What if the purchaser of the St. Augustine Beach Resort, KEY INTERNATIONAL, donated the land to connect the county-owned Pier Park with Anastasia State Park, in exchange for "air rights" to build a hotel over top of the new St. Augustine Beach Pier?
This is the only property dividing the two parks.
The current property, St. Augustine Beach Resort, was long an eyesore and a nuisance, locus of many police calls.
This nuisance has been purchased for $9,750,000 by KEY BEACH NORTH, LLC of MIAMI, managed by KEY INTERNATIONAL. It is closed, boarded-up and behind fences, ready for demolition, and ready for years of archaeological investigation of the second St. Augustine settlement (1566).
Questions about archaeological and historical due diligence need to be answered.
Let KEY INTERNATIONAL donate the land to the State of Florida, St. Johns County and the City of St. Augustine, to connect Anastasia State Park and St. Augustine Beach Pier Park. This is the only property dividing the two parks.
Connecting the two parks would protect the endangered species and archaeology and provide more beach access.
Great hotels are built out on piers elsewhere.
A hotel on the new St. Augustine Beach Pier would shield several outdoor restaurants and shield fishermen from the sun's rays, preventing skin cancer.
A hotel on the new St. Augustine Beach Pier would allow room for a history and civil rights museum, honoring the likely location of the second St. Augustine settlement, which 16th century Spanish documents say was being "eaten by the sea."
A hotel on the new St. Augustine Beach Pier would afford hotel guests unique views of the ocean from on top of the ocean.
A long pier with a hotel on top could include offices and shops.
A long pier could include solar panels on the roof (with federal grants from the Department of Energy).
A long pier might include glass or plexiglass flooring in parts, so people could look down at the sea, perhaps over the spot where the aretisan well lies offshore, a possible remnant of the second St. Augustine setlement, which 16th century Spanish documents said was being "eaten by the sea."
Imagine some of the coolest Miami modern or art deco architecture, only horizontal instead of vertical.
Hotels on piers is a business model that works well elsewhere.
Otherwise, archaeological research and administrative and court litigation will likely delay the hotel project for years.
I have asked KEY INTERNATIONAL for its thoughts about donating or selling the land to a government.
Perhaps KEY INTERNATIONAL's CEO will attend Monday night's St. Augustine each City Commission meeting.
Let's get this right. This is for your grandchildren, and their grandchildren.
It takes a village.
KEY INTERNATIONAL's AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyers well know that our community will stand up to them. AKERMAN SENTERFITT is Florida's largest corporate law firm.
AKERMAN SENTERFITT defends a world of evil, as I documented on this blog in 2010, quoting from AKERMAN's own website brags about defeating consumer, environmental and public interest cses.
AKERMAN SENTEFITT veru does little pro bono work. It is most unlike Holland & Knight, which represented eighteen of us in stopping two City of St. Augustine Sunshine and Open Records violations (four-Commissioner-"business" trip to Spain and First America Foundation being given $275,000 in City funds to put on the 450th celebration, when it lacked experience in even "running a child's birthday party," as Folio Weekly put it).
In fact, AKERMAN SENTERFITT is a big bully of a corporate law firm with one of the lowest levels of participation in pro bono activities. In fact, when I asked DANIEL SAUL GELBER, our 2010 Democratic nominee for Florida Attorney General what he did at AKERMAN SENTERFITT for pro bono work, GELBER was at a complete loss: "I was a Big Brother," he told me, lamely. That's not pro bono legal work.
AKERMAN SENTERFITT is one of tortfeasor BP's defense firms.
It was AKERMAN SENTERFITT that local activists here in St. Augustine beat like a drum during 2006-2008.
It all started when our former City Manager, WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS, illegally dumped 40,000 cubic yards of contaminated solid waste in our Old City Reservoir, in West Augustine. HARRISS and Commissioners then decided to accept AKERMAN SENTERFITT's hare-brained scheme. They voted to re-dump 40,000 cubic yards of illegally-dumped contaminated solid waste in Linconville, and call it a "park."
We stopped them, by organizing our commmunity and petitioning the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Administrative Hearings for relief.
We activists beat HARRISS and the City of St. Augustine, which wasted $300,000 on that fiasco. The solid waste is now in a Class I landfill in Nassau County, contrary to AKERMAN SENTERFITT's defending the indefensible. Local activists beat AKERMAN SENTERFITT to protect our community. We can do it again.
Being sophisticated international businessmen from Spain, we know that KEY INTERNATIONAL and the Ardid family will want to preserve our Spanish colonial history. We're looking forward to the King and Queen of Spain visiting here next year for our 450th. We know they will probably be interested to see the likely loation of the second St. Augustine settlement (1566), as well as the first (1565).
Unlike HARRISS and our former Commissioners, KEY INTERNATIONAL and the Ardid family will NOT want to waste their money on bad advice from AKERMAN SENTERIFTT.
Large corproate law firms like AKERMAN have a tendency to overbill clients, wiht impenetrable hourly rate strucutres and payroll padding. Sophisticated business people want to make deals, not pay hourly rates: they look to "value billing."
The bottom line: why insist on keeping the same location as the trashy hotel that is being torn down?
Why ruin Spanish colonial history and architecture with a too-fast quick and dirty shallow study by Beltway bandits, when real archaeology will take years (as Kathy Deagan has at the site of the frst St. Augustine settlement on the grounds of Mission Nombre de Dios and the Lady of la Leche Shrine and of the Fountain of Youth park)?
Why build a hotel on land that is eroding and has already eroded in our lifetimes?
What bank will want to invest in such folly (even with a ten-year payback)? Would that risk foreclosure (as occured with another KEY INTERNATIONAL project several years ago)? Would that risk bankruptcy? Would it risk bank regulatory agency invstigation of breach of fiduciary duty?
Instead, let's discuss:
(a) erecting a KEY INTERNATIONAL luxury hotel at the upper levels of a new St. Augustine Beach Pier, providing KEY INTERNATIONAL with air rights, in exchange for the six acre parcel of the former St. Augustine Beach Resort; and
(b) erecting a new long Pier through means of a public-private partnership, including restaurants, shops, and a history and civil rights museum, with participation of KEY INTERNATIONAL, St. Augustine Beach, St. Johns County and the National Park Service.
St. Augustine survived being burned to the ground by Indians in 1566, and by the British several times.
St. Augustine was where America started, on September 8, 1565: 800 settlers landed. Native American Indians saw America's first Roman Catholic Mass and shared its first Thanksgiving, with America's first Europeans, first Africans, first Hispanics, first Roman Catholics and first Jews. It is a history of cultural diversity.
Let's celebrate it and preserve it, strting with the site of the second settlement n St. Augustine Beach.
What do y'all reckon?
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