A newly formed, grassroots group gives no quarter to Key West attorney and developer advocate Barton W. Smith for his attempted rewriting of Key West’s Land Development Regulations Chapter 122. This is what Protect Our Residential Neighborhoods emailed last week:
“This 19-page scheme to forever change the landscape of Key West was hatched in the backrooms of a yacht club, formed and shaped secretly by prominent developers’ attorneys and their cronies. They represent a developer’s dream and a vibrant community’s worst nightmare.”
I did what any curious journalist would do; I went down the rabbit hole. Read the documents on the city’s website for the January and February Planning Board meetings. Watched the board’s Feb. 20 meeting. Did my best to decipher who said what to whom and why. I went back to July and November 2024 meetings. Retraced my steps a couple times.
It’s hard to come to any conclusion but this: With but one member dissension, the Planning Board is giddily onboard with Smith’s proposed developer’s dream. So much so, the board is willing to shunt aside recommendations of the city’s Planning Director Katie P. Halloran and her staff, who have been working to update and revise existing regulations to reflect the challenging realities of providing affordable and workforce housing on a 4.2-square-mile island with virtually no land for new development.
The board is chomping at the bit to recommend that the full City Commission overturn the city’s existing affordable and workforce housing development regulations. At the very least, if the Smith et al. proposals are adopted, existing Key West housing units could become luxury rental or second-home owner units and any required affordable and workforce housing would be relegated to locations from here to Mile Marker 11, which includes all of Big Coppitt up to the Shark Key Bridge.
In short, rich people live in Key West. Workers gotta commute from way up the Keys.
I don’t know about the Yacht Club’s backrooms, but 40-plus years of covering local government taught me this: Folks gravitate toward backrooms when they want to hide something they know will outrage voters. It’s a handy way to circumvent the Sunshine Law. (I once walked in on a Virginia city school board meeting in the backroom of a local grocery, members sitting on upturned lettuce crates. They’d been outed by my publisher who was best buds with all of them.)
Planning board vote removes redevelopment restrictions
There’s no doubt about the city’s housing crisis. There’s no argument about the difficulties in and outsized costs of providing workforce housing, whether it’s for an entry-level bartender or for teachers, health care and law enforcement staff and local professionals.
And we cannot ignore the effects of Florida’s new Live Local Act, which preempts “cities and counties from requiring that a proposed development meeting those above-referenced eligibility requirements obtain a zoning or land use change, special exception, conditional use approval, variance or comprehensive plan amendment for use, density, height or floor area ratio.”
Our current rules need updating, and few solutions are likely to garner full-throated consensus. Halloran and her staff have worked diligently with other city departments, Smith and the Planning Board to thread the needle of conflicting priorities and possible alternatives.
The Planning Board seems to prefer handing the keys to Smith, giving him virtually unlimited time to make his case, tossing him softball questions larded with glowing words and darn-near high-fiving themselves and Smith at the conclusion of their five-to-one approval of all of his demands. The board patronizingly dismissed the two residents who spoke publicly against the proposals, all but patting them on their little heads. The board was unfazed by city staff recommendations and concerns. (Only board member Ray Warren opposed motions and amendments favoring Smith.)
Look, I get the need for pragmatic compromise and I may even swallow some version of “build housing farther up the Keys, where land is available.” But the board’s enabling of a private developer to change city laws to benefit almost exclusively his clients and to allow those developers to buy their ways out of the mandate to provide affordable and workforce housing ain’t the way to do this.
There will be two public workshops, March 10 and April 7, 1 to 3 p.m., at City Hall. Get there if you can.
None of this is a done deal. Dustups are likely when the City Commission gets the recommendations from the Planning Board. One way or the other, when the final Chapter 122 regulations are approved, we’ll know whether the Key West commissioners, as well as the Planning Board, are willingly in cahoots with private developers determined to cement Key West as a haven for the uber-wealthy.
LEARN MORE
Protect Our Residential Neighborhoods | New grassroots group
Watch the Feb. 20 Planning Board meeting
Read the Feb. 20 staff report, including proposed changes, which the board approved.
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