All Together Now

The median age of Longboat Key residents is 68. We are an upscale residential community composed  for the most part, of retirees, many of whom spend only a few weeks a year on the island. Whether we like it or not that is our major demographic, and we as a community must deal with what we are.

I read a comment in one of the newspapers some time ago that used the term "Deadboat Key". I have spoken to several real estate sales people who have said that younger home buyers do not want to live on Longboat because it is "unfriendly" and there is nothing to do. Is that true?

I live in the village. Here, the residents are out and about in the neighborhood. It is a friendly welcoming enclave of modest homes. Every month we have a village get-together and potluck dinner. Anyone is welcome. The village has several activity groups and a lively social network. I have lived in the village over 25 years and it is the best place I have ever lived. Most of my friends and neighbors share my appreciation for the kicked-back friendly intimate lifestyle we enjoy.

I believe Longboat needs to become more user-friendly. Even though some people do not want our island to be known as a community of affluent retired people, that is what we are if you look at our population.

I have always supported the tennis center because I believe it enriches the lives of hundreds of our residents and offers a popular social activity to visitors and perspective home buyers.

Even though tennis is a good physical activity, along with golf and of course swimming in the beautiful gulf, many of our residents may be interested in less strenuous activities such as Bocce Ball and other outdoor activities requiring less stamina than tennis. Our climate may discourage many residents from participating in the more active social activities such as golf or tennis much of the year. Perhaps a few town Bocce Ball and shuffleboard courts with shaded seating might allow residents to get out more and find social interactions year-round.

I want to promote many more community activities that draw the residents together, provide more social activity choices and improve our image as a great place to live and buy a home.

The town has an infrastructure fund with proceeds from the tourism taxes collected by the counties. Perhaps a small portion of those funds might be used to create and promote social activities on Longboat to be enjoyed by all. Other communities such as "The Villages", an upscale planned retirement community on central Florida, have a robust social activities infrastructure that is well attended and supported by the residents.

Here are a few ideas I have that might be worth examining:



Bocce Ball courts can add utility to our existing parks at relatively little cost. Shaded seating affords residents the opportunity to exercise and meet other island residents in relative comfort year-round. Perhaps the town could organize league play and even an invitational tournament that would attract off-island players to our island as the triathlon drew hundreds of contestants to Longboat for a day.

I have a friend who moved from Longboat to "The Villages" several years ago, and is still happy with their decision. My friend loves all the community social activities that are available. Weekly dances in the village squares are very popular as are outdoor activities. We have ample room in one of our parks to install an outdoor dance floor with appropriate LED lighting. Add a DJ and you have a starlit evening to enjoy.

Longboat has no centralized organization to promote and manage community activities. Perhaps we need one. It is a lot of effort for our residents to sponsor activities which tend to be restricted to a particular condominium association or neighborhood. Perhaps we might all enjoy more community-wide activities. The St. Jude's luncheon and various other fundraising functions are always well supported.

If the town managed weekly potluck dinners in the park then they would be able to manage attendence each week. If the town installed numbers of shaded outdoor picnic tables and benches in the public areas, perhaps more people would organize activities in the parks. With a median age of 68, I doubt that many of our residents want to have to stand in the hot sun to be a part of an otherwise enjoyable community social gathering.

I believe our community needs to find more ways to come together and to offer an expanded living experience to residents and visitors alike. Perhaps local government is the most able to create and organize community resources in an intentional effort to grow our community.

We need to be a part of the competition to attract the baby boomers to Longboat. The current retiring generation has different asperations than the people who built our community a generation ago. The boomer's aspirations are more active, and if one looks at "The Villages" they want an increased sense of community.

We can easily increase social interaction on Longboat in a number of ways. Certainly a community center will be a major asset in attracting new residents. In the meantime, there are many other activities that can be organized.

Perhaps the vision plan might address community activities more and pay less attention to the tourists.

Managing our beaches intelligently

In this blog I will link to two beach maintenance technologies that might be explored to maintain sand on our beaches at minimum cost and maximum longevity, instead of hopper dredging that lasts only a few years.

