The Colony?

AL GREEN
Contributing Columnist
green@lbknews.com

With the judge’s decision to place The Colony in Chapter 7 liquidation, the final chapter of the first edition about this vital part of Longboat Key has been written.

We will now hear and read accolades to the warm outgoing hospitality of its founder and owner, Murf Klauber, and how he will be missed. Some of us will wonder why we never got to know this person.

Why Murf Klauber decided back in the eighties to go to war with the town and stay at war is a facet of his personality that I have never been able to fathom.

I once asked one of his partners in the original purchase of The Colony complex to describe Murf to me. He said, “Murf is a man who never thinks about how he is going to get to second base until he is on first.” He had incredibly inventive ideas. He had them in Buffalo and brought his imaginative ideas to the local area. Unfortunately he sometimes let his enthusiasms run ahead of the practical, and he suspected anyone who might disagree was either an idiot or maliciously trying to thwart his plans.

He decided Longboat Key needed a high-class spa and started to build it before he secured a construction loan, and when he didn’t get one, he had to stop work. With some very clever legal legerdemain, he managed to convince a jury that it was all the town’s fault. This gave him a financial shot in the arm, but the underpinnings just weren’t strong enough.

He fought about everything he could fight about. Whether it was speed bumps, advertising policies, jetties or tiki huts, he was always ready to drop his gloves and start swinging.

Possibly if the owners of the individual units had seen some annual income from their rental usage, they might have been willing to invest more, but it looked too much like a one-way street. Finally the two sides built up so much ill will between them, the final result became inevitable.

What will come next is not very clear. Not only does the Klauber family own the center core of the restaurant and shops, but also the balance of the property cannot be rezoned to allow the unit owners to operate themselves as condos. The density is too intense for residential zoning. Since no one wants to vacation in a run down boarded up housing development that could quickly come to look like downtown Detroit, something needs to be done.

Given the current economic conditions, a bank or hedge fund is not going to be anxious to lend start-up money.

If the unit owners could buy out the Klauber interests, they could then market the property and possibly sell it to a hotel developer. The property would be the largest single piece of land fronting the Gulf from Pensacola to Naples. With the town’s current attitude on assisting tourism, an investor could almost set his own terms on density and any other code remissions they would deem necessary.

No investor would want to start with the units and then deal with the Klaubers. That is real estate developer’s hell. However, it isn’t in the Klauber’s interests to see the entire property continue to deteriorate. The units themselves are too old and tired to just start over with a different owner, so any continuation of the Colony as it is now constituted would require extensive rehabilitation, and this would bring in not only FEMA rules but state rules on coastline construction. In short, it would cost too much.

I may eat my words, but if I had to go out on a limb and predict the future of The Colony, it would be a high-rise luxury hotel. Someone might think differently, but they better have deep pockets and long-term, patient investors.

In the meantime, so far, there are no winners.

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