When public officials and public figures ask audiences to be kind, you just know they’re reaching for the anti-anxiety meds. You don’t begin a meeting that way if you’re operating from a position of strength, if you know the audience is sympathetic or if you’ve got a reputation for transparency and doing the right thing.
It was pretty clear Monday, as the Key West Planning Board conducted a two-hour listening session, that board members knew the audience wasn’t a friendly bunch. Since Barton W. Smith also added his pleas for kindness, I suspect he wasn’t thrilled either. Doing public business in public ain’t for the faint of heart. Much easier to gather your buddies in a back room.
But they soldiered on, and I’ll cut them some slack because they did listen. (Well, the board did; Smith was a bunch more defensive.) There’s another listening session coming up 5 p.m. April 7. It was originally scheduled for 1, but the board moved it to accommodate day-shift workers.
I was off-island Monday so I watched via Zoom. A couple dozen residents, plus others on Zoom, made their cases against the Bart Smith-crafted changes to Key West housing regulations. Pretty polite, no one arrested, no one running amok (the occasional snarky comments aside). But I’m not sure there were any breakthrough moments. Smith stuck to his guns. The board listened without saying much. Speakers and most in-person and Zoom lurkers likely left wondering if anything was accomplished.
City Hall was, if not standing room only, refreshingly full. Zoom, too. Smith and the Planning Board should not have been surprised at the turnout, nor at the pushback, but it kinda felt like they were. Hence the “please be kind; we are people, too” pleas. The mayor, city manager and several city commissioners were there. We won’t know until the City Commission gets its hands on the final recommendations from the Planning Board whether Monday’s concerns made a lick of difference, or whether the developers get their dream.
Board Chairman Peter Batty opened the meeting with this question to the audience: “What ideas do you have that might help us?” I’ve been thinking about that for a couple days. Here are my observations:
Key West housing | We’re wary of the process
Folks don’t trust the process. Having a well-heeled, well-connected developer rewrite the city’s housing codes and then dump them fully formed on the public breeds outsized contempt, sows irreparable doubt and leads to outright dismissal of the proposals.
There’s no question the city needs to update, clarify and streamline these regulations. (Maybe Smith’s overhaul could have been a starting point, which is, I suspect, what the city staff thought when it tried collaborating with him.)
But letting Smith have his way last month at the Planning Board with but only one “no” vote? That’s not even close to right. Even if there are sensible revisions in Smith’s rewritten code, they don’t pass the sniff test. Not everyone trusts that process to do right by the residents of Key West. These revisions appease developers and suck cash and quality of life out of the island.
It’s understandable that we’re wary of changes that will cement Key West as an occasional retreat for the uber-wealthy while pushing residents and workers up to the Shark Key bridge to face ever-longer commutes.
But there could be opportunities on North Roosevelt (and at Sigsbee in a joint project with the Navy). We ought to embrace the commercial side of North Roosevelt as one gigantic opportunity for higher buildings and denser development — in turn for a requirement that commercial development and redevelopment build market-rate and workforce housing along that side of the boulevard.
North Roosevelt ain’t pretty. It’s a two-mile, paved-over, 1970-ish strip mall with acres of pavement, old buildings and a bazillion curb cuts. Yeah, the view across the water ain’t too shabby, but that commercial and retail side?
How much uglier could North Roosevelt get if we lifted height restrictions and allowed increased density? I’m sure when Publix completes its new retail center on the old Searstown property, it’s going to be a huge improvement. But I’d be a lot happier if Publix had had to add two or three floors of housing on top of its planned razing and rebuilding.
We didn’t learn anything new Monday and I suspect there was little mind-changing. A lot of folks have hardened their positions into “developers good; developers bad.” That won’t get us anywhere. Let’s send this mess back to the capable city planning staff to sort out, ensure that both new development and redevelopment are included and find workable, if quasi-unpopular, compromises for the most divisive points of contention.
Key West’s quality of life, its unique sense of place, cannot fall exclusively into the hands of a developers’ cabal — or into stasis driven by wishes and dreams that the island never change.
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