In my previous post I stated that the town might serve the community well by researching what beach management alternatives are available, and how they might be applied to our particular beach challenges.

I believe it is essential to look at preserving sand along our entire 10 miles of beach, not just the beach adjacent to Longboat Pass.

For the past 20 years I have always tried to offer positive alternatives if I questioned a particular town policy of activity. The current beach conundrum is no different and here I am suggesting that we look at two specific beach maintenance technologies because they make sense to me. I have looked into both companies enough to believe that each has promise. Both systems can be economically applied to the entire island to provide a semi-permanent solution that does not require spending tens-of-millions of dollars every 8 years or so.

In the case of the Sand Saver company, they are willing to ship 20 of their units to Longboat, at no cost to the town, so we might conduct a small test lasting for a month or two as proof of concept. Since the Sand Saver units are highly portable and quickly and easily removed, the town can assure the Department of Environmental Resources that the test will cause no permanent damage to the coastline. I like companies that believe enough in their technology to fully underweight the pilot project.


As soon as ideas for a long term low maintenance beach solution are presented, I suspect there will be opposition from several quarters. I can see no reason why these technologies should not be explored to the point where a consensus of experts reject them. Ask yourselves if you believe all the communities that decided to use these various beach maintenance methods acted impulsively and without evaluating what they were doing. In the past the town manager has defended his continued use of hopper dredging by saying that all other technologies will not work on Longboat Key. My question is how do we know this without throughly exploring the promising technologies and how they apply to our particular beach conditions.

Are we the only ones who know what we are doing? Is there nothing to be learned from the efforts and collective experiences of other communities? Do you really want to reject all seemingly successful technologies out-of-hand? I don't when $50 million is on the line with a life expectancy of only seven or eight years, and even higher costs the next time we re-nourish our beaches.

The Movable Wall: The first technology I want to highlight is called "Sand Saver". This beach maintenance technology uses movable semi-porous retaining wall modules to build beach profile and then maintain the built-out beach on an ongoing basis. The semi-porous units can be repositioned up and down the island to both acquire sand and to maintain the beach. Please watch the entire video and note how quickly sand is acquired using the Sand Saver modules.

At this point I am not saying that the Sand Saver is the answer to all our dreams. I am saying we should, as a community, honestly evaluate this technology, and others, both in terms of cost and effectiveness. The Sand Saver has never been permitted since the 1970s. Many of the technologies being proposed for examination have to deal with a $3 billion a year dredging industry along with its attendant lobbyists. Sand Saver has recently obtained all required permits for a project on the Great Lakes in Michigan. When this technology was permitted it was successful in accretion 100 feet of beach in a few weeks.

Link: http://www.sandsaver.com/main.wmv

Link: http://www.sandsaver.com/

Sub-current Stabilizers: Holmberg Technology is a local company has been reclaiming beaches for decades around the world. They have hundreds of satisfied clients. Holmberg has hundreds of success stories of reclaimed beaches that have lasted decades without needing further work and money. I have spoken with Mr. Holmberg and for a few thousand dollars we can have Mr. Holmberg evaluate our beaches and make a preliminary proposal.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA7D8UERl6A&feature=related

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBTroxOvczc&feature=related

I have presented two differing beach maintenance technologies. Both have been successful in other communities. There are many more alternatives to the expensive temporary dredging solution being championed by both the town manager and the town's beach engineering consultants. Look at my LBK beaches web site to see several other shore maintenance technologies that are in use around the world.

Link: http://www.lbkbeaches.com/

I do not believe we should continue to support expensive dredging projects without first having a disinterested independent expert beach management company evaluate the major alternative beach management technologies that have been successful in other communities.



Sandcastles In The Air

What are informed decisions? What are uninformed decisions?

What role does foresight play in our decision making?

The taxpayers of Longboat Key will soon be asked to once again approve a beach bond in the vicinity of $50 million to replenish ten miles of beach. I am reminded of George Santayana's admonition "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." If today's commission proceedings are any indication of the commissioners final decision concerning the scope of work on the island's shoreline, we are doomed to throwing an enormous amount of money into the Gulf of Mexico, again.

