Planning effort generates ideas for island's north end

Dream big.

That, in a nutshell, was the task of the approximately 40 people who participated in a planning charrette Saturday, Jan. 28, at the Longboat Key Center for the Arts, a Division of Ringling College of Art and Design.

They weren’t supposed to worry about the dollars or developers it would take to make those dreams come true.

“It was a very lively discussion,” said Longbeach Village resident Kip O’Neill. “A lot of ideas came out of it.”

The planning charrette was the second step of a community-based planning effort for Longboat Key’s north end that Longboat Key Revitalization Task Force Chairman and former Mayor George Spoll announced in December. The first step took place earlier this month when five New College students, under the direction of sociology professor Dr. David Brain, interviewed 40 stakeholders to gather background.

According to Task Force member and former Longboat Key Commissioner Randy Clair, the groups generally agreed on both the good and the bad.

They agreed that the positives included the north end’s beach, anchorage, restaurants on Broadway (Mar Vista Dockside Restaurant & Pub and Moore’s Stone Crab Restaurant) and the Longbeach Village itself.
They agreed that the drawbacks included Village parking and the east-west accessibility of Gulf of Mexico Drive from the Village area, which many see as dangerous. Participants then voted on priorities. And although the votes haven’t been tallied yet, there was agreement that the mostly vacant Whitney Beach Plaza, along with the empty former Longbeach Chevron station, were among the two most pressing concerns.

“What the groups really said was that they thought Whitney Beach Plaza was the priority item,” said Clair. “It’s in disrepair, and the gas station is in the same boat. People liked the idea of mixed use, maybe some type hotel or motel mixed with commercial use, like maybe a small restaurant or convenience store.”

“What I thought was interesting is that, even though we were separated in four small groups, we came up, roughly, with some pretty similar ideas,” said D’Arcy Arpke, a Village resident who owns Euphemia Haye with her husband, Ray.

According to a Task Force news release, the charrette produced “several hundred individual ideas about the revitalization” of the north end, which, after discussion, evolved into 10 major concepts.

The next step will come in February when a team of 12 local architects and other design professionals hold a sketching session in which they will attempt to visually represent these ideas. In late February or early March, the results of the charrette and the designs will be presented in a public meeting.

Spoll hopes the project will be the Task Force’s “gift to the community” while also highlighting the importance of planning — which he believes has been missing from the Key since the Arvida days.
Clair echoed a similar sentiment after Saturday’s workshop.

“If this really works out, it could be a good example to show people how planning can be very helpful for how we want things to look, say, 10 years from now,” he said.