The Last to Know

150 room hotel from Google search

Why were the residents of the village and the north end of Longboat Key the last to know about the "150-room boutique hotel" that Michael Drake revealed is being proposed at the north end of Longboat Key at last week's village association meeting?

Why is a south end resident, Randall Clair, who was voted out of office by the electorate, on Spoll's, commission mandated, Chamber of Commerce sponsored, stealth revitalization committee, telling north end residents what will be done with their property, when the long-standing  president of a north end condominium association was not invited to join the committee or the planning group at the art center last Saturday? For that matter, since I was elected by the people to replace Clair, why wasn't I asked to be on Spoll's secretive group, that meets on town property without advertising, virtually closed to the public, and attended by town staff at taxpayer expense?

What is being allowed to occur at town hall may be in violation of town government rules and may even be in violation of state law. We don't need a new community center if the commission is willing to allow private, business sponsored, groups to use town property and town resources, staff and utilities for private functions.

It is interesting to note that several members of Spoll's committee are, or have recently been, on the boards of PIC, the Garden Club and, of course, the Chamber of Commerce. Please note that the town staff has no official list of exactly who is on the committee, even though the committee meets on town property, and is allowed to schedule space as a private exofficio group that has access to town employees.  This group, which seems to want to have a lot of say, and arguably has some clout about development on the key, is not subject to the sunshine laws.

Back to the 150-room hotel proposal that no one at the north end knew was happening for the past 6 - 8 months. Why did the Planning and Zoning Board gratuitously offer to add an additional floor to any development at Whitney Plaza at one of their meetings some months ago, after a developer had already discussed a hotel project with the then town planning director? Did the town staff relay what should have been private information to members of the PZB? The timing and coincidence of the hotel proposal and the PZB discussion need to be explained satisfactorily to the residents. I believe the north end residents have a right to know what went on during this entire process spanning at least seven months.

Spoll's committee concocted an amateurish narrative north end development survey, which Michael Drake then asked a few of the residents to complete. Interestingly, Mr. Drake did not offer to inform those residents about the hotel project being put forward by some developers. Commission Brenner has been asked about development on the north end also.  He has twice assured constituents that nothing is happening.  It could be assumed Spoll's committee will find that his survey demonstrates that no one at the north end objects to a tall hotel at the north end. Of course, that is because no one knew about it. This entire process is ready-made for the lawyers. To save our community still more legal strife and probable stalled movement at the north end, as we have with the Key Club,  I am requesting the Spoll's phony survey be nullified and that a new survey be created by credible professionals, not undergraduates, after the community has been adequately informed about the possibility of a 150-room hotel on the property north of Whitney Plaza.

The village association has a history of political bias where Mr. Brenner has been repeatedly granted  opportunities to campaign, while political  opponents do not appear for some reason, no matter who is the opponent. Mr. Welly appeared before the village association for a lengthy presentation, and the village association held another discussion about the Key Club led by the then president. I am not aware that IPOC was ever invited by the association to make a presentation to the village residents. I am sad that the village association has such a recent unattractive political history. It was not that way a few years ago. Many villagers have quit the association in the past four years.

Who knew what when? Until this question has been fully vetted, there will probably be a lot of resistance from north end residents who will object to 18 year-old undergraduates telling 80 year-old PhD's, CEO's, etc. what they can and cannot do with their property.

The town, by allowing, and condoning, a private, commercially sponsored, group to repeatedly use town resources, meeting rooms and staff, may be placing the community in jeopardy. This group may have overstepped their mandated authority concerning what has happened at the north end. No resident deserves to be misled. The residents at the north end should have been informed about what people at town hall, and others associated with town government and exofficio committees, may have been aware of, before any survey was distributed. The entire survey process is unscientific and therefore invalid.