To view some of the erosion control solutions employed by other communities look at the link below.

http://www.lbkbeaches.com/

I honestly believe that any decision to repeat a process that has been shown to be temporary and increasingly costly is an uninformed decision if no attempt is made to seriously examine as many viable alternatives as possible.

I also believe that waiting until the last possible moment, when the town is between the devil and the deep blue sea, does not lead to a successful informed decision making process.

At the previous commission workshop, the town's beach consultants appeared to be ill-prepared at such a late date. They had no innovative and cost saving suggestions for the commission to consider. When commissioner Larson brought up the idea of geotex tubes as a means of retaining expensive sand, the consultants appeared to be caught off guard and had no immediate answers. One would think for what we pay the consultants, that they would have come to the deadline meetings with more than "the same old same old".

I believe the time has come, and the costs high enough, for the town commission to finally approach our beach problem with true due diligence. We need to seek solutions from more sources than just our current beach management consultants. If one takes the time and does the research it becomes apparent that communities use many different methods to control the costs of maintaining their beaches. If money were of no concern, then our present policy of replenishing our beaches ever seven or eight years might be the easiest approach. However, money is a concern and we need to attempt to find a permanent solution if one exists.

Informed decision making will require a great effort for an unpaid commission. It will also require that the commission instruct the town manager to bring in other coastal engineering companies from around the country and around the world if necessary. The projected cost of the upcoming beach project is $50,000,000.00 plus when interest is added to the $40,000,000.00 bond issue. That works out to over $5,000,000.00 a mile for sand replenishment that has been proven again and again to last only a few years.


False Economies: eventually taxpayers will tire of geometrically escalating beach management costs and insist that a permanent solution be found. As sand borrow areas become more difficult to find and competition for limited sand resources increases, so will the costs associated with our present sand replenishment policy.

The town commission can choose to remain passive and accept the advice of the town's beach consultants, or they can insist on input from a number of qualified engineering companies. I suspect that there will be no real effort to evaluate the many proven methods for erosion management used by communities around the world. Instead, and as usual, the commission will be willing accept the choices offered by our beach consultants, even in the face of launching the largest bond referendum in the history of Longboat Key.


The pending beach management project includes provisions for some sort of sand retaining structures at the north end to slow the loss of sand into Longboat Pass, depending on the outcome of an inlet management study. Inlets account for 86% of sand loss off our beaches.

Since the town has refrained from conducting a north end inlet management study for many years, until such a study was mandated by the state last year, the taxpayers of Longboat Key will be asked to "trust" the town to do the right thing, since the sorts of structures to be used at the north end may be undefined at the time of the bond referendum.

This week the town's beach consultants told the commissioners that they had stabilized Longboat's beaches with the exception of Longboat Pass and that sand replenishment was a prudent approach to maintaining the beach profile.


At the same time the consultants detailed the amount of yearly sand loss from the various sectors of the beach in terms of hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand. The stabilized beach they spoke of is still losing sand at a prodigious rate in terms of dollars that will soon be required to replenish that sand again.


I believe we need to explore means of keeping sand on the beach through the use of various technologies.

If the commission chooses poorly then some poor commissioners and many property owners will be faced with an even more enormous financial problem a scant ten years from now.

We cannot afford to continue throwing tax dollars into the Gulf of Mexico every few years if there is some way to retain the sand more effectively.

What's Wrong with Tourists?

Should we label tourists as second-class economic citizens on Longboat Key?

What do tourists bring to our community?

Recent studies have demonstrated that residents and tourists do not mix well. In communities where commercial tourism has expanded, residents most often relinquish territory to the tourists. On Longboat the tourist influx during February and March means crowded roads and restaurants. Residents know better and do not plan trips off-island on weekends when the beaches are filling up or tourists are heading home. We prepare ourselves for long waits at local eateries during season while mumbling about the need for tourism to keep local businesses alive. We modify our life style because of the tourists yet we are the ones who pay all the taxes. Does that make sense?

