Longboat Key News and Sarasota City News encourages Letters to the Editor on timely issues. Please email to: letters@lbknews.com or mail to PO Box 8001, Longboat Key, FL 34228. We also print letters sent to Town Hall that address Longboat Key issues. We reserve the right to edit.
Prior Uninterrupted Beach Access Discussions
To: Longboat Key Town Commission
As we discussed at Tuesday’s Workshop, I am attaching and distributing the 2021-22 meeting and workshop materials (Powerpoint, Memos and meeting minutes) that reflect the Town Commission’s December 2021 and January 2022 discussions on the subject of uninterrupted beach access in front of several of the gulf fronting properties on the North End. For those of you who were not on the Town Commission at that time, I am happy to discuss in greater details these materials and the alternatives considered. Please let me know if you would like to schedule a one on one call or meeting to discuss.
Maggie D. Mooney
Town Attorney
Town of Longboat Key
Boat lift ordinance
To: Planning and Zoning Board Member Jay Plager
Please consider this a renewed reminder and request to use your Town issued email address to conduct all Town related business. Using the Town issued email account by the members of the Town’s advisory boards (including the PZB members) and Town Commission ensures that all emails relating to Town business are retained on the Town’s servers and no one’s personal email accounts become subject to Florida’s Public Records laws. Attached is a previously circulated Memorandum dated June 27, 2024 on this subject. Your ongoing observance of these guidelines is requested and appreciated. If you have any questions about the attached Memorandum or the Sunshine and Public Records laws please let me know and we can schedule an in person meeting to discuss the laws.
Maggie D. Mooney
Town Attorney
Town of Longboat Key
Boat lift ordinance
To: Longboat Key Commissioner Gary Coffin
Further on our brief discussion about the LBK boatlift issue. I voted no on the proposal before the P&Z Board on Friday, in part because of the initial staff confusion over exactly what the proposed ordinance would say, and the effort by the staff and the Board to re-write it on the fly during the meeting. (I was the only no vote.) Here’s what I now understand to be where we are:
First, since many boatlifts are attached to docks which are attached to seawalls, we have to go there first. The standard in LBK for measuring the maximum allowed height of permitted seawalls is the old NAVD 1988 standard (the theoretical sea level). The standard we use for docks and boatlifts however is different – it is the Mean High Water Line (MHWL), an empirically-determinable and widely used standard for measuring water levels. Here our water gets a bit murky – the operative difference between NAVD and MHWL as a standard is about 1 1/2 feet – the MHWL is 1 1/2 ft. above the comparable NAVD line, so for example a dock built to the height of its adjacent seawall cap that is at say 4.5 ft. NAVD is actually at about 3 ft. MHWL. (For consistency and simplification we need to amend the standard for seawalls to be the same universal standard as docks and boatlifts – MHWL – but that is a separate issue.)
For some time the maximum permissible height for a seawall was set at 4.5 ft. NAVD – the Commission recently changed it to 6 ft. Current rules on dock heights differentiate between docks attached to seawalls and those without seawalls – dock heights when attached to a seawall are the height of the seawall cap; when not attached, 5 ft. above MHWL. I will focus my remarks on docks with seawalls since that is what many canal properties with boatlifts have.
Finally to the boatlift issue – boatlifts as of now can be up to 5 ft. above the dock (or the top of the associated seawall cap). Thus, as a practical matter a homeowner on a canal, such as we have here at CCS, can build a new seawall 3 ft. high (or under the recent change 4.5 ft high) above MHWL, attach a dock at that height, and then add a boatlift structure (supported by pilings) that goes up an additional five feet. The net effect is that a homeowner now can have a structure including a seawa