Spoll should be embarrassed. If I am not mistaken, Spoll was on the commission that denied Bob Dawson access to town hall to hold community meetings, saying it was against the town rules. Perhaps the commission needs to remove Spoll's ommittee from town hall. Perhaps they can find somewhere to meet like the rest of us. The village association has been reduced to meeting in peoples' garages since the art center was acquired by a private concern, introducing legitimate staff and insurance problems.

Look at previous article about an hotel at Whitney Plaza -

http://lbk-folk.blogspot.com/2011/05/newspeak-and-town-commission.html

Brave New World

Today 1 in 5 American households is multi-generational. The only segment of the new house market that is growing is the "accordion" home designed to accommodate several generations of a family living together in one structure. Parents with children under 21 are not included when counting multi-generational households in America.

You and I were born into a unique period of world history where there was immense growth in the middle class, for a period of 60 years, based on the emergence of automated manufacturing and the revolution of "technology" When I was a young child, plastic did not exist as a manufactured material. We have lived through an amazing period in human existence. Democracy and capitalism spread over the entire globe. Agricultural and medical science saved humanity from famine and disease while improving the human condition. Amazing times.

We are seeing, in this interminable national election cycle, the beginnings of a necessary reality adjustment in our country. We are beginning to accept the fact that blue collar manufacturing jobs have been largely replaced by numerically controlled machines and robots. The factories that produce Apple products will install 1 million additional robots in the next 3 years. We are not the only society that is entering the new technology age.

The manufacturing jobs are gone and it wasn't the result of "outsourcing". The jobs were gone 40 years ago with the advent of the semiconductor and cheap computing. In the 70's I started a company that automated several labor intensive aspects of the gaming industry. My company would charge unconscionable prices for our ideas and products, only to see them pay for themselves in a few months of reduced labor costs. We, my company, were the suckers, not the casino managers, who were usually pretty sharp business people.

I think we are all beginning to recognize that an economic colossus, the size of the American industrial base, took decades to be seriously affected by the new technology age, that has replaced hands and sweat with robots and automated machines.

Plastic and engineered materials have largely replaced metal. The pencil has been replaced by the computer. Vastly improved modes of transportation have ushered in the age of distributed manufacturing and assembly. The internet will soon marginalize national borders.

The manufacturing sector is not coming back. The brief period in history where a single society, representing less than 8% of the global population, was able to afford to consume 25% of the earth's resources, both natural and produced, has ended. Humanity is moving on. We, as a society, will necessarily begin the painful process of downsizing. American consumption and consumerism will have to come into line with the other peoples on earth. Nationalism is perhaps the first thing that will have to disappear for all countries. Global economics are out in front in this area. When I was a child, Americans would chuckle at the "made in Japan" label on imported products. Now we cannot get foreign made IPhones fast enough.

I do not know what will become of the blue collar segment of our society. I do know there are millions of clever people looking for a way to get rich by inventing something or some computer program that reduces costs for someone. If I worked in a Chinese IPhone/IPad factory, I would be looking for something else to do real soon. There is a robot in his/her immediate future.

Japan entered the global manufacturing market in the late 50's. American manufacturers underestimated the viability of a highly educated and organized industrial base. America lost market share and jobs. It took fewer than 35 years for Japan to enter permanent economic decline, as other countries entered the global marketplace, made possible by improved transportation technology including the jet plane. Now no one would dream of manufacturing something in Japan. It's too expensive. There too the Japanese laborer has been replaced by the robotic assembly line. China may well pass through its period of manufacturing expansion in fewer than 2 decades. Already some US manufactures are returning jobs to America, but not necessarily north America. Mexico may soon become the new China.

1 in 5 US households are multi-generational. This translates to a diminution of the American standard of living. We can elect whomever we want, but times have changed. There is no way to regain our golden age of the middle class. At least not as blue collar workers.

We as a nation need to "get real". We are just another society caught up in a world of too much violence (the result of too many people having too little), too many human beings, too much pollution, too little available water to support the global agricultural expansion that will be required to feed everyone and too much stuff. We need to start smelling the flowers instead of buying another flowerpot on the internet.

