- May 16, 2026
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Although the two barrier islands of Longboat Key and Anna Maria Island measure less than 20 miles end to end, there’s plenty going on.
On May 6, three mayors representing towns and cities on those two islands met at Longboat Key Town Hall to catch up on those goings on. The potential introduction of paid parking, Anna Maria Pier repairs, Manatee County property valuations, ferry service and traffic backups were all discussed. For Longboat Key’s new mayor Debra Williams, the meeting served as a chance to exchange information on topics that impact all the jurisdictions on Anna Maria and Longboat.
“We’ve got a lot in common with Bradenton Beach, Holmes Beach and Anna Maria. There’s a lot of things we deal with that we all have to deal with,” Williams said. “They’re different communities than we are, but it’s good just to have that free flow of information to talk about things like we talked about today. For example, the parking. If they do bring paid parking to Coquina (Beach), that’s going to have implications for all of us.”
With Manatee County signifying it may begin charging people to park in county lots on Anna Maria Island, local leaders are evaluating how that could impact their jurisdictions.
Longboat Key Town Manager Howard Tipton described introducing paid parking to squeezing a balloon. The air (in this analogy the cars) must go somewhere.
“If you have to pay to park there, people will search,” Tipton said, alluding to the fact that beachgoers will start to look at free beaches, such as Longboat's.
Anna Maria Mayor Mark Short said the town has begun the process of performing a parking study to “evaluate options we may have” and how much parking inventory there is in the city.
“My scariest scenario is if Coquina and Manatee Public and County goes to pay-to-park, people are going to drive right by those places and hunt and search and find any available free spot,” Short said. “That’s why we’re doing this (study) because it’s going to be a significant challenge. Even if they have to walk four blocks to get to the beach, they’ll do that because they won’t have to pay whatever the county might decide to charge.”
Short shared an update on repairs to the Anna Maria Island Pier, which was severely damaged in the 2024 hurricanes. He said the walkway, which was the costliest and most time consuming aspect of the repairs, is expected to be finished before August.
“The next step for us is to fix what we call the T-end of the pier,” Short said. “We received yesterday the bids to do the remediation work for the buildings, which we need to do first before we do the final repair work to the buildings. We’re also in the process of evaluating what’s going to go in at the end of the pier. Mote (Marine), that used to be out there, is not going back.”
Manatee County is looking to add a Gulf Islands Ferry stop to the pier once it is rebuilt, Short said, but the pier would need to go through alterations beyond what is being done in the renovations. That’s because streamlined permitting documents specified that the pier be rebuilt exactly how it was previous to the storm damage, “which meant no accommodation for a water ferry.”
“The county knows this. They have to construct their own landing,” Short said. “A boat cannot dock at our pier. It can connect to our pier, possibly, but the whole landing thing is on the county.”
Holmes Beach Mayor Judy Titsworth said 7.3 million visitors came to the small beach town last year. How does she know?
“We have an app that tracks through cellphone how many people are coming to your city and where they’re from,” Titsworth said.
The tool uses cellphone pings to track how many people come to a certain area, which can be as narrow as a single beach access. At Manatee County Public Beach alone, 1 million visited last year. Using cellphone billing data, the tool not only informs the municipality how many people came, but where they come from.
“12,000 were Holmes Beach residents, 200,000 were county and the balance (788,000) was from out of state,” Titsworth said.
Williams had heard of the tool before and said she was interested in potentially introducing it in Longboat Key. “That’s really good data,” she said.
The city of Anna Maria may potentially change how stormwater fees are calculated a year after the city doubled its stormwater fee from $2 per hundred square feet to $4.
Short said that stormwater fees have traditionally been determined solely based on the size of the parcel. After hearing concern from residents who had small houses on large lots and thought it unfair that they were being charged for lot size, not impervious surface area, a new strategy is being considered. Now, the city is looking to take into account the area of impervious surfaces (roofs, asphalt, concrete, i.e.) each parcel has.
“Our goal is to change that process effective September to change from per-parcel size to potentially a three-step process,” Short said. “Every parcel gets a flat fee, then based on impervious coverage they get charged an additional fee for whatever that is, and then if their lot coverage exceeds a certain percentage, they would get another charge.”
