Booming hotel development creates friction on Pinellas beaches
By JOSH BOATWRIGHT
Tampa Tribune
Published: Apr 26, 2015

CLEARWATER - There's no going back to the days when only cottages and mid-size motels looked out over the Gulf of Mexico here.

In these days of record tourism, the nine towns lining Pinellas County's sandy barrier islands again face the quandary of just how much room to make for all these visitors clamoring to spend their money on a few nights in paradise.

Dozens of hotel concepts scrapped during the recession are back on the table, with real money to back them up, and developers have returned in force at city halls asking how big and tall they can build the next new luxury resort.

The answer to that question is plain to see in Clearwater Beach where two massive hotels are coming out of the ground to complement some 60 lodges already spread out around the city's bustling Beach Walk promenade.

With a master plan that laid the groundwork for growth a decade ago, the Tampa Bay area's biggest beach town now is in the throes of a boom that could add 2,000 new rooms in the next few years and fill out nearly all land set aside for hotels on the 3-mile-long island.

That kind of mass transformation is inspiring to some business leaders in smaller beach communities such as Treasure Island and St. Pete Beach, but frightening to those residents who have fought to place strict limits on building.

A legal compromise earlier this year in St. Pete Beach appears finally to have settled a long-running dispute that has kept nearly all new development away for more than a decade.

After the city conducts a series of infrastructure studies that will be completed later this year, hotels such as the TradeWinds Island Resorts finally may move forward on expansion plans that could take advantage of heights of around 10 stories along the beach's large resort district.

The settlement won't give developers all the flexibility they've sought over the years, but it's expected to make way for a new level of hotel construction that could reinvigorate the city's economy.

"If you're a resident of St. Pete Beach or Clearwater and you like your little spot in the world on either beach and you don't want any change, I can certainly understand and appreciate that may not be your first priority,” says TradeWinds CEO Tim Bogott, who is also a member of the county's Tourist Development Council.

"The balance has been debated for many years here,” he says. "But, in the end, I think the majority has still said we want new development and we want to protect tourism and the benefit tourism provides for residents.”

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Last year, the county raked in a record $35 million in hotel bed taxes, a 5-percent cut of visitor spending on overnight lodging that goes toward tourism marketing, beach maintenance and even supporting big capital projects such as The Dali Museum, Tropicana Field and spring training facilities for Major League Baseball teams.

There's a vocal contingent of beach residents that says the tax does nothing to offset the lifestyle costs of overcrowded streets, stressed infrastructure and the general headache created by those millions of people who horde their neighborhoods every year.

Last year, the county drew 5.8 million visitors, and hoteliers say this past spring break may have been their busiest season ever.

Over time, all the billions of dollars these tourists spend shopping, dining out and staying entertained on vacation has swayed most local beach cities to open their arms ever wider to accommodate more guests.

No city has done so more than Clearwater Beach.

In 2001, the city set a course for building up what a USA Today poll later would call Florida's best beach town.

As part of the Beach by Design master plan, the local government spent $30 million laying out the winding, palm tree-lined BeachWalk that connects with Pier 60 and abuts a wide stretch of white sandy beach.

Major updates to water, sewer and other infrastructure went along with all that to support a spate of growth incentivized by offering new large resorts a density pool of 600 units above what typically is allowed in parts of town designated for big hotel development.

The towering Sandpearl and Hyatt Aqualea Resort were the first to pull from that pool, and the last chunk of those units now is going into a new 450-room Wyndham Grand at the center of the beach town, a project that has been in the works for more than 10 years.

The city added more rooms to that density pool in 2007 for mid-priced, limited service hotels, and today nearly all the units have been assigned among 19 planned hotel projects, though only a handful have broken ground so far.

What may not be obvious when lurching through traffic in the shadows of Clearwater's new beach towers is that the city actually has lost more than 1,000 hotel rooms since 2002 as many old mom-and-pop motels sold out to condominium development.

Based on current plans, the beach is set to see its current 3,341 rooms grow to more than 6,000, a net gain of more than 1,000 rooms.

"We were losing our small, limited service - as people like to affectionately call them - the mom and pop hotels; we were losing them to condo development because the market was just overheated and condos were the rage,” says Michael Delk, the city's planning and development director.

"Obviously, the ability to accommodate tourists is the heart of a tourism economy.”

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Hoteliers and city planners have made the same arguments for allowing more growth in St. Pete Beach and Treasure Island, but they never have been quite as well received.

Lawsuits have plagued St. Pete Beach's comprehensive plan since it first was proposed around the same time as Beach by Design.

