Times they are a-changing

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don't stand in the doorway

Don't block up the hall

For he that gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There's a battle outside

And it is ragin'

It'll soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls

For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan

Wow! What a week. Loeb Partners, who own the Key Club, are leaving town, along with the general manager. On top of that, the president of the Chamber of Commerce is leaving at the same time. Is this a coincidence? Perhaps it is best if the new owners of the Key Club are able to work with the surrounding affected property owners and find a common-sense design for a new and reasonable Key Club expansion. 

The town is still facing a court decision towards the end of November that will decide if land use on Longboat Key will remain under the purview of our Comprehensive Plan and town ordinances, or become a political weapon totally in the hands of a commission that is presently mostly appointed. 

I hope that the prospective owners of the KC  and IPOC can reach an understanding. But I also hope that IPOC allows the courts to rule on the legality of two recently passed town ordinances, passed by the town commission - 2012-6 and 2012-8. I believe both ordinances will discourage people from investing in residential properties on Longboat. No one wants to invest in a community where anything is possible depending on who is on the town commission at the time. Both these ordinances destabilize our community and undermine trust that land use will be managed in a steady and predictable fashion. 

This commission fails to understand that "highest and best use" of commercial property extends well beyond the confines of the commercial development and impacts surrounding property owners and to a lesser degree the entire community.

The Servant of Two Masters

"No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other"...Matthew 6:24

Several people have asked me to explain the perhaps unusual relationship between the town lawyer representing Loeb Partners, while at the same time getting paid by Longboat Key taxpayers. My explanation that this three-way relationship does in fact exist has been greeted with laughter and dismay. So far, and the sample size is arguably small, everyone I have talked to has had difficulty understanding exactly what is happening. How can the town lawyer be the town's legal adviser and also be employed by a developer at the same time?  When I tell them that it's legal, that does not seem to alter how they feel about the town lawyer being the servant of two masters.

What does "being legal" have to do with what is right? It is legal to ride on a motorcycle without wearing a protective helmet. It is also legal to have a minor on the motorcycle equally unprotected. In many cases, the uninsured cost of treating serious motorcycle accident injuries are paid by the Florida taxpayer. "Special interests" have always influenced our laws. The motorcycle lobby has been able to control the motorcycle safety issue for many years. However, every taxpayer in Florida is subsidizing the motorcycle industry to some degree, through higher public sector medical costs.  From my perspective the motorcycle law is not a just law.

Longboat Key has become a community mired in special interests. 

Are you better off?

Are You Better Off Than When

This Commission Took Office 3 Years Ago?

I resigned from the commission 3 years ago in the midst of a divisive community struggle between the Key Club developers and those in our community who felt the Key Club expansion was too massive, and would be unfair to people who had already invested in property at Islandside. Four of the seven commissioners decided to back the developers, passing Ordinance 2010-16. I was so opposed to the intervention into community affairs by the town commission that I could no longer countenance being part of what I, and later two different Florida courts, believed to be an over-extension of political power. At that time I expressed my concerns that what the commission was doing was in violation of our own codes and ordinances. I was not willing to be party to the commission's inappropriate activities concerning the Key Club expansion. 

I have always expressed publicly, in print, my belief that the town should have leaned on the two sides to create a compromise. Instead, the commission voted unanimously to approve the KC application. I still believe a compromise is the only way to avoid still more years of court battles that have so far been a stunning refutation of all the actions taken by the commission on behalf of Mr. Lesser. I find it curious that the town commission is taking the opposite position in their dealings with the various factions involved in the Colony fight, calling for compromise. Unfortunately, the commission has, at the same time, created a new extra-legal zoning district in violation of the town's codes and land use ordinances. I expect law suites by those who are adversely affected by the commission's decisions. I also expect that the town will fare no better, legally, than they have fared with their efforts at the Key Club. 

