STEVE REID
Editor & Publisher
sreid@lbknews.com
It was really the classical Greeks who started philosophical paradoxes. You could go all the way back to Heraclitus, but let’s look at things like the myth of Sisyphus—everyone knows about pushing the boulder up the hill only for it to forever roll back down. Or what about Tantalus? His punishment was to be forever thirsty and hungry, with the fruit always just out of reach as a penalty for his extreme hubris. Or what about Prometheus, the bringer of fire, which can be extrapolated to technology—one could even say modern-day AI. For gifting us the ultimate tool, Zeus chained him to a mountain where an eagle would tear out and eat his liver every single day. Because he was immortal, the liver regenerated nightly, subjecting him to an endless loop of daily torture.
What is the paradox or perhaps punishment in dealing with the FDOT for the Town of Longboat Key?
Is the state agency the immovable object, the immutable government entity where you ask for something innovative, creative, or nuanced, and you get something you absolutely did not wish for, but that technically resembles a solution? As the front page of today’s paper spells out, state budget math has officially trumped community character, and we are stuck in our own eternal cycle of bureaucratic punishment.
The “Bricklayer Hands” Approach to Longboat Key
We wanted targeted crosswalks in specific locations on Longboat, and we got these HAWK crossing systems that initially were dangerous and disorienting. We asked for a turn lane in Country Club Shores, and we ended up putting hardened medians in the middle of the road and taking away 15 feet of golf course and green space that forever added to the beauty of the island and its great entrance. One cannot imagine how you take 15 feet times almost a linear mile—it’s a lot of land, and it’s a lot of green.
And although the Longboat Key Club will do everything it can to keep it beautiful, it is a loss simply because former Commissioner Lynn Larson stomped her feet and kept talking about how someone would die if we didn’t get a turn lane. But it’s not really on her. The State came back with the typical FDOT solution. In tennis, it would be like not having subtle hands at the net, but having what is called “bricklayer hands,” where instead of hitting a beautiful drop shot or a well-placed slice, you simply bump the ball clumsily out of bounds.
A Looming Concrete Shadow
So, here we go again with a bridge too far, a bridge too big, a bridge that will not be beautiful. We begged for a 36-foot mid-level Bascule design to maintain our island’s low-profile aesthetic, but because of a cost disparity, the state is pushing forward with a massive 78-foot high-span. To put that in perspective, FDOT is forcing a 78-foot elevation over a mere 0.15-mile distance. That creates a slope steeper than the John Ringling Causeway—a significant hazard for pedestrians and cyclists. And for the residents of Northgate? This massive concrete span will creep within 36.5 feet of their homes.
Meanwhile, just to the north, the Cortez Bridge is weeks away from going out to bid for its own $130 million fixed-span replacement. We are staring down the barrel of a 1,200-day construction sentence starting this September.
A Wall of Gorgon Stone
This will not be the Ringling Bridge, which was designed through a community charrette using creativity and architectural renderings. This will be what we are stuck with. It will simply add to the imposing scale of the island, and while it will fix one thing—it will be nice not to have a drawbridge from a traffic point of view—the FDOT will not work in this nuanced capacity. They will not allow a “design bridge.” This will not be the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, or any bridge that crosses the Seine, and it certainly won’t be the Ringling. Instead of a refined and architecturally defined entrance to Longboat Key, it will be as if the FDOT looked at the plan and took what could have been a graceful arc of beauty and transformed it into a wall of Gorgon stone.
So, when you read the story on page one and watch the news, think back on all the eons of history going back to pre-classical Greece, and realize we are yet again stuck in a mythological cycle. Although you may believe you’re in the modern era, that is just a fantasy. In 2,000 years, they’ll look back at these towering concrete monuments to bureaucratic budget math and they’ll say, “Wow, how could those government leaders span one of the most beautiful island waterways in the world with a concrete ode to the ordinary?”
