Key West The Newspaper - November 30, 2001

Southernmost House

by Sheila Mullins

When Key West City Commissioners voted to approve the Southernmost House project at their last meeting, they demonstrated once again their callous disregard for the survival of our endangered Old Town neighborhoods. In a 5-1 vote, the Commission okayed plans to turn the historic building into a 14-room guest house and museum, with a "conditional use" granted for a combination bar/restaurant with amplified music. It's this last component that the Commissioners bent the rules to accommodate, and which will spell doom for the surrounding neighborhood.

Unlike other guest houses in Key West, which can only serve complimentary food and drink to their paying guests, the Southernmost House will be able to sell food and liquor to anybody who enters the museum. To anyone who doesn't have their head in the sand, it's clear that this is nothing more than a loophole to approve a bar and restaurant without going through the required permitting process. The attorney for the project repeatedly warned the commissioners "don't treat my client differently" than any other applicant. Well, I couldn't agree more— because had he been treated like everyone else, he would never have gotten approval for a public bar and restaurant.

If this plan comes to pass, it will have a fatal impact on the surrounding neighborhood. Because when a neighborhood's quality of life has been compromised once, the City Commission invariably writes it off as lost and allows increasingly disruptive commercial activity.

This kind of block-busting has eaten away at the fabric of virtually every Old Town neighborhood, turning once-vibrant parts of our city into lifeless commercial deserts.

When neighbors of the Southernmost House dared to challenge this assault on their quality of life, Commissioner Harry Bethel launched into his famous bully-boy routine, interrupting citizens who were speaking out to save their homes, and casually dismissing their concerns about traffic, parking and escalating commercial activity.

Considering the Commission's past experiences in similar situations— which have spawned expensive legal quagmires for the city— the commissioners should have known better than to open this Pandora's Box again. The example of the conditional use granted and later rescinded for the Laser Tag on Eaton Street stands out. Only after years of suffering and uncounted time and money spent documenting the abuse heaped upon them by Laser Tag patrons, were neighbors able to convince commissioners to rescind the conditional use.

And in another case several years ago, the Commission granted conditional use for an outdoor tiki bar, spa and pool that were exclusively for the use of Orleans House guests, but which were in fact the scene of numerous very noisy events. Signs inside the Bourbon Street Pub (under the same ownership as the Orleans House) and newspaper advertisements promoted the outdoor bar, and non-guests patronized it day and night.

And not surprisingly, the unbearable noise at all hours eventually drove away the surrounding residents— some of whom had lived there for 20 years.

It's hard to tell whether the commissioners are utterly unfamiliar with our zoning rules and land development regulations (LDRs), or if they simply choose to ignore them. In public they often make it look as though there is nothing they can do to prevent commercial development and intensification of commercial uses, when in fact all they have to do is vote no based on our LDRs.

Commissioners are elected to represent our interest and the good of the entire community. But they're not and we need to tell them so, now and on election day.