Do tourists keep our businesses alive? Probably not the same businesses needed by residents such as medical, lawn, municipal, home repair or domestic services. While residents have little need for tee-shirt shops, shell stores or jet-ski rentals. There seems to be very little that tourists and residents have in common except being on the same road at the same time two months a year. 


The residential community realizes almost no financial benefit from commercial tourism except for a small portion of collected sales taxes and real estate taxes which represent a small fraction of the total tax burden.

A few property owners rent their houses, mostly on a monthly basis, with mixed reactions form neighboring homes. The chamber of commerce along with some current commissioner/planners now advocate relaxing the monthly rental restrictions and allowing weekly rentals to encourage more tourists to come to Longboat by offering reduced cost accommodations. We all know that weekly rentals quickly deteriorate into weekend rentals. There are no controls as to how many people can occupy a house. A property owner near me rents to different people for weekends on a weekly basis even though it is illegal. Sometimes there are eight or more people occupying the house including boisterous young children. Our town continues to demonstrate that it is not prepared to effectively regulate residential rentals, nor should it, for the town is not be in the vacational rental business. The weekend rentals continue island-wide, though the economic downturn appears to have reduced rental traffic.

I do not believe that the great majority of our island residents even want monthly rentals much less weekly/weekend rentals. Yet the current pro-business commission appears to be on the verge of approving a vision plan that encourages weekly/weekend rentals. Of course, our chamber of commerce also seeks increased tourism and relaxation of the current thirty day rental restrictions.

If you own a home in a neighborhood where rentals are allowed, and you do not want your neighborhood to be turned into a short-term rental community, then I suggest that you log onto http://www.longboatkey.org/ go to the commissioner's page and email them how you feel about weekly rentals on Longboat Key.

Lastly I want to bust the myth that young Yuppie tourists will become future home buyers on Longboat Key, and that is why we should want hoards of them to be visited upon our beautiful serene residential community. By the time these people are old enough to want to retire to our island, I will most likely be beyond caring and my heirs will also be too old to care.

I believe we should be marketing our island to the retiring baby boomers, not weekly tourists. As soon as the economy recovers we will be looking at a large population of retirees. The more fortunate of those retirees will want just what we wanted when we bought our homes on Longboat Key. Who wants to wait twenty years for the Yuppies to grow up and retire, when there are so many perspective home buyers much closer at hand?

We do not need more tourists. We need discriminating home buyers right now. The best way to attract these people is through sophisticated marketing and advertising.

We do need to spruce up our act, put on a big smile, invent all sorts of things to do as a community and tell the world that we are a wonderful place to live. Did I hear tourist in any of this?

"What our commissioners fail to understand is that the community, not the developers, should define community identity. That is the purpose of the zoning code. Variances should be the exception and not the rule." ... SH 




Longboat's Looming $54 Million Gift to the Gulf

http://www.lbkbeaches.com

Let me be perfectly clear. I am 100% committed to maintaining our beautiful beaches. I believe they are key to the value of our homes and attracting tourists.

For the past 10 years my problem has been how we maintain our beaches. I have never agreed with the town manager's unwavering approach to expensive dredging projects while rejecting examination of possible alternatives suggested by numerous coastal engineering and technology companies. My question has always been how do we know what is available if we never ask. In the past the town manager has responded to this question by saying we do receive professional advice from the coastal engineering consultant the town has retained for over a decade, and that the town's consulting firm continues to advocate sand replenishment on a periodic basis.

"In 2008, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 1427, known as the beach management bill, which contained an Inlet Management Initiative that strengthens DEP’s ability to manage sediment around the more than 60 navigational inlets located throughout the state. These inlets, which interrupt the natural flow of sand along beaches, account for more than eighty percent of Florida’s coastal erosion" - NOAA quote. Knowing this, for the past several years my question has been, why not farm the inlets on a regular basis and return the sand to the beaches from whence it came?

The town manager has asserted for the last decade that inlet management is not feasible on Longboat Key, and that dredging from more and more distant underwater sand deposits is our only viable solution. After the passage of HB 1427, the town manager finally initiated an inlet management study of Longboat Pass. I do not feel comfortable with the town manager's decision to hire the same coastal engineering company to do the inlet management study that the town uses for its sand replenishment programs. It seems reasonable and logical to seek new fresh ideas from several qualified sources.