I have decided to run against Commissioner Younger in the upcoming town election. I realize that I may be a single voice of opposition at times, however, there needs to be some sort of voice for the residents on the town commission. Someone needs to be able to represent the taxpayers and non-resident property owners to balance the current business-biased, mostly appointed, commission. I am also aware that I face unified opposition from the business interests on the island that have been effective in shaping the current commission. This is a strange opposition since I am very pro-business. I am simply opposed to uninformed government driven by special interests.

This is why I am running:

1) For the past three years the commission has done literally nothing to further the economy of Longboat Key. There has been much posturing and attending off-island small business promotion luncheons, but nothing else. There has been no concrete action on the part of the town commission to improve the town's image or to actively market our community. That is Job One for any local government.

2) The current commission continues to take actions based on legal advice that time and time again has been insufficient. If I am elected I will work to find new legal representation for the town. The most recent example is the hedge cutting ordinance vote now supported by the town lawyer. The ordinance should have failed if the commission voting process had been conducted properly. Once again the commission has received advice that most likely will not hold up in court.

3) The current commission has adopted a beach management, or I should say non-management, policy that has exposed too many properties to damage and even destruction. The record will show that Commissioner Younger is willing to gamble private property against a balanced budget. I believe that if a single waterfront property is lost as a result of a lack of preventive action by the town, it will have disastrous effects on the town's reputation. If elected I will be active in protecting valuable property from storm damage resulting from uninformed beach policies.

4) Another three years has passed since the current group of people gained political control of the town commission, and the $30 million pension system beast is still on the loose. This is another example of the type of inaction that has plagued Longboat Key for the past three years. Who knows how much the commission's indecisiveness has cost the taxpayers. One fact is known and that is the number of new-hires that have been allowed to enter our retirement plan during that time. If I am elected I will make sure the taxpayers are foremost in the actions of the town commission. The pension system debacle simply cannot be allowed to be kicked down the road for another three or four years. For the past five years I have advocated that the town transfer all workers to the Florida Retirement System as the best way to resolve a situation that has not been confronted by the current town commission. How long must we wait?

5) The commission has not been successful in their public relations with town workers. One of the reasons I was previously able to defeat an incumbent, who had strong support from various interests in the community, was his part in alienating the police employees to the point where they formed a union. The same sad spectacle is taking place again, this time with the regular employees. Because of perceived inequities, which are too blatant to be ignored, Longboat Key has yet another union on its hands. If I am elected I will get rid of our highly paid labor attorney and find someone who can work one-on-one with the employees to reach some sort of solution. Dragging things on year after year accomplishes nothing. When employees, who have been loyal workers, feel abused, they form unions. This did not need to happen, just as the police union did not have to happen. This commission has had a part in unionizing the town government. Taxpayers will now pay even more to deal with three unions, where a few years ago there was but one.

6) The current commissioners would like you to believe they did great things at the north end where unsightly blight is allowed to drag down the entire community, year after year. Instead of working with commercial property owners and surrounding residents to effectively solve the problems, they instead allowed a small group of business people to run the town. As a result this commission passed an ordinance that actually restricts possible solutions at the north end. If elected I will find a way to rid Longboat Key of commercial blight. There are Florida statutes that allow the town to insist commercial property owners maintain their property or face very serious consequences. Instead this commission made things more difficult to resolve. Doing nothing does not cut it.

7) Perhaps the greatest failure of the town commission over the past three years has been its inability to stem the steady loss of business on Longboat Key. I say this because this commission has devoted most of its time talking about how the town needs to promote tourism and business, yet they have not done so. There is an old saying "planning does not make government". That certainly has been the case for the previous three years. If anything the commission has been instrumental in halting progress at the Key Club by enacting unreasonable land use codes and ordinances that have been thrown out in court. This commission has the worse record in my memory for failing to attract and retain businesses on the island. For a commission that has focused on the business community and tourism, while ignoring residential problems, their actions have been insufficient and Longboat Key is losing ground.

8) Finally, people say nothing is more attractive than a pretty face. Gulf of Mexico needs to put on some makeup, get rid of the shabby signage and create a really attractive unified commercial presentation to those visiting our community. The present commission seems unwilling to confront the business community to improve their appearance. If I am elected I will work with shopping center and business owners to improve our image. It is in everyone's best interest that we put on a happy face. This commission talks the talk but has been insufficient in improving the appearance of GMD.

