Stand on the sand at the south end of Coquina Beach an hour before sunset and you are looking at one of the last unspoiled postcards in Florida. The Gulf pours through Longboat Pass in bands of jade and turquoise. Pelicans work the tide line. Boats drift off the sandbar at Beer Can Island, Jewfish Key sits green and quiet just inside the cut, and across the whole scene runs a low, gray, 69-year-old drawbridge that barely interrupts the horizon.
—That bridge is coming down. Everyone agrees on that much. What replaces it is now the most contested design question on the barrier islands, and this week’s mail to Town Hall shows the fight has changed shape. It is no longer simply Longboat Key against the Florida Department of Transportation. It is the north end against the state, sailors against a lower span, a condominium president against the laws of physics, and a neighboring county being asked to pick a side.
—The State’s Number: 78 Feet
—FDOT’s preferred alternative, presented at public hearings in March, is a two-lane fixed span rising 78 feet above the water, running roughly a mile from North Shore Road to the Coquina Beach park entrance. The agency’s case is financial and structural. A February 2024 inspection gave the 1957 bridge a sufficiency rating of 42 out of 100. The high fixed span is estimated at $138 million. A drawbridge would cost between $176 million and $194 million, before decades of bridge tenders and mechanical upkeep.
—The town’s answer has been consistent through two mayors. In 2024, then-Mayor Ken Schneier told the state, “A 78-foot-high fixed span would be inconsistent with the character of Longboat Key.” This spring, Mayor Debra Williams repeated the plea for a lower bascule bridge and called the extra height “a questionable expenditure of taxpayer dollars,” pointing to FDOT’s own boat survey showing only a handful of vessels need that much clearance.
—In June, town leaders tried something more vivid. They met FDOT’s district leadership in the Coquina Beach parking lot and flew a drone 80 feet over the pass so the engineers could see for themselves how high the roadway would sit. In a follow-up letter, then-Town Manager Howard Tipton conceded that Florida rarely builds drawbridges anymore, but argued that “substantial consideration should be given to preserving the unique character and quality of life” of the north end.
—The town left that meeting expecting a final decision by the end of summer. Summer is over. As of this week, FDOT’s project page still lists the study as due for completion in “mid 2026” and has not been updated since March 18.
“FDOT Is Not Currently Entertaining the Thought”
—The clearest read on where things stand comes from Commissioner Sarah Karon, whose district includes the north end. In correspondence being published in this week’s letters section, she does not pretend the drawbridge is winning.
“The bascule option would be my preference, but FDOT is not currently entertaining the thought,” Karon wrote to north-end resident Richard Abuza. “Hopefully our community will find a way to shift that obstacle.”
—She has not surrendered. “The wheels turn slowly with FDOT, so the Town is committed to stay engaged with state officials and not give up on a lower option,” she wrote, adding that the town “continues to enjoy a healthy working relationship with FDOT, and hopefully time is on our side to improve bridge plans.”
—Not everyone on the north end shares the diplomatic tone. In a letter published here last month about the Broadway roundabout, resident Maureen Merrigan wrote that the state agencies “completely disregard our input on the Longboat Pass bridge.” Assistant Town Manager Isaac Brownman, answering a different resident in that same exchange, put the power dynamic in one sentence: “FDOT has full authority as to what gets built on a state roadway.”
—The Sailors Speak Up
—Here is where the story turns. For two years the public argument has been framed as tall bridge versus drawbridge. But a lower fixed span has crept into the conversation, and to at least one group of residents it is the worst outcome of all.
—Mark Fishman, a year-round Longboat resident who has kept a cruising sailboat in Sarasota Bay for a decade, wrote to the commission after reading minutes from a meeting of north-end representatives and Manatee County.
“This is the first time I have read that the Town of LBK is pushing for a shorter fixed bridge!” he wrote. “I am very much opposed to that proposal.”
—His boat’s mast stands 71 feet above the water and the hull needs six feet of depth. He laid out the geometry of Sarasota Bay like a man describing a closing door. The Ringling Bridge is a 65-foot fixed span. The Cortez Bridge is about to become one. New Pass, he wrote, “is not reliably more than 6′ deep.”
“The only reliable entry/exit from the Gulf to Sarasota Bay is Longboat Pass Bridge,” Fishman wrote. With a 65-foot span there, “my boat will be permanently trapped in Sarasota Bay, or will never again be able to gain entry to it.”
—He would accept the state’s 78-foot bridge or a taller drawbridge. What he will not accept is anything fixed below 72 feet. “Since sailing is a major part of my lifestyle, if a lower fixed bridge is installed, I will likely have to sell my house and move elsewhere.”
—In a second note he sharpened the point: “This is not a ‘it would be nice if’ kind of issue.”
—Karon’s reply acknowledged the bind. “The bridge project as currently designed will speak to the needs of sailors like yourself,” she wrote, “and the Town’s efforts to refine that plan will take all voices into account. As you know, resident preferences run the gamut at this time.”
