When South Seas’ owners showed heart
To the editor:
Protect Captiva — a coalition of local residents and civic organizations — is in the early stages of a major legal battle with Lee County. In December, the county finalized special exemptions for South Seas, at the north end of Captiva, from existing density and height restrictions as it rebuilds after Hurricane Ian. The exemptions are based on a preposterous argument: that permitting a dramatic increase in development at the resort will somehow contribute to the island’s future disaster resiliency.
Protect Captiva is fighting the exemptions on multiple fronts. It is petitioning the state land planning agency — which last fall found the county’s resiliency rationale risible — to review and reject the changes. On the county level, it is opposing the rezoning application South Seas submitted just days after the exemptions were finalized. If neither of the administrative challenges succeeds, the dispute will graduate to civil court.
So far as the county is concerned, the exemptions are a done deal. It can be expected to damn the torpedoes and push through approvals for South Seas as quickly as possible. Still, Protect Captiva’s opposition will slow things down, giving us time to study the issue from a wider, historical perspective.
One unnerving observation is that Lee County tried to grossly overdevelop South Seas another time, 60 years ago, when the resort was in its infancy.
Back then, the concrete was still drying on the new Sanibel Causeway, built in 1963. During that era, South Seas had about 40 guestrooms. With the new automobile access available to Sanibel and Captiva, Lee County up-zoned South Seas to a permittable carrying capacity of 3,900 units.
That figure is not a misprint. Lee County in its planning wisdom determined that with vehicular access to the islands, South Seas could now responsibly accommodate approximately 100 times more guest units. How it calculated that number (not 2,900 or 4,900?) is perhaps lost in the sands of time. But the number it settled on would have allowed an average of 13 units per acre. Since much of the resort’s acreage is not buildable — mangroves, waterways, ponds, beaches — and even more of it would be used for roads, parking, walkways, landscaping and space-consuming amenities like golf and tennis, the remaining acreage for actual buildings would need to have been far denser. Think high-rises.
Why didn’t that happen? How were the county’s plans foiled? This is where an improbable series of events combined to save South Seas from the county’s excessive development policies.
By the early 1970s, the aging owner of South Seas had become infirm, moved to the mainland, and his family decided to sell. Thirty-nine different parties lined up to make bids for the property, since the county had up-zoned it to such a vast development potential. The winning bid passed over the deep-pocket suitors and went instead to a fledgling development company, Mariner Group, started by two guys from Ohio who were doing a number of projects on Sanibel.
That was very lucky, because those two guys from Mariner had the heart to see that South Seas would be utterly overwhelmed by anything like 3,900 units. They promptly and successfully applied to have South Seas’ 304 acres down-zoned from 13 units per acre to no more than three units per acre, for a total of 912 units. That building density has been enshrined in county code for a half-century, until two months ago, when the board of commissioners blew it up.
A question worth asking is why Lee County would be so persistent in its efforts to overdevelop South Seas. Money is a good place to start. The more development, the more taxes — property, sales, occupancy — flowing into county coffers. Also, developers are often generous campaign donors to local politicians, money intended to influence thinking and sway decisions. On a psychological plane, local public officials and civil servants sometimes fall prey to sycophancy, fawning before rich and powerful developers and their backers. Maybe it’s just aesthetics: when county officials contemplate proper island development, they might look to Marco Island or Miami Beach, not local exemplars like Sanibel or Captiva or Boca Grande or Palm Island.
One thing we can’t count on today is an owner like Mariner, that rarest of developers with an old-school sense of proportion and public purpose. Mariner not only brought the buildout from 3,900 down to 912 units, it dedicated 140 of those units to employee housing, leaving only 772 visitor-serving units. Mariner walked away from about 80% of the property’s development potential. It left four-fifths of the potential profit on the table, untold millions of dollars, in the interests of building a tasteful, moderate, low-rise resort it could take pride in. Its prescience even right-sized the final buildout: at nearly 912 units, South Seas in the high seasons before Ian was as brimful as it could safely handle.
Contrast Mariner with the new South Seas owners, who actually form a division-of-labor triumvirate. Wheelock Street Capital provides the money, Timbers Company does the resort’s operations and management, and The Ronto Group of Naples handles the resort’s redevelopment work. Ronto — the builders — believe firmly in high-rise shoreline construction. Its website shows a photo scroll of tall buildings looming over waterfronts; the company’s “expertise in high-rise construction” is emphasized in the second sentence of its self-description. In fact, the expression “high-rise” appears no fewer than four times on Ronto’s homepage. It is clear where its sentiments lie: the more, the higher, the merrier.
South Seas’ new owners have cycled through a rapid evolution of plans that invites questions. Less than four months after Ian, in January of 2023, Timbers’ chief executive officer in a talk before the SanCap Chamber of Commerce said they intended to have the resort’s Harbourside Hotel back in service by last September, a timeframe that other major buildings at the resort — timeshares and condos — largely adhered to. Those buildings are all of similar age, height, style and construction materials as the hotel, and they’ve all been repaired and reopened. The resort determined that the hotel was repairable, even projecting a completion date, and yet in the weeks following the CEO’s statement a year ago January, a decision was made to destroy the hotel. What changed their plans? The hotel could be up and running right now, as the other non-resort-owned units have been for months. Why did the county allow the resort to destroy a repairable hotel? And why did South Seas destroy it, unless they were convinced they could replace it with something bigger?
Similar questions arise about demolitions of other resort-owned buildings. Most of the non-resort-owned buildings, including all of the condos and timeshares, were repaired in relatively short order; most of the resort-owned buildings were approved for demolition and destroyed. That is an odd discrepancy. Even the destruction of the resort’s classic nine-hole golf course raises questions. Why demolish the course, unless they’re convinced the county will allow them to build condos on its Gulf-facing finishing holes?
Today, South Seas presents a bizarre and telling juxtaposition. On the one hand, non-resort-owned timeshares and condos have been largely returned to their former glory. On the other hand, destroyed resort-owned buildings lie in ruins, amid torn-up, debris-strewn grounds. One can legitimately ask: What caused more damage to the resort, Ian or its new owners? And how else can one explain the willful destruction of valuable resort assets, unless the sweeping changes South Seas proposes have been in essence pre-approved by the county?
Protect Captiva is not just protecting Captiva’s future. As we see, it is also protecting a proud legacy of low-rise moderation that the county is threatening with extinction. What should happen here? The proper outcome is to restore a South Seas that got it right the first time, by maintaining the buildout limit of 912 units, by dedicating 140 of them to employee housing and by requiring that the unnecessarily demolished hotel and other facilities be rebuilt to their prior dimensions.
Don Bacon
Montara, California