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Holmes Beach Gets Cold Shoulder from BOCC

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On Tuesday, the Manatee County Commission and Holmes Beach City Commission convened for a long-overdue joint meeting to deal with the ongoing island parking wars. To describe the meeting as less than productive would be an understatement, to say the least.
While parking issues between the county and its island cities are nothing new, this latest round of drama started with the election of District 3 Manatee County Commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge, who, in a county work session that took place immediately after he was sworn in, went on the attack following the city’s decision to reduce its number of free public parking spaces in response to persistent resident complaints.
Van Ostenbridge, whose district includes Holmes Beach, accused the city’s government of jeopardizing beach renourishment funding by not having enough public parking spaces within the prescribed radius of its public beaches to qualify. It would quickly be revealed that the freshman commissioner did not understand the issue and that the city actually had an interlocal agreement with the county that ensured an excess of such spots.
Rather than apologize for a rookie mistake, Van Ostenbridge simply dug his heels in deeper and the result has been an unfortunate feud between the city’s elected officials and their representative on the county commission. If you want more backstory, you can find it in the following articles:

County and Holmes Beach Continue to Spar Over Parking


During Tuesday’s meeting, Manatee County Parks & Natural Resources Director Charlie Hunsicker gave the board a presentation regarding field investigations his department had performed. Hunsicker said that his staff had identified 1,255 beach parking spaces in 2013 and only 775 in 2020. That's a net loss of 480 spots, but considerably more than what is required for federal funding or through the interlocal agreement. It’s also important to note that Hunsicker’s number included spaces that were "unverifiable“ as open to the public by way of signage, so the deficit could very well be less.
While the city commissioners and Holmes Beach Mayor Judy Titsworth had brought a number of issues they had hoped to address, Van Ostenbridge, who currently serves as the board’s chair, said that adding back those 480 spots was his starting point. The meeting went nowhere fast.
The City of Holmes Beach, in response to the very valid quality of life complaints it has been bombarded with from its residents, has decided to implement a still very reasonable parking plan that is better suited to the capacity of the geographically-challenged space it occupies. Nonetheless, it still offers the most public parking of the three island cities.
And here’s the rub, putting back those 480 spots is going to do absolutely nothing in terms of making island parking easier on mainland residents. It wouldn’t even keep up with a single year-to-year increase in demand for a county that’s consistently growing by about 10,000 residents per year on average. What it would do, however, is reverse the small amount of relief it has provided for the people who have made Holmes Beach their home.
To summarize Holmes Beach Commissioner Carol Soustek, the county commission cannot continue to dole out comp plan amendments and rezones so that the developers who pay for their seats can continue putting up mega-developments all along the coastal mainland and then expect the city to just figure out a way to conveniently accommodate every one of them when they want to use its beaches.
But anytime someone brings up development, Van Ostenbridge–who was tapped from obscurity by political kingpin and Medallion Homes CEO Carlos Beruff to make sure that sustainable-growth advocate Matt Bower didn’t get the seat–tells us that there’s a housing crisis and that it would be irresponsible to do anything but let his political sponsors build, build, build. Of course, he always leaves out the word "affordable“ before "housing crisis“ lest we take a closer look at the starting prices of all those mega-developments, or the fact that the county commission couldn’t be less interested in providing housing solutions for the working class that actually needs them the most.
The BOCC’s obsession with acting punitively toward Holmes Beach extends beyond Van Ostenbridge. Indeed, there really didn’t appear to be a single friendly face among the seven commissioners when the city officials looked across the table during the meeting. Some of it is clearly partisan, as Van Ostenbridge, one of six Republicans on the board, continued his habit of making ideological barbs on Tuesday. The City of Holmes Beach has a non-partisan government, but some of its members are rumored to be Democrats (if you can imagine such a scandal) and Mayor Titsworth has admitted to being a registered independent.
However, Mayor Titsworth had a more interesting take as to why the county might be so disinterested in working with her city toward equitable solutions. As more and more island residents give up on the idea that their quality of life can possibly be preserved, the sky-high prices have increasingly seen the properties of those who sell torn down and replaced by even higher-value, non-homesteaded properties that represent a much bigger property tax windfall for the county coffers (see her statement in the video below).

Vacationers tend to be much more willing to accept resort town inconveniences for a week or two, especially when they don’t have to get up early for work or traverse the roads on the routine schedule of everyday life. If they also amount to more revenue in the budget, that’s at least one way to offset all of that unabated mainland growth that we all know doesn’t pay for itself. Of course, that’s not a particularly tasteful strategy in terms of protecting the welfare of the community you ostensibly represent, but if anything was clear during Tuesday’s meeting it was that one government was representing its citizens and their stated interests, while the other was playing politics.
The island is never going to get any bigger. Just look at a map of Manatee County and you’ll see why that pencil-thin strip of barrier islands is never going to adequately meet the demand of the much larger mainland that keeps growing at a faster and faster clip. Water taxis, park and rides, and a county-built garage will only partially keep up with growth over the next decade and, at best, it will only get somewhat worse over that time. The ultimate meter of supply and demand will remain the PITA factor and who is willing to get up early enough and put up with the challenges of finding a spot, a proposition that will only continue to require more motivation with every new mega-development that is approved.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is availablehere.


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