The town manager also rejected a recently completed comprehensive Humiston & Moore study of Longboat Pass even though the H & M work had previously been funded and approved by the Florida Department of Natural Resources, the West Coast Inland Navigation District (WCIND) and the the Army Corps of Engineers in Jacksonville.


Commissioner Brenner has recently expressed his own concerns regarding our present beach management program, where half the deposited sand washes into the Gulf in the first two years "by design", followed by incremental losses in following years, until our beaches reach a depleted state and we do it all over again.

The truth of the matter is that many communities use many different means of controlling beach erosion. Coastal engineering appears to be an inexact science beset with constantly changing conditions and events. Still the time may have arrived when we need to look outside the box at what other communities are doing that works, and to see if their solutions are applicable to our island.

Further I want to know why we need to be looking at a beach bond referendum this year. If Port Dolphin has not indicated if and when they will begin their project, are we still obligated to remove sand from the impacted borrow areas by a certain date or is that date predicated on the commencement of the actual Port Dolphin project?

Second, exactly how many cubic yards of sand will be used from the Port Dolphin borrow sites in the proposed 2011 beach project, given the darker color of the sand from the Port Dolphin borrow sites? Is the town reimbursed on a yard-by-yard basis, and if so, how much money are we actually talking about coming from Port Dolphin, if they do decide to build the pipeline? What does the town get if Port Dolphin does not commence work until after our beach project is complete? Is the Port Dolphin sand the best choice at the least cost if the Port Dolphin project fails to materialize?

If we do not really need to replenish the beaches in 2011, and the north end danger is alleviated by the current project to add some sand to the north end beaches, might this not be a good time to pause and take another look at how we manage our beaches and postpone the bond question to 2012 when it was originally scheduled?

I hope we ask for opinions from a number of experts and look to see what is working for other communities.

In case you are wondering about the $54 million figure in the headline, I have always disagreed with the town's way of defining public debt (i.e. bond cost). The town never uses the true debt cost, which is the bond amount plus the interest on the bond. In the latest $40 million beach management bond proposal, the actual levy against the properties of Longboat Key is approximately $54 million. That is the amount that will be added to your yearly real estate taxes for the next decade.



Be a Booster for Beautiful Longboat

This week's Observer listed a 2009 - 2010 September home sales decline of around 45% for condominiums and 65% for houses.

Perhaps a little less gloom and doom by commissioners Brenner and Brown might be advisable given the negative September sales trends on the island.

I do not see that negative public assessments of our island will contribute to real estate sales. 

In a previous blog, and article in the LBK News, I argued that our community needs immediate help in the area of real estate sales, as opposed to the cure being proposed by Messrs Brenner and Brown, who advocate a long-range build-up of tourist lodging to the point where  retail stores will flourish. Who knows how long that will take given our economy.
http://lbk-folk.blogspot.com/2010/09/longboat-needs-great-marketing-campaign.html

I have been on this island since 1979 either as a visitor or resident. I never saw retail flourish. Demographics have changed over the years and the business environment has morphed into one that fills the current demand for goods and services.

It is all well and good to discuss long-range development on Longboat. However, given the current and projected economic conditions, along with the demise of the baby-boomer 401Ks, it may be more effective to look at more immediate ways to attract home buyers to Longboat.

I suspect most residents are not concerned with the distant in the future profits that will be made by developers if they are allowed to build hi-rise hotels on the north end of Longboat.

Residents need help today not a decade from now.

Every time a read another article about Messrs. Brenner and Brown, telling us we are a decrepit aging declining community, I feel sad that the very people who should be our most outspoken promoters appear to be our most prominent detractors.

These two gentlemen may be the best planners to ever grace our community, but I believe they may not fully comprehend what it is about Longboat that makes us one of the premier residential and retirement communities in America. Perhaps it is their urban background that contributes to their future vision of Longboat as a built-up tourist based economy.

I believe we attract discriminating residents because we are not a tourist based community.