—The stakes on the water are not theoretical. In April, a sailboat named Hula Girl struck the existing bridge, snapped her mast and wedged beneath the span, closing the southbound lanes for more than an hour.
—The View From Northgate
—No one lives closer to the consequences than the owners at Northgate, the condominium at the island’s northern tip. The new bridge would be built just west of the old one, shrinking Northgate’s buffer from the roadway from about 95 feet to 36.5 feet.
—Abuza, Northgate’s condominium president, wrote to Karon to correct himself. He had told a Longboat North meeting the proposed slope would violate accessibility standards. It does not. But he is not backing down.
“Just because something is technically in compliance does not mean it is practically in compliance,” he wrote. “Just ask anyone who has pushed someone in a wheelchair up a 3% grade incline for a short distance, let alone nearly 1/5 of a mile.” Coming down, he said, is scarier: a wheelchair “gathering momentum for almost a quarter of a mile, with no level place to bring yourself to safety.”
—He made an environmental argument too. “Every bit of raising the bridge height is a hidden tax on the citizens who use the bridge in addition to taxing the environment,” he wrote, describing engines straining up the grade in stop-and-go traffic.
—And he said what many north-enders think but few officials will: “No new bridge of any size or height will do anything to solve our fundamental problem, gridlocked traffic. If the bridge has to be replaced (which I am not sure is a valid assumption) at least the low bridge does not create safety, and ecological and visual disaster.”
—Commissioner BJ Bishop has been blunter still, warning earlier this year that the state’s design “will look like a black diamond hill at a ski resort.”
—The Other Side of the Argument
—The tall bridge has defenders, and they are not all in Tallahassee. A fixed span never opens, and the existing drawbridge goes up between 100 and 300 times a month, according to an FDOT engineering study, each time stopping the only road off the north end. The state argues a fixed bridge is a more reliable hurricane evacuation route and would add a 12-foot shared-use path where today there is almost no room for a pedestrian.
—Sarasota has heard this argument before. The Ringling Bridge was fought bitterly before it opened in 2003, and today its walkway is one of the most used public spaces in the city. One reader responding to this newspaper’s earlier coverage made exactly that case: “Progress is needed and there is more than just ‘locals.'”
—The difference, north-enders reply, is the setting. The Ringling lands in a downtown of towers. Longboat Pass lands in a neighborhood of cottages, a county beach and a mangrove island.
—Manatee County Gets an Invitation
—The newest move came Sept. 24 in Bradenton, where the Longboat Key and Manatee County commissions met jointly. Mayor Williams, Bishop and Commissioner Penny Gold each asked whether the county would sign a joint letter to FDOT opposing the taller design. Bishop, a serious cyclist, told the county she doubts many riders want an 80-foot climb in the middle of the region’s future trail system.
—County commissioners would have to approve any letter by majority vote at a future meeting. Chair Tal Siddique offered a reality check on the calendar, estimating the bridge “would probably not even come up for consideration until at least the mid 2030s.”
—Bradenton Beach, on the far side of the pass, is already uneasy. Mayor John Chappie and Commissioner Scott Bear have warned that the high span’s relocated Coquina boat ramp access would send trucks and trailers across traffic and worsen backups on both islands.
—What Happens Next
—Four things are worth watching.
—The state’s final call. FDOT must close out its $2.125 million study and formally select an alternative. Nothing has been posted since the spring hearings.
—The Coast Guard. Any bridge over a navigable waterway needs a federal permit, and the clearance must reasonably serve the vessels that use the pass. That is the leverage sailors like Fishman hold, and the reason a 65-foot compromise is not a simple matter of asking.
—Manatee County’s vote. A joint letter from both governments that share the pass would carry more weight than Longboat’s alone. No date has been set.
—The money. FDOT has $4.5 million programmed for design. It has no construction funding at all. Meanwhile the state has budgeted repairs to keep the old drawbridge working.
—That last point is the north end’s quiet hope. A bridge that is a decade from construction is a bridge whose design can still change. Karon put it simply: “Project timing is likely several years down the road.”
—A Decision That Outlives Everyone Making It
—A bridge built at Longboat Pass in the 2030s is designed to stand for 75 years. Children not yet born will cross it as grandparents. They will either rise seven stories into the sky above Coquina Beach and look down on the pass, or they will cross it low, at the level of the water and the birds, the way people have since 1957.
T —here is history under that crossing. The first bridge here opened in 1926 and was torn away by a hurricane in 1932. For a quarter century Longboat Key and Anna Maria Island were simply two separate places, until the present drawbridge reconnected them. What the state builds next will define the northern gateway to Longboat Key, and the last tall-mast gateway to Sarasota Bay, for the rest of this century.
—The state is doing the arithmetic on dollars. The islands are asking it to do the arithmetic on everything else.
—Residents can send comments to FDOT Project Manager David Turley at David.Turley@dot.state.fl.us or (863) 519-2255, or through the project page at swflroads.com.