How did the mantra of "cheap goods" ever become the sacrament of American society? Do we all need all the stuff we posses? Look up "hedonic assimilation" as it relates to happiness. Basically, we all quickly get use to our new stuff and need more and better stuff to get another consumption high. America, and much of the modern world, is on a never-ending consumer treadmill.

The working class will have to find something else to do, since there is no longer an expanding need for their services or efforts. How's your robot today? Capitalism is based on an expanding market. Recent studies show Japan's population decreasing 30% by 2050. As societies industrialize their birth rates decline. Without 1 million illegals entering the US each year, we also would have a declining population growth rate.

Right You Are, If You Think You Are

"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.

The Producers

The gist of "The Producers" plot is as follows - New York, 1959. Max Bialystock was once the king of Broadway, but now all his shows close on opening night. Things turn around when he's visited by the neurotic accountant Leo Bloom, who proposes a scheme tailor-made for producers who can only make flops: raise far more money than you need, then make sure the show is despised. No one will be interested in it, so you can pocket the surplus investor money.

If one examines the many "closing nights" for commercial developments on Longboat Key, compared to the overwhelming success of dozens and dozens of high-end residential homes, one wonders why investors would ever choose to put their money into commercial speculations on this island.

The reality of commercial development includes "the developer", quite similar to the producers, in that both use other people's money and have no "skin in the game", to use a Warren Buffett term. Other than maintaining a track record, neither the developer or the producer suffers any real lose if his/her efforts turn out to be failures.

The following is a list of commercial developments that are no longer here: Avenue of the Flowers, Mattison's Restaurant, Whitney Plaza, Holiday Inn, Buccaneer, Far Horizon, numerous small tourist facilities, 2 gas stations, bank building at north end, the commercial property adjoining the Center Shoppes property, and L'Auberge Restaurant.

Fortunately, for every failed commercial venture on Longboat Key, five to ten luxury homes have been constructed. No one can deny that a new mansion increases surrounding property values, whereas failing small retail shops in poorly maintained strip malls do little, if anything, to improve our community's image or property values.

Avenue of the Flowers and Whitney Plaza cast a pall over the entire community. They have for years. For the past few years the commission has been guilty of benign neglect in these areas. It's time to do something that should have been managed years ago, instead of treating these eyesores as cherished locations for commercial tourism expansion. We are all getting older and poorer while we wait for the commissioner's "vision" to come true, if ever.

Publix has begun a revitalization of what was Avenue of the Flowers. The town needs to aggregate other social amenities around the Publix project. We don't need more doomed retail experiments and wasted years. We need to have more fun.

It's time to stop coddling developers, and follow a more proven direction for revitalizing our community, by attracting residents who want to build mansions instead of motels and busloads of tourists.

The town needs to be active in resolving the visual blight at Whitney Plaza that is pulling down property values in the surrounding neighborhood. Too many years have passed where the town has allowed a developer to hold the north end property owners hostage, while he waits, hoping for a financial miracle. Job one for the commission is to preserve and improve property values on Longboat Key. For the past few years the commission has done nothing to resolve the Whitney Plaza blight. Has the commission bothered to find out what is really happening at Whitney Plaza? North end residents are tired of hearing "check's in the mail", "Mercedes is in the shop", "Whitney Plaza will be booming next month".

If one examines what has actually been occurring on Longboat Key since the referendum permitting 250 replacement tourists units was passed 7 or 8 years ago, the answer is absolutely nothing in the commercial sector of the island's economy, and a robust proliferation of high-end single family homes up and down the island. As Al Green said in a previous article, the "market" is driving our economy, and that market has been exclusively private residential up-sizing. The commissioners would do well to support this process, rather than fighting it, as they are doing at present.

