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© St. Petersburg Times, published January 22, 2003
SAFETY HARBOR -- Nine months ago, a group of residents and business owners stacked plastic blocks to demonstrate what they envisioned might become the Harborside at Safety Harbor.
Late Tuesday night, city commissioners brought Harborside closer to reality, approving the Orlando developer's proposal to build a 65-foot, $20-million mixed-use development in the heart of downtown.
But it wasn't without opposition.
Nearly 100 people packed the small City Hall meeting room and spilled out onto the sidewalk outside to have a say about the biggest thing to come to Safety Harbor in years.
City Commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of the site plan and a waiver to allow the complex to be built over the three-story limit set by the city's development code.
"I'm not surprised," said John Marling, chairman of Investors Realty, which owns Village Partners. Of the long approval process, he added, "I don't think we were pushed too long. It was just a challenge."
"But now our work begins," he added. Village Partners will buy 3.3 acres on the corner of Main Street and Bayshore Boulevard from Clearwater resident Walter Loick.
Loick stands to make somewhere between $700,000 to $1-million per acre on the sale.
The complex will be made up of restaurant, office, retail and residential space. It includes four buildings, two of which would each have 18 condominium units built over parking spaces for 80 cars. Another building would have six retail shops of just under 900 square feet each and include six two-story townhomes, for a total of three stories. The anchor building on the corner of Bayshore and Main would have office and retail space and a restaurant.
To get the deal done, the developer agreed to reduce the height of the building slated for the corner by one floor.
Commissioner Robin Borland, who cast the only dissenting vote, prefaced her decision by dispelling "myths" that there was no interest from other developers to do what Village Partners are proposing and warned that approving this plan would facilitate overdevelopment.
"I believe in responsible development," she said. "The two problems we have in Pinellas County are traffic and drainage, and that has been caused because codes have been changed to accommodate development."
"These codes were set for a reason," she added. "We need to adhere to them."
Other conditions for approval agreed to by Village Partners include extensive landscaping, street resurfacing and the dedication of the development's plaza on Bayshore Boulevard.