New Longboat Key turtle rules face close crawl

The Longboat Key Town Commission was one vote away from moving forward with a sea turtle ordinance that town officials said would be unenforceable.

Commissioners spent 50 minutes Monday debating the balance between the needs of property owners and turtles — a debate that has occurred multiple times at Town Hall in recent months.

Commissioner Ed Zunz submitted tweaks to the proposed ordinance that he hoped would give property owners relief from excessive enforcement in a May 19 memo to Town Manager Dave Bullock. 

The revisions would have given new homes and developments  more time to come into compliance with new lighting codes. 

But when commissioners voted 3-3 to add the new language regarding proposed lighting regulations to the ordinance, the amendment died due to the tie. The ordinance moved ahead to second reading as originally presented, though Zunz’s amendment could return on second reading next month.

“This ordinance should be able to be balanced and stand on its own two feet,” Zunz said.

Zunz’s proposed revision included the phrase, “it has been found to be impractical to set, measure or enforce the precise level of such artificial illumination, if any, at a particular time” — a provision that would strip the town of its power to uphold the entire ordinance, Bullock said during the meeting.

Commissioners Phill Younger and Armando Linde voted in favor Zunz’s revised ordinance.

Commissioner Jack Daly was absent because he is recovering from surgery.

Younger and Linde argued the proposed regulations were too subjective, because they rely on the code enforcement officer’s line of sight from the beach to determine lighting violations — and could encourage excessive enforcement by civilians.

“It’s just very broad, but it opens the door for very well-meaning people to start patrolling the beaches,” Linde said. “We should inject less subjectivity into this.”

The current ordinance limits Code Enforcement Officer Elbon’s enforcement to a moonless night. If the proposed ordinance passes without Zunz’s amendment, it would allow Elbon to patrol the beach on other nights. The proposed ordinance also addresses 13 types of lighting, up from the nine varieties the current ordinance enforces.   It also makes interior lighting visible from the beach illegal during nesting season.

“I don’t want to vote against this thing, but how can you put your names on something like that?” Zunz asked fellow commissioners.

Younger, who said he isn’t against more stringent regulations, again pushed for a measurable enforcement method, despite Elbon’s insistence that no other jurisdiction has one. And if the town wanted to experiment by measuring light intensity, it would have to spend more than $20,000 on new equipment.

“You’ve got clear and sanctioned standards for virtually every law except when we get into a politically correct, touchy-feely situation like we are on some of these turtle laws,” Younger said.

As Bullock has worked through state and federal permitting for the more than $10 million in beach renourishment projects this year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials said the town would need more stringent regulations if it wanted to undertake sand projects in the future.

“I don’t know why this commission goes out of its way to look for trouble,” Vice Mayor Terry Gans said during the meeting. “We have a damn gun to our head saying we need to change our ordinances, right?”

The commission will discuss the ordinance on second reading July 5. After Monday’s meeting, Zunz said he had not decided whether he would reintroduce the language then