County/South Seas: Take a lesson from General Lee
To the editor:
A recent legal decision has dashed the plans of Lee County and South Seas to drastically enlarge the iconic Captiva resort. The 20th Circuit Court upheld a long-established permanent 912-unit limit for the property; South Seas’ pending application asks for 1,271 units, with 631 new units.
– Accept Defeat: In the closing days of the Civil War, as Gen. Robert E. Lee prepared to surrender his army to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled from Richmond, vowing to continue the fight. Lee wisely counseled that the war was lost, and defeat must be accepted. Davis spent another month wandering the South, trying to cobble together remnants of his armies, until he was captured while hiding in disguise, a woman’s shawl over his head.
It is in everyone’s interests that the county and South Seas accept defeat, and take the appropriate actions. First, they need to forgo fruitless legal appeals, which would only further delay rebuilding the resort, while squandering more taxpayer millions on a misbegotten cause. Second, they need to abandon their easily-refuted interpretation of the resort’s 912-unit buildout limit as not counting hotel rooms. Pursuing that gambit will land them back in court for another loss. Third, they need to cancel the scheduled February public hearings on the South Seas redevelopment application. A completely new application will need to be submitted, since the circuit court decision nixes 57% (359 units) of the proposed development. Fourth, county commissioners need to repeal the 2023 ordinance that removed any density limits for the resort.
– Right Your Wrongs: The county and South Seas naively assumed from the beginning that resistance to their scheme would be negligible, and that the resort would soon be dramatically enlarged. While the county prepared to grant South Seas its special density exemption, it permitted significant changes to the resort with the expectation that it would approve South Seas’ future application for a new rezoned planned development.
None of these anticipatory piecemeal changes should have been permitted. County planners should have waited until the rezoning application had been submitted and deemed complete, after which any desired changes should first have been evaluated by planning staff as component parts of a proposed redevelopment whole, then considered in public hearings. Instead, the county’s eagerness to please the resort’s owners resulted in a hodgepodge of perfunctory pre-approvals whose consequences can now be corrected.
Of course everyone who’s been following this conflict knows that any corrections will be mightily resisted. The purpose of putting the cart (changes to the resort) in front of the horse (consideration of a proposed master plan that includes those changes) is to present the public with a fait accompli that supposedly cannot be undone.
The most significant pre-approval was to allow the demolition of the hotel, which — like all the other condo and timeshare buildings at the resort after Hurricane Ian — was by all appearances not substantially damaged. South Seas has hoped to replace the hotel with taller structures of greater stories, when what it needed was repairs and an updating. The hotel, with a graceful serpentine design wrapping around the marina and harbor mouth, should now be rebuilt on its prior footprint.
The county also hastened to pre-approve the destruction of a historic, superbly designed golf course, again on the assumption that the resort’s grandiose enlargement plans were a done deal. The course’s Gulf-front finishing holes were situated right where the resort hopes to build dozens of luxury condos. As a downgraded replacement, the county permitted a pitch-and-putt, along with a “clubhouse” and large maintenance building that now stand in the viewsheds of no fewer than five condo and timeshare developments. The original golf course should be restored, and its token replacement and attendant structures removed.
The county has more recently permitted a new resort restaurant that appears to obtrude onto the only roadway access resort residents have to the beach and Gulf. South Seas has even blocked residents from using the roadway for vehicular access. The partially-constructed restaurant should be located with setbacks that ensure residents’ unfettered beach access.
– Best and Highest Use: This is a catchphrase that the real estate community employs to express the notion that properties should realize their ideal use. Best and highest use for a given property might mean anything from open space to a skyscraper; every property has its own unique potentiality.
South Seas some time ago grew to achieve its highest potential as a mixed-use, low-rise, low-density resort that (but for 25 units) was entirely built out. The artful design and configuration of its buildings and amenities drew universal praise. Small-scale developments were carefully staggered throughout the resort so as not to block or crowd one another’s views, especially of the surrounding waters. The biggest problem in recent years was that the previous resort owners (Blackstone, the hedge-fund group) failed to consistently invest in the resort’s upkeep.