Commercial developers have had a poor track record on Longboat Key. Perhaps so many commercial developments have failed due to the strong market trending towards Longboat Key becoming an exclusive seasonal retirement community. The commissioners need to promote this trend rather than talk about commercial development that is years away at best, and a probable failed blight a few years later, if one looks at the history of commercial development on our island for the past 20 years.

If the commissioners insisted that a commercial developer have a large financial stake in a proposed project, as recommended by Warren Buffett, I doubt we would ever see an expansion of tourism on Longboat Key. Perhaps then the developers would put their money into exclusive residential development where the odds of financial success are far greater.

No Free Lunch

What is occuring on Longboat Key involving the Key Club litigation, could be a very costly zero-sum-game. Since the commissioners have once again unanimously decided to adhere to their stance on the Key Club expansion proposal, they have created a situation where a developer stands to gain tens of millions of dollars from government sponsored added value, to what is currently golf course acreage. By doing so, the town government has inadvertantly placed a huge financial burden on some residents, as they are now in the position of having to protect the value of their property.


From reading the recent town lawyer's letter to the commission listing nine active legal actions against the town by residents, it would appear that IPOC is not alone in their grievences against the commission and thus the town. All these residents are so dissatisfied with the town that they are willing to spend their time and money to fight against what they feel to be unjust treatment. The more oppressive, rigid, and developer-friendly the commission becomes, the more lawsuits are launched against them and the town.  Monitarily, this appears to be a beneficial situation for the attorneys, quite the opposite for the town and the taxpayers.

On Monday night, the commission unanimously agreed to allow the town lawyer to proceed with a costly and lengthy appeal of a recent court decision which had slammed the commissioners on their high-handed abuse of resident's property rights. The court decision cited seven issues with the commission's passage of ordinances 2009-25 and 2010-16. Since there was no meaningful discussion about the morality and advisability of appealing such a strong court ruling, one must assume that each commissioner had throughly weighed the wisdom of their decision prior to the commission meeting.

Nowhere in the commissioners' non-discussion was there any question of possibly being wrong. All that was said by our lawyer was that the commissioners needed to somehow overturn the court ruling. What if the court was right?

Given that their separate decisions had to be made without group communications with the town lawyer, their confidence in this legal matter is significant. The commissioners are surely aware that if the town lawyer had communications with each commissioner in "rapid succession" prior to Monday night's commission meeting, that could constitute a violation of the sunshine law. In a December 3rd article in the Herald Tribune newspaper, the possiblity of abuse of the sunshine law in this manner was discussed in reference to the actions of the Bradenton School Board. If communications and agreements were made "behind closed doors" so to speak, coming forward when the town lawyer asked whether any violations of the sunshine law took place would have been the right thing to do to be fair to all the residents involved in the Key Club expansion litigation.

During the Monday night commission meeting, when the town lawyer was politicking to get permission to appeal his most recent pending land-use litigation defeat, the lawyer stated that the commission had always stepped up to defend their actions. I recall that previously the Klauber lawsuit appeal request made by Mr. Persson was wisely denied by the commission. This time Mr. Lesser is supposedly paying all the legal and staff expenses, as the commissioners try to reverse all seven of the adverse rulings made by the court.

Now for the no free lunch. We all know that courts can be unpredictable, as evidenced by the recent Key Club ruling against the town commission. The commissioners, in their appearant haste to appeal that ruling, did not take any time to discuss what could befall Longboat Key taxpayers if the town loses its appeal. Under Florida statutes it may be possile for property owners to sue the town for losses to property values as a direct result of illegal actions by the town commission. If that happens, Loeb Partners will most likely run away from the town. The taxpayers would end up having to pay for expensive lawyers. If the property owners prevail, the taxpayers could be stuck with a huge settlement that would be levied against the town. This is exactly what happened in the Klauber suit. Don't think it can't happen again.

