Julee Marzella with Pirates Saving Paradise, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the group’s efforts.
Preserving Little Torch Key is one of the goals of Pirates Saving Paradise.
Marzella explained, “The county has approved a development order to allow Little Palm Dolphin Resort Development to build a 38 unit resort hotel with eight employee housing units. What they’re calling a hotel is these 38 units will have two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a full kitchen, a full laundry room, a great room, a lanai, a patio, covered parking and they are they are about four stories high. Bottom level, first level with main living, third level has the bedrooms with a cathedral ceiling is what it appears. So in my mind, they’re more like attached condo units than hotel units.”
It would be about 160 people on property plus the affordable housing employee units.
Marzella said, “Our biggest concern, aside from the units themselves being out of scale, style and character of our neighborhood, they have proposed, and the county approved again, that all the traffic from that resort is going to be put onto Pirates Road. They are not going to continue to use their current direct access to US 1. They’re going to take all the traffic onto Pirates Road and Pirates Road is the only access we have to the 300 plus homes in our neighborhood. That intersection there at US 1 is already very congested and very dangerous. In fact, a woman was from our neighborhood was severely injured and life flighted out just a few months ago, because of an accident at that intersection.”
Is there a solution?
Marzella said, “I feel it’s impractical to develop there at all at that scale. It’s just, it’s too massive. It’s too big for the area and it creates a terrible traffic nightmare for us.”
How much area are we talking about?
Marzella said, “The buildable acreage on that site is 3.6 acres, I believe. They have requested a parking variance. They have a boat ramp there. They have closed the boat ramp and marina to the public. That’s one of our concerns as well, because one of the requirements of getting a major conditional use permit is that they have to maintain or they’re supposed to maintain access to the waterfront areas and they’ve closed that now to the public. The variance is requesting elimination of the boat ramp parking so that they can have enough room to fit the required car parking for this massive resort. They don’t have enough space for both the boat ramp parking and the car parking. So they’ve requested a variance to eliminate that boat parking.”
An appeal has been filed through the division of Administrative Hearings.
Marzella said, “We’ve hired Jane Graham from Sunshine City Law and she filed our appeal with DOAH, that Division of Administrative Hearings. It’s been fully briefed at this point and we are now waiting to hear when our hearing date will be.”
What is Pirates Saving Paradise?
Marzella said, “It’s big, nearly everyone in the community is opposed. I conducted an online survey and had over 200 responses to this survey and of those, it was like 99% opposed. There was the only person in our neighborhood that was for it.”
Was the opposition heard before the permitting was approved?
Marzella said, “There were several community meetings that the community attended and we all voiced our concerns. We made requests. Prior to Hurricane Irma, they had about 12 units on that site that they were running out and we asked them to reduce the size more in keeping with what was there before. They rejected that request. We asked them to reduce the height of these buildings, because these things are triple the height of any of the ground level homes in our neighborhood. Then we have elevated homes in our neighborhood. These things are 20 feet higher than the elevated homes in our neighborhood. So we asked them to reduce the height, and they rejected that as well. Then we asked them to use their access out onto US 1 to get a variance from FDOT to cntinue using their direct access to US 1, which by the way they’re required to do. In order to get a major conditional use permit for a hotel of this size, they are required to have direct access to US 1. They rejected that as well. Still, it was approved with putting all their traffic onto Pirates Road. If I recall correctly at the meeting, their response was that it was too cumbersome to get the variance from FDOT.”
Does DOAH have the authority to stop the development?
Marzella said, “That’s actually the first step in the appeal process. You have to exhaust all administrative remedies before you can even think about taking it to civil court or circuit court. At DOAH, the judge can either can affirm, reverse or modified the development order. So it’s hard saying what will happen. One of our main concerns about it was that they signed the development order when they did not have the parking variance in place. To this day, they still haven’t approved a parking variance and during the Planning Commission’s October 25 public hearing, the development review manager, he testified that the variance would have to be secured before the development order would be signed and they didn’t follow that. They went ahead and signed the development order on December 5. So that that’s one of our concerns that we’re asking the DOAH judge to look at. I think in general in the Keys, given the water quality issues that we’re currently having with the fish spinning that they’ve been seeing and the deaths of the small tooth sawfish, I mean, people in general have been standing up and pushing back against overdevelopment in the Keys. A lot of us feel that the water quality issues we’re having, the problems that they’re having dealing with wastewater, our drinking water system has been taxed, we feel because of overdevelopment. In our neighborhood, in particular, those of us that live there, we chose that area, because it’s a quiet, it’s small, very tranquil community. It’s truly a vestige of what life in the Keys used to be and here they come again, with another towering structure to bring in a whole bunch of tourists that are going to destroy our quality of life.”
For more information, click here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1084161769664023/about/?paipv=0&eav=AfaYKkdkaojiJzIck9F69KBvOYtpVDpJODd0orQdCzBJRzltZk5YLLkg9BydpaF9Slw&_rdr
Marzella said, “I’d be happy to answer any questions. Our email is easy to remember, it’s piratessaving [email protected]. If they have any questions for me, or would like to help, we could certainly use the donations. We’re right now trying to raise another $9,000 just to cover our legal fees. It’s a very expensive process trying to appeal one of these development orders.”