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Height-limit compromise reached during workshop

Whether restrictions for the resort district will please St. Pete Beach residents remains to be seen.

By PAUL SWIDER
Published August 14, 2005

Through sometimes nasty squabbles, the St. Pete Beach City Commission reached significant new agreements on building heights and other parts of its redevelopment proposals at a workshop Wednesday, but the breakthrough is yet to be tested with the public.

During a four-hour conversation about the large resort district along Gulf Boulevard, commissioners debated math, mass and marketing in considering how tall and/or wide new hotels should be. Commissioner Ed Ruttencutter repeatedly urged that other commissioners' notions of the ideal district wouldn't pass muster with opponents of tall buildings, yet, in the end, he proposed a compromise that could still see 20-story hotels in the city.

"The opposition in the general public isn't square footage," Ruttencutter said, "it's height. They don't want to feel intimidated."

At one point, city staff used the example plan opponents have used of a proposed Clearwater hotel shorter than those possible in St. Pete Beach. Staff said the building, regulated mainly by height, would fill nearly its entire lot and block views and beach access. Ruttencutter said the example was ill-chosen because St. Pete Beach would never allow such a building, to which Commissioner Nancy Markoe responded: "So, aren't we doing well?"

"Height isn't the only issue," she added. She reminded the board that the city regulated height in Pass-a-Grille and got low houses that were unsightly boxes. "To think that by limiting height you solve all other problems, you don't."

A good bit of discussion also revolved around Ruttencutter's desire to regulate the average size of hotel rooms. Other commissioners preferred regulating the mass of a building generally through calculations of "floor area ratio," a relationship of total building square footage to lot size.

"FAR obscures what we're doing so the public can't understand it," Ruttencutter said.

Mayor Ward Friszolowski, an architect, said FAR is an industry standard and a means of keeping a building from overwhelming its site and neighborhood. The staff also suggested that regulating room size might generate unintended consequences and unattractive developments. Commissioners in favor of FAR said dictating room size would be guessing at market demands. They said residents who feared large hotel rooms might later be converted into residential condominiums need not worry because it would be illegal. The board eventually agreed on a FAR standard based, mathematically, on an average hotel room size of 850 square feet.

The commissioners also decided tall hotels would have to be at least 100 feet off Gulf Boulevard to keep them from forming a canyon. They also discussed calculations to keep buildings from interfering with neighbors while still leaving flexibility for creative designs. They even talked about quadrupling parking requirements for bars and doubling those for restaurants.

The real breakthrough came when Ruttencutter suggested the city might allow buildings up to 20 stories only if they were used strictly as hotels with no residential units. The rest of the board said they were happy with that because they wanted to encourage hotels in any case. Board members also agreed that any strictly residential building in the resort area could be no more than five stories, while a building with both hotel and residential units could be no more than 10 stories.

"I knew if we talked about this long enough, we could find a solution," said a smiling Commissioner Deborah Martohue.

The commissioners said they were pleased to have reached harmony among themselves, but their compromises may not satisfy residents who have proposed referenda against tall buildings and other development plans. Ruttencutter's repeated references to public opinion may not reflect reality.

"I don't think Ed is necessarily representing anybody," said Terry Gannon, the leader of a political committee opposed to the redevelopment plans. "With the information they talked about, I don't think anybody can tell you what the people will think."

Gannon said the commissioners have made their plans hard to swallow by complicating a good proposal from the city's planning consultant. Gannon and his colleagues want residents to be able to vote on city redevelopment, but he said he thinks the city's present plan would fail because its detail makes voters leery.

"This plan is so complex," Gannon said. "They don't understand it. We don't understand it. It shouldn't be that way."

He said the city needs to confine its proposals to the resort district and to bring back the Orlando firm Glatting Jackson to fix the proposal.

"I would not be surprised if (redevelopment) passes," Gannon said, "because the city will eventually have to work really hard to simplify what they are doing."

In other commission action, the city Tuesday endorsed conceptual recreation plans that would include a public pool, a dog park, a new skate park and a "splashpad" where fountains on a soft surface would give small children a place to cool off.

[Last modified August 14, 2005, 00:53:19]