And the beat goes on and on and on
I would feel a moral obligation if not a legal one to enforce that regulation. I would go so far as to resign my seat rather than be involved in such a failure of my oath.
AL GREEN
Contributing Columnist
green@lbknews.com
It is beginning to look like the Town Commission will do anything including the reading aloud of every bit of testimony concerning the Longboat Key Club expansion rather than make a decision.
Learning about the idea that a commissioner should meet to work out a compromise about tee times for the golf courses seems to me like having a discussion on whether you will need to take jacket on a honeymoon when you hate the potential bride and have no thought of getting married.
You will later find that if you already agreed on the honeymoon, you must have agreed on the marriage.
If there is any rational person who can say, let alone a Town Commissioner who has sat through hundreds of hours and read hundreds of pages, that he or she hasn’t made up their minds, I wouldn’t believe them.
I thought that this Commission had brought down on itself as much ridicule as it could withstand with their hours and hours of arguing abut a tenth of a mil on the annual tax bill. However, their obvious avoidance of making a decision on this case is ludicrous.
It is quite obvious that there is a great deal of sympathy for both sides and equally as obvious, any vote is going to upset someone. The irony is that the opposition candidates have all made their position so crystal clear that none of the commissioners who are being opposed would gain anything by voting for the expansion anyway.
If the commissioners believe that the Club has a right to have their property rezoned and feel the residents rights are subsidiary, then they should have the courage to say so. This decision should be made before the election. It would make a farce of quasi judicial proceedings if a new Commission having not heard one word of testimony had the responsibility for the vote. If anyone is looking for a hook to hang an appeal on, that is one that jumps right out. There is crude saying we all know but cannot be printed in a newspaper, but the final s portion tells us “or get off the pot”.
In my opinion, the issue that overshadows every other is the simple fact that the people most directly affected by any change in the operation are almost unanimously against it and have spent an awful to of their own money to protect themselves and so far have been completely abandoned by the Town Commission. The residents of Islandside spent over a billion dollars purchasing their homes base upon a very simple fact; that was that the Town and Arvida had made an agreement that the gated community would be a residential area. The parcels were doled out that way, the maximum density was set and to avoid any concerns, the agreement set forth a clear statement; “there will be no transfer of density”. If I were sitting on the Commission, I would feel a moral obligation if not a legal one to enforce that regulation. I would go so far as to resign my seat rather than be involved in such a failure of my oath.
If, in the future, the operators of the golf portion of the property were to convince the residential owners that it is in their best interests to allow some amendment to this rule, as a commissioner, I would then try to decide if it is in the best interest of the Town in general but under no circumstances would I sell out the citizens of this Town who depend upon their elected officials to protect them from the ravages of over-development.
With the possible shift of a Commissioner and the uncertainty of the coming election, I don’t hold out too much hope for the residents involved. It will take a miracle to save the quiet upscale residential quality of Islandside along with an election victory for both Lee Rothenberg and Peter O’Connor.
One of the saddest features of this upcoming decision, the one portion of the hearings that should have been the most relevant was the ‘people to be heard’ segment. If any of the candidates contesting the current commissioners were to vote, they would be voting without hearing the most compelling testimony.