I grew up in Larchmont New York. Elisabeth and I visited friends there in August. As far as I can tell very little has changed in the past sixty years. All the homes are at least eighty to ninety years old. The commercial area is small, ragtag and typically suburban New York. Retail have not expanded appreciably over many decades yet Larchmont homes are outragously expensive for what they are.

Larchmont appears to be prospering and filled with the young families that Brenner and Brown think we should be attracting. Believe me when I tell you there is a lot of money in Larchmont.

There are few tourist establishment in the Larchmont, yet the community prospers.


Having worked with New York State schools for a decade, I can attest that Larchmont has some of the top ranked schools in America. Why would an educated professional family move their children to Longboat Key, when our local schools rank poorly? Improve our local schools and I believe the affluent families will come.

Elisabeth and I recently entertained friends from Evanston, Ill. Their visceral and enthusiastic response to Longboat and the village was one of awe and great pleasure, realizing they had arrived in paradise. We walked to the Mar Vista and dined under the Buttonwood trees beside the water. Paradise!

Our guests spent three days with us. As I listened to the many accolades they bestowed on our community, I had a difficult time reconciling their perceptions of Longboat with the dure and alarming assessments coming frequently from our two planner commissioners.

I have never met anyone who did not love our aesthetically beautiful serene island ambiance. From spending time with many of these people, I have come to understand that there are "different strokes for different folks" and that people who fall in love with Longboat do not want to be in the hi-rise world of Boca Raton.

I encourage our planner commissioners to become Longboat Key boosters instead of detractors.

We need a great marketing campaign now if we are going to enable residents to sell their homes rather than their heirs.

Representative Government on Longboat Key

Representative Government: a form of government in which the citizens delegate authority to elected representatives.


A large percentage of our residents do not in fact enjoy representative government, because they are  non-residents or foreign nationals. These people cannot vote. They have no say about taxes or town codes or vision plans.


We are told by our representative government that this is the price one pays for having a second home in paradise. Yet the disenfranchised group pays a large percentage of our taxes. They are forcibly a part of a silent majority without voice or political power. No one asks them how they feel. A few individuals write letters. One or two attend town commission meetings. But in large part this group of unrepresented taxpayer residents go unheard.


Now we have a few commissioners who say over and over that the great majority of residents have approved the previous vision plan. Of course we do not know how the unrepresented taxpayer residents feel about the previous vision plan, or the new improved vision plan, because no one will ask them how they feel.


No matter that very few residents were given an opportunity to express their views about the old vision plan. No one really asked any taxpayers if they wanted to spend 100 thousand dollars on a piece of paper that will never see the light of day.


Only a few chosen people are being included in the new vision plan process. The old vision plan process at least included a few hundred business and real estate people and a smattering of regular residents of which I was one. The makeup of the new vision plan committee includes representation from the chamber of commerce and seems to be oriented mostly towards the business community on Longboat. I feel any vision plan should focus mainly on the residents who after all pay over 95% of the taxes.


I suspect we will be informed that since the previous vision plan was overwhelmingly approved by the residents, which it was not, because no one ever saw the old vision plan, the new vision plan need not be approved by anyone save the chosen group. After all isn't one vision plan is just like another vision plan?


I am amazed at what is now being created out of whole cloth.


I am wondering where representative government enters the picture. A sizable part of the residents have no representation at all, and now the residents who are able to vote are also being left out of the vision plan process.


The highly paid expert, who was hired to moderate the old vision plan process, told the town that the plan was not valid without carrying out a legitimate survey of the community. His words went unheeded.


Commissioners are now saying that the community approved the old vision plan, and by extension they approve the new vision plan.


What do you think?


I have been an active advocate of community participation in local government. That cannot happen if the government is not willing to engage the community.


Our current set of commissioners seems to ascribe to some sort of  "Noblesse oblige".

I cannot imagine that any sort of unvalidated vision plan, that may severely affect the fortunes of our residents, would be legislated into power without asking the people how they feel.


I believe we need a through examination of any proposed vision plan by the community at large. To me to have four or five commissioners impose some sort of illegitimate vision plan on the community is the antithesis of the spirit of representative government.