Florida Statutes : 70.001 f.s.
Abstract: (2) When a specific action of a governmental entity has inordinately burdened an existing use of real property or a vested right to a specific use of real property, the property owner of that real property is entitled to relief, which may include compensation for the actual loss to the fair market value of the real property caused by the action of government, as provided in this section. (d) The term “action of a governmental entity” means a specific action of a governmental …

The commissioners are playing for high stakes, though they may not know it. By not seeking some sort of compromise between Loeb Partners and the property owners of Islandside, the commissioners are now exposing the taxpayers to possble liabilities that will adverasely affect the future of our community.

There is a distinct feeling of unfairness in the dogged efforts of the commissioners to assist Loeb Partners' efforts to add value to their golf course. By not seeking compromise, the commissioners have created a very costly zero-sum-game, where someone wins financially and someone loses. By appealing rather than demanding a workable expansion plan from the Key Club, the commissioners have prolonged the start of anything positive at the Key Club for another year at least according to the town lawyer.


Worse yet is the possibly tenuous and greatly increased financial exposure of the entire community to  losing an appeal of a fairly severe court ruling. This is foolhardy. I am amazed that the commissioners spent hours rangling over ten feet of parking space at the Publix hearing, and fewer than six minutes on the largest lawsuit on the island since the Klauber suit, which went terribly wrong for the taxpayers.

Moral Compass

Florida Circuit Court Judge Charles Roberts called the entire effort by the Longboat Key town commission, including ignoring existing building codes and the town's Comprehensive Plan, "a miscarriage of justice".  He is right.  The commission did this in order to grant Loeb Partners the right to expand onto protected PUD land (Planned Unit Development), and thus abridge the property rights of Islandside property owners for Loeb Partners' exclusive profit.

I predict that this judicial chastisement will have little affect on the zeal of the current commission to vindicate their actions, and continue to work to fulfil their pledge to make more millions for British retirement funds and Mr. Lesser, who does not even live here.

These commissioners do not seem to understand that while aiding and abetting Loeb Partners to compromise the covenant that exists between Islandside property owners and their shared PUD for Loeb's profit, they may, at the same time, be financially harming hundreds of taxpayers. It is a risky zero-sum game they play.

Have we as a community lost our moral compass? Are we willing to condone the commission harming someone to help someone else make a buck? Have we reached a place where we are willing to believe that someone needs to suffer for all the rest of us to get ahead financially?

What the commission did was illegal, and many property owners may have been financially harmed as a result. The Longboat Key real estate market has been stalled because many Islandside buyers do not want to invest in an unstable community. Discriminating private property investors will avoid a community that is on a fast-track to expand commercial tourism.

Sure the commission can further erode the protections afforded our residents under our current codes and charter to favor commercial developers. That does not make it morally right. If there are those that are more interested in winning; if there are those that do not care about what means are used to achieve some political or financial goal, and if we refuse to hold our commissioners accountable, then we are probably in for a long period of constant court battles, law suites and community divisiveness. We all lose.

The commission and the town lawyers would have been able to commit "a miscarriage of justice", possibly damaging the home values of hundreds of residents, had it not been for the members of IPOC.

Legally wrong is legally wrong and the commission was willfully so. To take actions that are known to be unjust, and hope no one notices, further diminishes peoples' trust in their government.

If you are tired of watching your commission take the side of developers over the interests of the taxpaying residents, then speak up. Otherwise do not complain when some developer is legally able build a nuclear reactor next door to you as a result of your commission removing all the protections that once insured that Longboat Key would remain a low density exclusive community.

There are those, including several commissioners and business people, who cast people who do not agree with the commission's all or nothing KC expansion stance as "against the Key Club". One could argue that every Longboat resident wants the Key Club to thrive, just not at taxpayers' and property-owners' expense. Why not work within our time-proven codes and avoid further litigious delays.

From the beginning I have advocated a process that produces results in the shortest time and with the least adverse impact. For as long as it takes our commission to come up with a "legal" and community friendly agreement with Loed Partners, that is how long that our real estate market is going to be held hostage. The ill-advised actions of the majority of the current commission have delayed this process by years. If the commission continues to operate outside the confines of the law, then we will see more years wasted and a continuation of a crippled real estate market.

