—Longboat Key sold its last big water main job in Country Club Shores as the gentle way to swap out a neighborhood’s plumbing. The new pipe is going in underground, by a trenchless method the town describes as “less invasive.”
—The sidewalk along Gulf of Mexico Drive would like a word.
—A Bay Harbour board member says contractors on the town’s Country Club Shores water main replacement have been running skid-steer loaders, buckets full of soil and sod, up and down the GMD sidewalk to their staging area on Channel Lane. And the concrete, she says, is breaking under them.
—“It’s destroying the concrete that was, apparently, never designed to take that much weight,” Kathleen Wingate wrote Oct. 29 to Town Commissioner Steve Branham. “There are serious cracks and some with elevation changes.”
—Two blocks, a lot of cracks
—Wingate attached photos she took that morning along a two-block stretch running north from Bay Harbour, the 39-unit bayfront condominium at 448 and 450 Gulf of Mexico Drive, across from the Longboat Key Club. Three of the shots were taken in front of her own complex. One, she said, shows the tire marks and dirt that prove how the material is being moved.
—She added that this month’s rain has probably made a bad situation worse.
—Wingate says she has walked GMD almost daily for five years and knows what those sidewalks normally look like. In all that time, she wrote, it has been “nothing like this.” And she headed off the obvious rebuttal before anyone could make it.
—“Some cracks may look old but that’s just because dirt has settled into them,” she wrote.
—She asked that the town inspect the sidewalk along the entire length of Country Club Shores, plus the frontage at Bay Harbour, and said she had copied the Bay Harbour board president.
—“Hopefully the town knew this was going to happen and has a plan for repairs as soon as the pipes are done,” she wrote.
—She also reminded Branham that she broke her wrist in a fall on Gulf of Mexico Drive years ago. “I wouldn’t want to see it happen to anyone else.”
—Up the chain of command
—Branham, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral who holds an at-large seat, wrote back that “safety and good repair are always concerns for the Town,” then forwarded the complaint to Town Manager George Landry. He asked Landry to send it to the appropriate staff for follow-up on the project and the repairs, and for a response to Wingate and the Bay Harbour board president.
—Landry, about six weeks into the job, answered with a crisp salute: “Will do Sir and Thank you!!”
—The trenchless irony
—The work is the last leg of a multi-year campaign to rip out Country Club Shores’ 1960s-era asbestos cement water mains, the last such pipe on the island. Phases 3 and 4, covering the Country Club Shores I, II and III associations, began July 6 at a cost of about $3.2 million.
—This round uses pipe bursting, in which a new line is pulled through the old one as the old pipe is fractured in place. That spares the streets from long open trenches. It does not spare anyone the dirt. Crews still dig launch and receiving pits, still tear up and replace sod, and the spoils still have to go somewhere.
—According to the town’s posted schedule, Channel Lane, home to the staging area, is the last of 10 streets on the list, with work slated for Oct. 27 through Nov. 24 and demobilization Nov. 20 to 24. In other words, the loaders may have most of another month on that sidewalk, right as the season’s walkers come back to the island.
—Built for feet, not four tons
—Florida sidewalk standards commonly call for slabs just four inches thick, thickened to six inches only where a driveway crosses. A mid-size Bobcat skid-steer weighs about 6,500 pounds empty. Fill the bucket to its rated load and the machine tops four tons, all of it riding on four tires.
—Federal accessibility standards allow no more than a quarter inch of vertical change without a bevel, and anything over a half inch calls for a ramp. A raised lip is exactly what catches a toe, a cane tip or a wheelchair caster.
—Who pays for the concrete?
—Gulf of Mexico Drive is State Road 789, owned and maintained by the Florida Department of Transportation, and the sidewalk sits in the state’s right-of-way.
—The island has been here before. In October 2021, Frontier Communications tore out a stretch of the GMD sidewalk in front of Twin Shores to fix a phone line, and the town’s position was that Frontier was responsible for putting it back. Walkers detoured through a parking lot until new concrete was finally poured in January 2022.
—This time there is no outside utility to chase. The contractor works for the town, which makes the repair the town’s to demand.
—And nobody should count on the state to sweep up after it. In May, in a reply shared with the Longboat Key Bicycle Association, Town Engineer Jennifer Fehrs wrote that FDOT’s upcoming resurfacing on the Sarasota County stretch of GMD is pavement only and does not include sidewalk repair. The same bicycle group survey had already flagged spots elsewhere on the east-side sidewalk where work crews had plainly done damage.
—The pipes have a finish date. The sidewalk doesn’t.
—Wingate closed her note to Branham with a vote of confidence: “I know your attention to detail, so I’m sure you will pass this along to the appropriate department.”
—He did. The water mains are due to be finished before Thanksgiving. As of this week, no repair date for the sidewalk has been announced.
