A conversation with Dave Brenner

Dave Brenner started visiting Longboat Key in 1967. He’s lived on the island permanently since 2000. Although he had no real intention of getting heavily involved in town business, he served  as vice mayor and commissioner and co-founded the Longboat Key Foundation. We sat down with Brenner to talk about what big issues he thinks Longboat is facing and where he sees the Key going in the future.

What issues do you think are biggest on Longboat today?

Well, short term, this whole discussion about the Colony Beach Resort is pretty obvious, but I think it’s a bigger issue than the just the Colony. It gets to the future. What kind of tourist construction do you want to see? 

The No. 1 issue, and maybe for the state, is going to relate to sea-level rising. I’m not a scientist or what have you, but if you raise the sea level here, I’ll say 3 feet, I’ve got a hunch my property goes, or if I’m forced to rebuild, it’s certainly not going to be where it was. If the canals on the other side are 3 feet higher, the bottom line is you’re going to have less buildable land, and then you get the whole question, well what do you want that to look like? So, I think it gets talked about as if it’s a theory. 

I think the sea-level issue is going to be the thing that’s going to make a big difference here if nothing is done about it. The state is nothing but coastline.

Do you think if more people lived here more than six months some of these issues would get solved more quickly?

I think there will be more attention to it. I think the apparent lack of interest by the public in governance has had an impact. I ducked into the charter review committee. I think there were two people in the room. 

Our rules are pretty straightforward here. But if density, for example, is such an issue, which it is to many, why wasn’t the room sort of jam-packed? They’ll care over coffee and tea or write letters, but seriously that’s one of the shortcomings of the short-term visitors because if I’m coming for two weeks’ vacation, I can’t imagine spending a couple of days in a town meeting. But, that’s where those kind of decisions are made. 

To do many of those things [density] costs money. It’s going to impact your taxes. Most people don’t like to see their taxes go up, particularly if they don’t know why they’re going up. It’s sort of a crazy situation.

Do you think there needs to be younger voices around the island?

The answer is yes, but the real problem is how are you going to do that? I mean, for the sake of argument you take what’s going on for, I don’t know, the past 15 to 20 years. The impact of the computer and the internet and the ability to communicate, it’s entirely different. If Longboat had a different kind of communication network, even the part-timers might say, “Well, I can do this. Yeah, I’m home in Akron, Ohio, but I can pay attention better to what’s going on on Longboat Key because that’s my second home.”

There’s a planning element that goes to all of this that does not get attention. I think one of the reasons you see all the hullabaloo about the underground utility project is, it’s a future-oriented project and most people don’t really think about it ... you’ve really got to take them through the whole process.

 I’m not really sure as a community we’ve done as good an education job as we might have to tell people, “Let me tell you what’s going to happen on the underground.” 

As I say, some of this is future-oriented, some people’s eyes are going to glaze over. [They say] “I’m not really concerned about that because I’m not going to be here.” That’s a true statement, but that’s a different problem for Longboat Key. People don’t give a damn about the future.

Why do you think people want to limit tourism?

Well, traffic is clearly the big issue, but when you have overloads of people, which we tend to get, you get other problems.

Just a case in point, I think it’s fair to say that security on this Key is pretty good. [There’s] a competent police department. [They’re] on top of things. They know people and what have you, but it’s for all intents and purposes geared toward a certain level of a population. But I’m sure in that period from December through March the security gets stretched.

Many of us came from large urban areas, and every time you went out, you made sure your front door was locked and you kept an eye on the people who were walking around. One of the nice things about being here on Longboat is that I don’t think about that. Most of the people you see either say “hello” or “how are you” because you feel like you know them even if you don’t. That’s hard to come by. You can’t legislate that. That’s an enormity kind of feeling. 

If you have hundreds of people, you put your head down and you plow through wherever you’re going.

Where do you see Longboat in 20 years?

Well, ideally, I’d like it exactly the way it is, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. I think these external factors (density, climate change and a rising sea level), if not dealt with, are going to make it less appealing and much more like every other tourist town. 

If we don’t deal with the density issue in a thoughtful way — I think that part of The Colony Beach Resort thing has a lot do with it — then you’re going to have, at least for a little while, an explosion of people. 

But at some point, those people are going to say, “Well, I went to Longboat Key. It was awful. I had to wait in line for everything. Getting to the beach is not what it used to be because the sea levels have risen and there is no beach.”

Even if your goal is to have the place exactly like it is now, that is probably a pretty good goal. Because ... of the environment we have with it, and in conjunction with that environment,  we ought to do planning that enhances our ability to maintain what we’ve got.