Now the legal battle begins

AL GREEN
Contributing Columnist
green@lbknews.com

Despite all the rumors floated about that Joe Lesser doesn’t like to be involved in lawsuits, his team has landed him right in the middle of one, as IPOC has challenged the decision of the town to allow the expansion of the Longboat Key Club & Resort.

Although for legal purposes, the town is the primary opponent in the IPOC appeal; under the terms of the approval, all legal fees must be absorbed by Loeb Realty, and one way or another they will be involved throughout the entire affair. Like BP in the Gulf disaster, they will see their money spent without having any say in how it is spent.

Even if the club prevails in what can be a long drawn-out process, they still will have to deal with what can turn out to be a major stumbling block, the phasing-in process. Although there are separate individual projects combined in the total application, Loeb is required to deal with them in a certain order.

One of the first issues that will have to be addressed is the reconstruction of the golf course. Unfortunately, for those who are most interested in that procedure, there are no specific details as to what will constitute reconstruction of Islandside. Michael Welly, the club manager, is on the record as saying the only way it can be done successfully is by introducing paspalum grass for the fairways and greens. Since this must be done with plugs and watered in the early stage with fresh water, it can be a time consuming affair and would not be cheap. It will be interesting to see if the Town Commission decides to let the club off the hook and allow them to do the usual lick-and-a-promise, which would make this about the third time this easy way has been tried and will have the same result. For the uninitiated, the problem is that the salinity in the well water doesn’t allow new growth, so replanting or reseeding is a temporary and futile exercise.

Members of the club will be disappointed to find out that Harbourside courses are not included in any restoration requirement as these are in worse shape than Islandside. It also means that the rationale for the expansion in order to create the revenue needed has been totally ignored. This is very ironic but only one example of how the Town Commission took their eye off of the ball in their mad haste to approve the project.

A sidebar but another potential intramural argument that was never addressed is where the new hotel guests would go to the beach. Resort owners have been given to understand that there could be a beach on the Pass. Anyone who knows the area can tell you that isn’t going to happen. Have the resort owners considered whether they will have any option if more and more strangers start using their pool access as a way to the beach, or are the new hotel guests coming to a hotel on the Gulf and not finding their way to the water? If turtles can do it, people who stay in hotels near the water also will make their way. Would it be considered trespassing?

The history of the legal battles between the club and their opponents has so far been in favor of the club. The threat of expensive legal costs has up to now discouraged the injured parties. It will be interesting to see if the deep pockets of the members of IPOC reverse this trend.

In the Tee Time lawsuit, the pressure of the Longboat Observer over high legal costs pushed that suit to an early surrender with the club prevailing. In the Moorings case, the entire episode is cloudy and no one seems to want to discuss how his or her problems were resolved. E-mails at the time seem to give the impression that it was proving very difficult to get a majority of the slip owners to contribute to a legal defense fund. Maybe attorney Michael Furen’s famous hourly fee didn’t affect the conclusion, but since the Moorings Board insists it made no deal with the club, something had to be the motivator to cool the ardor of the slip owners. However, in this new case, it seems that Loeb Realty is faced with a more determined opponent.

For the present, there is really nothing Loeb Realty needs to do. They can continue to hold fast and hope IPOC runs out of steam. Some have said that Mr. Lesser still thinks of Longboat Key as a small town in Florida that is just too big for its britches. However, there are a lot of very wealthy pissed-off people living on Islandside, and he seems to bring out their belligerency. I still to this day do not understand how a smart guy, who can be charming when he chooses, has allowed it to drag on as long as this.

If, in the next few years, Loeb either raises the money to proceed or finds a buyer, we could and probably would see some sort of a compromise. Anything they can do with land that they already own and previously weren’t allowed to touch before the rezoning is pure gravy. It doesn’t make any sense to keep saying things like “the numbers don’t add up.” I can see Shane Eagan shaking his head. He thought getting the right to build 24 villas was a very good deal.

This will be a drawn-out process. It will probably be a much different world by the time the money comes available. If the economic conditions improve to that extent, so might the mood of the residents. Once they feel secure again and realize their world is not ending, who can tell, they just might go back to being the old Longboat Key, where site plans deal with specific details and P&Z boards and commissions may not always be made up of such credulous groups.

Phase one of this story is over. Phase two will start when the appeal process gets on a court calendar. I have a feeling that most people following this affair know how it’s going to come out in the end. It just needs time for the lawyers to get a little richer and Mr. Lesser to do what all smart real estate developers do, meet your opposition half way.

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