It's Hot at the Beach

It's Hot at the Beach

By Francis X. Gilpin

Associate Editor

Feuding St. Pete Beach residents seem to agree on one thing, if little else. The Pinellas County barrier island city has no desire to be another Clearwater Beach.

That means no tall condominium buildings that make city streets look like urban canyons. "We don't want to change," says St. Pete Beach resident Mike Cohen. "We want to be a residential resort community."

But there is heated disagreement about how to maintain the charm of St. Pete Beach while modernizing tourist accommodations.

Like other tourism-dependent Florida cities along the Gulf Coast, St. Pete Beach land prices have spiked skyward. That coupled with an aging stock of post-World War II-era motels has city leaders worried about competing with ritzy new resorts in Orlando.

A three-year-long attempt to loosen development rules has pitted local hoteliers, real estate developers and St. Pete Beach commissioners against a vocal group of city hall critics, led by former Mayor Terry Gannon.

Gannon's group, Citizens for Responsible Growth, is afraid that the city commission is engineering a backdoor transformation of the old motels into high-density condos for the profit of a select few.

"We're totally in favor of hotels," Gannon says.

But Citizens for Responsible Growth says the city's proposed master plan isn't tight enough to restrict tall condos. "The plan they have now has no benefit for the community," says Gannon. "But I see a lot of benefit to the developers."

Many beach cities are debating the wisdom of converting kitschy motels to luxury condos. But the government critics in St. Pete Beach have introduced another question into the redevelopment debate: Would the city go so far as to condemn existing homes to attract high-end developers?

Each side of the St. Pete Beach debate says the other isn't playing fair.

City commissioners have gone to court to stop what they consider the Gannon group's misleading campaign to democratize the process by letting voters approve redevelopment plans.

Gannon group lawyer Kenneth L. Weiss, who drafted a series of anti-condo referenda that the city has tied up in court, says St. Pete Beach commissioners are limiting citizen rights to petition their government.

The city has hired Thomas G. Pelham, a lawyer in Fowler White Boggs Banker PA's Tallahassee office, to duel with Weiss in court. Pelham, who studied land-use law at Harvard, was community affairs secretary for former Gov. Bob Martinez.

Weiss has some expertise of his own. The Treasure Island attorney represented another group of dissidents in his Pinellas beach city two years ago during a similar planning dispute.

The suspicions of the Gannon group notwithstanding, St. Pete Beach leaders also voice a preference for hotels over condos.

Luxury hotels would bring a moneyed crowd to patronize local retailers and restaurants most of the year. Condos could get snapped up by out-of-state buyers who might not set foot in nearby shops and eateries for more than a few weeks out of the year.

"You can walk around and see the hurricane shutters," Mayor Ward J. Friszolowski says of the current crop of low-rise seasonal condos.

Yet government regulation and the real estate market are conspiring to favor condo building.

Coastal development codes force prospective hotel operators to acquire more land for new projects than was needed in the 1950s or 1960s.

"Land prices are soaring. The condo market is hot," says Friszolowski, a St. Pete Beach architect. "When you combine those two, property owners are selling out for condos."

The city's answer has been a plan to permit lodging developers to construct somewhat higher hotels so they can recoup the bigger investment in land, according to Friszolowski.

But the drafting of the plan has degenerated into a nasty squabble reminiscent of the Treasure Island confrontation of 2003, which featured an unsuccessful attempt to recall a city commissioner from office.

Last spring, both sides in St. Pete Beach formed political action committees to gird for their legal and electoral battles.

The city hopes to encourage upscale hotel construction by creating a redevelopment district wherein future tax receipts from appreciating property values can be used to fund the effort.

But Gannon appealed to civic pride in blasting the proposed district. He noted that the district designation requires the city to declare certain parts of St. Pete Beach to be blighted under state law.

Gannon also stoked homeowner fears by predicting the city will seize residential parcels within the district for what could be high-rise condos masquerading as hotels.

"Do we want to give the city the power to take property by simply calling it 'blighted'?" Gannon asked in a June 16 flier mailed to residents. "This will take away your property rights."

His timing couldn't have been better. Within a week of the flier mailing, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly endorsed municipal condemnations to promote economic development.

Citizens for Responsible Growth collected 1,100 signatures to place development restrictions before the voters of St. Pete Beach, a city of almost 10,000 year-round residents.

St. Pete Beach officials say they have no intention of grabbing any of the 378 dwellings within the proposed redevelopment district for hotel use.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruling sent the Gannon group to the copy shop again. "If you do not want to sell your home to developers, the city will force you to sell under eminent domain," another Citizens for Responsible Growth flier reads.

The flier included telephone numbers for Friszolowski and two staunch redevelopment allies on the city commission, Vice Mayor Deborah L. Martohue and Deborah L. Nicklaus, whose family is in the local lodging business.

Angry city commissioners denounced Gannon's tactics.

"It had to get emotional," says Cohen, who favors the city plan after splitting with Gannon and his followers. "They need the emotions because they don't have the facts."

But city officials and Cohen have lost their reserve at times, too.

Cohen, who chairs the pro-redevelopment Support Your City's Future PAC, complained to City Clerk Theresa B. McMaster in July that Citizens for Responsible Growth's PAC filed a flawed financial report. Several donors were listed as "retired" when Cohen claimed they still work. He proceeded to inform the clerk's office of their occupations, city records show.

There was a bigger blowup last month.

Harry Metz, deputy treasurer of Citizens for Responsible Growth, told city officials that his group was gathering signatures for new referenda in Belle Vista Park on Aug. 12 when the mayor's wife drove up. Words were exchanged between Amber Friszolowski and signature seekers.

The departure of the mayor's wife was soon followed by the arrival of a St. Pete Beach police officer, according to city records. Police evicted Citizens for Responsible Growth from the city park.

City Manager Michael P. Bonfield later apologized to Citizens for Responsible Growth for a misunderstanding between his office and police. Bonfield says the cop should have only asked the petitioners to remove stick signs from public grounds, not the petitioners themselves from the park.

The under-funded Citizens for Responsible Growth has gained from local news media coverage of such gaffes, and the Gannon group appears to have made some inroads with local public opinion. Support Your City's Future PAC isn't underestimating the potential impact at the polls.

Last month, Cohen notified the city clerk that Support Your City's Future had begun to phone voters urging defeat of the various referenda that Gannon wants to put in front of them.

If the referenda survive the city's court challenge, Citizens for Responsible Growth hopes to have the questions on a city ballot by no later than next spring's municipal election.

Gannon denies his name will be on the same ballot. The former mayor says he won't try to reclaim the office, contrary to the whispers of his foes.

"I see no reason to do that to myself again," says Gannon.