The community is characterized as much by the old beach cottages and inns at the south end of the island in historic Pass-A-Grille as by the sprawling resorts that mark the northern end of Gulf Boulevard.

Plans always have limited taller hotels to about a 1-mile stretch of the 4-mile barrier island, but a strong contingent has fought to keep even this area from going bigger and taller than the six- and seven-story buildings that are already there.

Hoteliers insist more flexible height and density rules will allow them to redevelop and continue making profits rather than sell to condos.

Treasure Island attorney Ken Weiss doesn't buy it.

"That has nothing to do with the viability of the project; it's all about developers who are greedy and want to make more money off the backs of residents,” says Weiss, who has waged legal battles against bigger development for decades in Pinellas beach towns.

In Weiss' hometown, developer Ocean Properties had proposed a luxury resort with 77 suites, which it maintains would need to exceed the city's five-story height limit to allow enough space for the rooms and an architectural design with a stylized roof and extra room on either side of the building to preserve views of the water from the road.

When it failed to get a variance, though, Ocean Properties proceeded with its plan anyway, staying within the city's current rules, and construction is underway at the long empty lot on Gulf Boulevard.

That project might show that low-rise hotels can be economically viable, but the problem with maintaining inflexible development rules is that it tends to result in unattractive, square-shaped buildings, says Gregg Nicklaus, president of the Sirata Beach Resort in St. Pete Beach.

Without a bit of wiggle room, builders are forced to stuff as many rooms as they can into a box at the expense of arched roofs or other aesthetic flourishes that make it more appealing, he says.

"It's going to look more like square or rectangular boxes along Gulf Boulevard rather than a skyline that has multiple elements of height,” Nicklaus says.

The kinds of designs that will come from St. Pete Beach's recent compromise remain to be seen, though the settlement appears to be spurring renewed interest in the resort district.

The one-story Postcard Inn was bought about the same time as the legal settlement occurred, though the new owner hasn't announced any specific plan for the property.

The TradeWinds also acquired the neighboring Coral Reef resort, a derelict hotel where several redevelopment plans have faltered in the past.

Part of the property already has been demolished to add extra parking at the TradeWinds, but the hotel expects to expand once the taller building rules are put into place, says Bogott, its CEO.

"We will see some new development. You'll start to hear about plans in the not so distant future,” he says.

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One beach community that historically has struck a healthy balance between the low-key, residential beach life and tourism is Indian Rocks Beach.

A fraction the size of Clearwater or St. Pete Beach, Indian Rocks never has attracted large resort construction, but a strong mix of full-time residents and small lodgings so far has supported a number of year-round shops and restaurants.

"We haven't ever had an anti-hotel development philosophy in the city,” says Mayor R.B. Johnson.

"For a long time, most development in the city, starting back 100 odd years ago, was simple beach cottages that were built by families in Tampa and they wouldn't necessarily even stay here year round.”

There have been a few dramatic changes in this trend, especially during boom times.

One of them is an 11-story condo called Reflections that went up in the 1970s, which dwarfs most of the surrounding cottages and motels.

The city now maintains a three-story height limit, but even that has been loosened a little bit during the most recent tourism spike.

An old development agreement with the town's only large hotel, a Holiday Inn on the Intracoastal Waterway, allowed the hotel to reach up to five stories, which is the height of the current building's Key West-style gabled roof.

City leaders didn't expect the hotel to come back years later with a design for a boxy, flat-roofed addition that went all the way up to that five-story limit with no gables or other attractive features.

To keep the 100-room expansion in line with Indian Rocks' beach town character, the commission eventually agreed to four stories with a gabled roof on one side of the property, but the south end now is being built up to seven stories.

"It was a little bit of a tradeoff,” says Johnson.

"It's big. It's a big building and it's right across the street from our historical museum,” he says. "I think a lot of people wish maybe it wasn't so tall. It is what it is.”

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A lot of people still wish the hotels on Clearwater Beach or the towering condos on Sand Key to its south weren't quite so tall.

Residents at the north end of the island community, which has a large number of single-family homes, wish their streets weren't packed with vacationers and day-trippers, who make it nearly impossible to get on and off the island certain times of year.

City Mayor George Cretekos understands.

"I live on Sand Key. I've lived out there since 1976. As a kid, I remember going to Clearwater Beach or Sand Key and there was basically little development like we have now,” he says.

A lot more people have come to realize what a privilege it is to watch the sun sink in the Gulf of Mexico every evening.

"That's our attraction. While we can do some things to make it easier to get around,” Cretekos says, "we have to realize that certain times of the year, we're going to be inconvenienced.”

jboatwright@tampatrib.com
(727) 215-1277
Twitter: @JBoatwrightTBO