That is why I am once again seeking public office. There is a pressing need to find a new direction for our town. Clearly what the current commission has been doing has been ineffective. Property owners have a clear choice. They can have a few more years of a floundering community, with leadership so focused on tourism that they have failed to improve anything. Or the taxpayers can elect new leadership with new ideas and a new sense of creative solutions for Longboat Key. 

Let's get stuff done for a change!

Why Whitney Won't Work

I am one of the few year-round residents on the north end of Longboat Key. A am one of a few thousand people who live on the island more than a few months during the winter. In the off-season we can pick and choose where we shop from a fairly select group of local businesses located in three good sized shopping centers that are all located either mid-key or on the north end of Longboat Key. Many of my neighbors are Canadean or European and are limited to a six month visa. For the majority of property owners and seasonal renters, Longboat Key is the winter playground for those affluent enough to be able to spent time away from their primary residences.



Longboat's Hidden Tourist Industry

While the town commissioners go about their self-appointed crusade to build high-density lower-middle-class tourist hotels on our exclusive island, they have failed to look at their own community and realize that Longboat Key already has an extensive and burgeoning tourist accommodation industry. Perhaps ten to fifteen percent of all properties on Longboat Key are already on the vacation rental market. 

One has only to go on-line and Google "for rent by owner Longboat" and there are dozens and dozens of websites advertising vacation rental homes on our island. Typically one finds headlines such as "

Longboat Key - 527 vacation rentals - VRBO

The above website alone lists over 5% of the total properties on Longboat Key as rental properties  I recently attended a party in a home in Bay Isles. Talking to the occupant, who herself was seasonal  renter, I was told that approximately half the homes on her street were rentals. 

Everyone, except the current town commission, has known for years that there is a steady, and now accelerating, economic transformation occurring on Longboat Key. More and more of Longboat is becoming increasing wealthy. Property costs continue to go up. Over the past four years, the island has witnessed a McMansion building boom. Gone are the days of modest homes being built on the island. Now we see 10,000 square foot beachfront cottages and $4 million+ homes being torn down to make way for even more opulent abodes.

Many of us remember a simpler community where people spent a majority of their year. We now see the profile of a new wealthy, highly seasonal, property owner. The new Longboater spends two or three months a year on-island. They are vacationing and do not require neighborhood services such as hardware stores or clothing shops. 

Many of the houses owned by people who are seldom here become rentals. Since the town has made no attempt to understand the island private home rental market, there are no substantiated figures, other than what one is able to see on the internet.

Looking on-line it is readily apparent that the Longboat Key visitor market is alive and well, and also highly promoted. Given the seemingly large rental inventory already available, one has to wonder why the town commission is driven to increase tourism still more.

It should be noted that all local restaurants have been experiencing record business in recent years. The commission might look into where all these customers are coming from.

The current commission's tourism dreams may have already been fulfilled. They just have not noticed in their zeal to  promote commercial development in an exclusive, residential community, where it is doubtful that property owners of luxury homes even want more tourists.

A new form of tourism may in fact be evolving on Longboat Key. This new form of visitor accommodation is softer and lower profile than the high-rise hotel-like structures of the past two decades. Along with residential tourism comes a transformation of island neighborhoods into assemblages of private and rental houses.

It is of interest that many of the rentals on Longboat lie "behind the gates". The American economic landscape is changing, As wealth disparity increases, exclusive communities such as Longboat Key, with abundant upscale home rentals, will continue to attract the discriminating vacationer, who now prefers the comforts of a house to the limits of a hotel room. Personally I always rent flats or condos, as opposed to hotel rooms, when I travel.

There is no lack of advertising and promotion of Longboat Key as a vacation destination on the internet, where all promotion now takes place. What has changed is that increasingly wealthy travelers and seasonal visitors are choosing larger more commodious accommodations. Why stay in a 500 square foot noisy crowded box when you can stay in a beautiful home for not much more?