The residents of Islandside have been demonized for buying already existing high-rise condominiums that were created by previous town commissions and Arvida decades ago. All the current residents did was to purchase part of  a PUD with all its supposed stability. Judge Roberts pointed out that the composition of  PUD cannot be altered by one party in just the same way that changes to condominium association property cannot be changed without legal consent of at least a majority of the stakeholders.

Does Longboat Key still have a moral compass? Does Might Make Right?

Condo-Tels - what's in it for you?

 

As we look at the future of Longboat Key there are clearly two directions we can take. The one favored by the current commission appears to be towards more development, that is, high-rise condo-tels and tourist towers similar to what has befallen other Florida beach communities. The other direction points towards a community similar to Casey Key, which is predominately private residences.

The residents of Longboat Key have to make a choice, or the decision will be made for them by a town commission with several commissioners who were appointed rather than elected. The coming election could be looked at as a referendum on which direction you want to take.

What does each approach offer to property owners on Longboat Key?

If the commission is successful in removing height and density restrictions presently in our building codes and Comprehensive Plan, then we can expect that sooner or later developers will convert many of the current two story beach structures into multi-story buildings that make them the most money. Any developer would probably do the same.

What happens to residential property values when the community is divided into towers along the beach, with far greater numbers of people on the beach and a greatly expanded tourism and rental population, and neighborhoods of older homes?  Typically, the older homes lose value.

What happens to residential property values if older beach homes are converted instead into larger exclusive homes similar to Palm Beach?  Typically, the older homes increase in value.  There is an old real estate investment saying - buy the least expensive home in the most expensive neighborhood.

A friend of mine owns a not so well situated rental home in the Hamptons on Long Island. His property appeals to New Yorkers who want the Hamptons without the high cost of being in the Hamptons. My friend is riding on the coattails of his wealthy neighbors and exclusivity. I doubt we will see codes relaxed in the Hamptons or Palm Beach or numerous other communities that thrive on their low density and exclusivity.

 

There is little doubt that much of Longboat Key's largess is derived from the general perception that we are an exclusive community. Much of this perception is due to Islandside / Key Club and the Bay Isles gated community. People like being where there are few other people, the beaches are clean and relatively unpopulated, and the level of public safety makes people feel comfortable.

Inceases in tourism and the number of rental units have not been the reason for the great success of Longboat Key as an exclusive seasonal retirement community, since both have been steadily declining for the past two decades. What has increased is the number of million dollar properties that have been built and continue to be built on our island.

Ask yourself if you would like Longboat Key as much if it looked like Boca Raton or Fort Lauderdale Beach. Ask yourself if you believe the value of your home will increase if our community has increasingly more high-rise buildings lining the beach.

I grew up in a community that has changed little in the past eighty years. The same houses are still there. The little shopping districts are still the same. There are no hotels or motels of high-rise condo-tels. The only things that are taller are the trees. We should all hope that our property values fare as well as they have in that small New York City suburban town.

Let me be clear, the majority of our current commissioners favor changing our codes to allow considerably more density and the removal of height restrictions for buildings. This is also the case with the current members of the planning and zoning board, who are appointed by the commissioners.   Density restrictions and height restrictions have protected Longboat from developers who wanted to build high-rises. These two aspects of our code are quietly in the process of being changed - they haven't been changed yet, but are in the process of being changed by our current commission.  

If you do not register your views, then government must operate in a vacuum. We cannot blame the commission for adopting a pro-development policy if the community as a whole remains silent. Currently much of the island is zoned for low density two-story residential units. This can change. Remaining silent is the same as affirming the current direction that is being rapidly adopted by our commissioners. If you care and you are concerned then you need to make your views known. VOTE!

We can go either way. The one thing we cannot do is stand still and let the world pass us by.