdicated their rightful role as an electorate. Instead, a few powerful special interest groups effectively control who gets to be on the commission and the planning and zoning board. They even decide who is today's town manager.
Most residents don't know what is really going on in town government. And many residents who vote get their information from a pro-business newspaper and PIC, a sham community organization. Uninterested ignorance prevails, while taxpayers passively accept a stalled real estate market, crippled by the uncertainty of the future of commercial tourism on the island. No one wants to invest in property that may be rendered worthless in a few years as a result of actions being undertaken by the current, predominantly appointed, activist town government.
I am sympathetic with the plight of our new town manager, who daily must live or die by a political sword in the hands of self-anointed, appointed, professed pro-development activists, who control both the town commission and the planning and zoning board. These appointees can have the town manager's head on any given day, as they have recently demonstrated, appointing 4 town managers in a month's time. A town manager can only be effective when allowed to function as a sort of technocrat. As far as I can see we no longer have a stable powerful town manager. That position has been superseded by a self-appointed, political, fairly radical clique within our community.
Ask yourself if your life and financial situation on Longboat Key is better or worse than when the current pro-business commission came into power 2 years ago.