That set the stage in 2021 for a discounted sale to the current owners, who appear to interpret “best and highest” as “most and biggest.” Blackstone’s deferred maintenance, combined with Hurricane Ian, gave the new owners an opportunity to treat the resort as a teardown, wiping the slate in preparation for a rezoned planned development of far greater size, heights and density. To make all that possible, the county lurched to pass a special enabling ordinance, then spent all of 2024 trying to wriggle out of its longstanding legal commitment to never approve more than 912 units at the resort.
It should go without saying that the least rational response to repeated hurricane thrashings is to attempt to dramatically increase the density of the resort. One must ask: why in the world would the county go to the mattresses — spending countless attorney hours and millions in public moneys — for such an irresponsible cause?
South Seas’ redevelopment plans attempt to overstuff a resort that has proven itself extremely vulnerable to disaster. There is nothing in South Seas’ proposal that evinces any appreciation for the moderate sizing and easygoing style of the resort. This lack of proportion would happily stack new buildings without regard for the viewsheds of existing development. The new owners have even had the audacity to restrict residents’ beach access. All of this has locals questioning whether they have what it takes to properly restore and steward a once-exquisite property.
– Shoulder Your Share: South Seas is at the very end of a long cul-de-sac, about 18 miles from the mainland across the Sanibel Causeway and through the length of Sanibel and Captiva. Real estate entrepreneurs are particularly attracted to such properties, not merely because they have an end-of-the-road ambiance whose privacy and exclusivity garner higher room rates and faster appreciation. Less obviously, properties at the terminus of any chain of development tend to free-ride off the public and private infrastructure required to reach the far end of the road.
Think of regional end-of-the-line destinations such as Boca Grande or especially Key West. The special costs that properties in those locales may incur are far outweighed by the unreimbursed benefits of the public roads, utilities, services and amenities they enjoy. Try as Charlotte or Monroe counties might, they can never get their glamorous, expensive termini to pay their fair share. They will always free-ride to one degree or another.
That is equally true of South Seas. One of the ways the original developer evened the score a bit on the free-rider issue was through employee housing. One hundred and forty units were built, and fully included in the 912-unit buildout limit. The county’s 2002 governing document for the resort — still on the books — mandates the continuance of employee housing, but neglects to specify how many units. That omission opened the door for subsequent owners to allow those units to dilapidate, in the hopes of replacing them with condos. The county obliged about a decade ago, by first slashing the number of required units, and then (overriding its own mandate) entirely excusing the resort from supplying any employee housing. It is no surprise that none of the 631 new units South Seas hoped to build were intended for employees.
If county planners and commissioners can ever get out from underneath the resort owners and see their way to representing the public interest, they will require that South Seas rebuild the 140 employee units. Otherwise, considering today’s acute housing shortage and resulting rent spikes, it is predictable that some of the people who clean the rooms or wash the dishes at the resort will spend their nights in an RV, or their car, or on the street. The logical location to rebuild the employee housing is on its former site, at Sea Turtle Court on the resort’s southern edge.
A portion of those 140 units could be set aside for workers who provide and maintain the infrastructure upon which the resort free-rides. Police, fire, EMT, harbor, water, sewer, sanitation, public works, electrical, cable, landline, cellular, et cetera, are all essential services provided on a continual basis to the resort, the costs of which can never be fully recouped. One step in that direction is for the resort to provide housing, at below-market rates, for some of the essential-service personnel who cannot otherwise afford to live anywhere near the resort and community they serve.
– Full Buildout: South Seas will finally reach its buildout limit if 25 new units are added, which the new owners would presumably wish to be condos, not hotel rooms, because they can be larger and sold off as desired. The market value of 25 new condos would together be worth more than was paid for the entire resort in 2021.
The new units can form a small-scale development on the southern end of the peninsula also occupied by Marina Villas, affording all the units bay views. Or they can be located just to the north of Sunset Beach Road, next to the new restaurant and to the south of the rebuilt golf course’s 9th hole. That location would give all the units Gulf views, without obstructing the Gulf views South Seas Club has enjoyed throughout its 40-year existence. A third option is to divide the 25 new condos between the two sites, creating compact new developments on both sides of the island.
Don Bacon
Montara, California