The town commission may be a day late and a dime short when it comes to accommodation trends on Longboat Key. Their baseless rational that a high level of commercial tourism is necessary to promote home ownership is outmoded in today's new vacation rental world. Increasingly the owner promoted residential rental market is displacing the older hotel room model. The internet is displacing the travel agent. Longboat is unique as there is such a high percentage of wealthy seasonal absentee property owners, coupled with an attractive island ambiance that makes home rentals attractive to travelers.

This is the new reality and the town commission needs to get on board.

Poineers!, Oh Pioneers!

To paraphrase a Walt Whitman poem:

Come my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your lawyers ready,
Have you your agenda? have you your sharp-edged tongues?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Once again this town commission is already girding up its loins to do legal battle with all those who would criticize yet another uninformed venture by a failed group of people who speak with a single tongue it seems. It should be noted that this commission has so far lost every single legal squabble they have precipitated.

This time it will be very expensive and actually create more problems for future generations of taxpayers than the commission's north end beach plan might help.

Below are images of every inlet in the state of Florida. I include them so taxpayers can clearly understand that building two groins at the north end is unique. No other county or municipality has chosen to build groins near an inlet. Why?

I want to use images to try to inform residents just how ill- advised it is to spend tens of millions to construct unneeded groins that will severely and quickly erode Beer-can Island which is county property. Manatee County will surely take issue with their beach being ravaged as the result of two groins adjacent to the island and demand that the beaches not only be restored, but also maintained on a yearly basis. This will be extremely expensive for Longboat taxpayers, year after year. 

If you look at the various inlets you will notice that every single one has two jetties, one on either side of the inlet, and not a single inlet has groins. Does that make you wonder why it is that the town commission has decided to become pioneers in inlet management? 

Do you know that the commission is ready to spend $25 million dollars of your tax dollars on a scheme proposed by people who stand to make millions on the project, without asking for advice from a single outside independent qualified engineering company? Would you be so trusting?

Even though Florida created statutes to encourage investigation of alternative ways of maintaining our beaches, this commission has chosen to proceed in complete ignorance of  what is being done in other communities around the world.

Below are two pictures of the proposed groins at the north end. The second shows how the beach will fare if no groins are erected. There is not enough difference to merit spending tens of millions of tax dollars. Additionally, the town manager has repeatedly cautioned the commission that groins require more sand replenishment than leaving the beach in its natural state. 

Groins and erosion down-drift.

Looking at the Islander, it will

much more severe.

Natural beach with projected erosion

Because this commission refuses to ask for input from other communities that have successful inlet management programs, we taxpayers may end up spending much more money than we need to. Ignorance seldom produces good results. It is important to email the commissioners and demand that they act prudently and in our best interests.

The rational approach to managing our beaches adjacent to our two inlets would be to seek input from communities with successful programs. 

Then there is the issue of spending our money to maintain Beer-can Island which belongs to the county to which we send eighty percent of our Manatee county taxes. Why is this commission asking taxpayers to pay and pay and pay, when we should be demanding the county control their inlet that is responsible for gobbling up 86% of the sand lost off the north end beaches - 86%!

Here are images of every other inlet in Florida - notice NO GROINS.

Accountability and the Common Good

In 1975, while touring Asia with a popular band at the time, we experienced a two hour water outage in  the early afternoon at our hotel in the Ginza district of Tokyo. On the evening TV news he learned that the water commissioner for the Ginza district had committed harikari late that afternoon, for his failure to the Japanese people. I was horrified at the level of accountability expected by their culture at that time.

Today I read that a vice-president of Apple is being fired because he refused to sign a corporate letter to the American people, apologizing for the recent Apple Maps App failures. Once again I was taken back by the level of accountability within the Apple company. Perhaps being held responsible is a contributing factor  to the company's great success and superb quality in their products.

I look at the past three years of governance on Longboat Key. I see no one being held responsible for a dismal record of failed policies that have hobbled our real estate market, compared to likened communities such as Bird and Lido Keys. The property owners within the Islandside community have been denied full access to the real estate market, as a result of unlawful actions taken by the current town commission surrounding the now dead Key Club expansion application, that led to three legal actions, the last of which will be decided in late November. The first two judgments strongly rebuked the town government for violating their own laws and ordinances.

I do not see any of those responsible for the failed policies of the past three years willing to accept any responsibility for their actions.  Save for the unceremonious dismissal of the manager of the Key Club, no one else is taking responsibility for actions that have damaged the Longboat Key economy.

Then I wonder what would come to pass if the entire commission did commit political harikari. Are there any other residents willing to take their places?  The voting record of the current commission has been relatively monolithic when it comes to land use ordinances and changes to the town's Comprehensive Plan. This commission has devoted its energies almost exclusively to pro-development and pro-commercial tourism  legislation.

I know there is a great deal of concern and dissatisfaction with the present commission. People come up to me and express their apprehensions and their desire for a change in leadership. I always ask them if they are willing to serve as a town commissioner, or even willing to make the effort to write letters to the present commissioners. We all know their answers by the dearth of candidates and emails appearing in the News. 

I do not see how the current commission can justify their course of action over the past three years with anything but apologies to the residents for having bogged our community down in endless legal battles that so far have gone against the town government. Unfortunately these protracted litigation's have had a serious negative impact on the commerce of the island. 

It is sadly ironic that a pro-business commission has been singularly unsuccessful in attracting any new businesses to Longboat Key. To the contrary, there has been a steady decline in the number of retail businesses on the island along with a steady decline in property values during the past three years. Personally I do not attribute this decline to anything the commissioners have done, because they have done nothing to actually promote commerce. We hear a lot of talk. We do not see things getting better. Where this commission has focused their efforts on gutting our protective land use codes, they should have been working with the real estate community to create coordinated effective national and international marketing efforts to advertise our wonderful town's lifestyle. 

The retail stores on  Longboat Key never played apart in our meteoric development as an exclusive seasonal retirement destination. Likewise the commercial segment of the island's economy will never become a major influence on property values. The types of businesses being promoted by this commission are unneeded by the residential community. The primary concerns of today's Longboat seasonal resident center around restaurants and domestic services including furniture, house painters, appliance repair, Publix and CVS.

If Longboat Key somehow  finds itself on an irreversible course towards commercial tourism becoming the dominant business on the island, there will also be a painful period of transition, taking perhaps a decade or more, where our well-to-do residents will flee the congestion and the constantly changing unfamiliar faces of tourists, for communities just like what exists on Longboat Key right now. If our property owners wanted  to live in Bradenton Beach they certainly have the financial wear-with-all to do so.

If the commercial tourism proposals that have been entertained, and encouraged, by the current commission, come to fruition, the number of tourists on Longboat Key will almost double in a short period of time from current levels - Key Club expansion, Colony rebuild, Hilton expansion, north end motel. This is a huge expansion of tourism in an otherwise bucolic residential community. 

It is the obligation of people holding offices of public trust to act for the common good of their community. This has not been the case for the past three years. Property owner's interests have been ignored while a mostly appointed commission has been devoted to passing ordinances, overlays and codes that are exclusively for the benefit of commercial developers.

If the community at-large does not express their views, then we will continue to have a mostly appointed town government, with a narrow agenda that does little to nothing to promote real estate values over commercial development.

I advocate that the town redirect its energies to clearing the glut of for-sale properties on Longboat Key through a concerted national and international marketing program to attract home buyers. I would much rather see the town pay for effective marketing than architects for yet another plan for a costly, and most likely unneeded, expansion at Bayfront Park. 

This commission has been playing a zero-sum-game with the island's economy.

When a tourist developer wins some residents lose.

Year-to-year Property Values - Aug. 2011-2012

Longboat Key$472,4002.8%

Whitfield$151,40017.7%

Cortez$140,6003.9%

Bradenton Beach$230,8000.4%

Sarasota$130,60011.6%

North Sarasota$74,7008.6%

Note how poorly Bradenton Beach has performed. 

Perhaps tourism is not such a great asset.

We need to do a better job marketing our beautiful community.