May 31, 2007 Issue

Beware of anyone who eagerly offers to come to your rescue…when you aren’t in need of being rescued.

The city of Destin, after 15 years and three exhaustive and expensive studies (the discarded Sasaki Plan alone cost $800,000.00), is again coming to the aid of the Destin Harbor with a plan for a Harbor Walk. Tetra-Tech, the current planners, should have spent more time studying the Sasaki study.

The fatal error that Tetra-Tech, and the city, has made once again is partly in their methodology. They are supposed to have interviewed 80 stakeholders in the Harbor area about a Harbor Walk. Who those 80 people are, I don’t know. What they needed to do was to listen to what the people want; not what the developers need.

A local developer, with vacant land on the Harbor, found the Harvard-educated Sasaki group, and underwrote their study. It is amazing how studies are generally skewed in favor of the party who is paying for them. One aspect of the Sasaki study that I will always remember occurred at the Destin Community Center.

“You people may have been to a resort before,” the speaker told a crowded room. “Disney World, Seaside, and Sandestin all look like resorts. The Destin Harbor area does not.”

Well, there is a reason that our Harbor doesn’t look like a resort. That’s because it’s not. It’s a real town, an actual working Harbor, not something born of a developer’s imagination, and that is the way it should stay. Coastal Living Magazine just chose the Destin Harbor as one of the top 10 in the United States.

There is a unique irony in our current situation. The project most often used as an example of what our Harbor could be is Baytowne Wharf at Sandestin. Baytowne Wharf is a replication of a real harbor. Complete with uniform signage and chain stores and the cutesy accoutrements that go with knock-offs of real places. So we are in the position of imitating an imitation of a real working harbor, which we already have.

Who is in favor of the Harbor Walk and spending $80 million dollars of taxpayer money? Developers. The huge monstrosity looming over the Destin Harbor at the base of the Marler Bridge named its marina Harbor Walk years ago. Its theme is “Celebrating the heritage of the Destin Harbor.” I don’t think anyone believes that building project has anything to do with the heritage or the future of the harbor.

To my knowledge, the “monster” has attracted two commercial tenants. The first was Pat O’Brien’s, a New Orleans bar-turned national chain, whose claim to fame is the high-octane drink: “the hurricane.” The newly announced second tenant is Testers Mardi Gras Daiquiri Bar who reputedly have the “world’s strongest drink.” The “monster” has two tenants who can argue over who has the strongest drink. That’s classy.

Real estate developers are speculators. They take risks and are either rewarded by those risks or hurt by them. That is an aspect of private enterprise they are well aware of. Before the “monster” has even been finished the developers have been beseeching the city to fix the sea wall and address erosion problems. Those are problems that can occur when a project is built on a spit of land close to a gulf pass. But they are problems for the developer, not for taxpayers.

We are in the midst of a devastating real estate market now. The “monster” is caught in the middle of our real estate nightmare. The developers of that project were hoping to lure buyers with the spectacular views. That is called “betting on the come.” Sometimes you bet wrong. But when it happens don’t expect millions of public tax dollars to bail you out.

Ninety percent of the Destin Harbor area is already suitable for pedestrians. It doesn’t have the uniformity of signage, seating and lighting that Baytowne Wharf has, but we do have The Boathouse, something Sandestin can never claim.

The City of Destin is using scare tactics to try to push the Harbor Walk on us. Fear is a popular political strategy these days, but it won’t work in Destin. The city tells us other tourist communities nearby are spending “billions” of dollars in advertising to lure our tourists away. That is total crap. Someone doesn’t understand how much a billion dollars is. Besides, our city doesn’t need to spend one dollar on advertising. There were more people here this Memorial Day than ever and they didn’t show up because of an ad in Southern Living magazine.

The attractions that are most appreciated in Destin have nothing to do with developers, or businesses, for that matter. They are the beaches, the gulf, the bay, the harbor, and the most spectacular floating party in the world, Crab Island. Aside from helping to restore the beaches, the city hasn’t had a hand in any of these natural wonders.

But the city does have a track record at redeveloping areas in our town. The Main Street CRA is an ongoing one. CRAs were invented to help restore blighted, urban, slum areas. How Main Street or our Harbor area fit into that description is a mystery to me. The city has spent millions of dollars and three years butchering the area around Main Street and Airport Road. And we’re going to allow them to take on a much more problematic redevelopment of the waterfront on the Destin Harbor? I don’t think so.

However, if we had no say in the matter, we should have someone like Tom Becnel, a local developer, rebuild the Harbor. He could do in six weeks what would take the city six years.

But we do have a say in the future of our Harbor. If there was a need for redevelopment, Harbor area property owners should pay for it themselves. When I first inquired of Gulf Power as to the cost of underground utilities it was $1million per mile. I would gladly pay my pro-rata share of that cost. If the city wanted to bring more vitality to the Harbor, which would be hard to do, they could build public parking lots. Parking lots can be a profitable endeavor, and are one of the few projects the city could undertake that could actually pay for itself.

A project that is promoted and funded and studied for 15 years has had long enough to catch on. If a project that has been this visible, for this long, has not captured the imagination of the public, it’s not going to.

My advice to the city, and our county, is this: you have taxed our people enough. Let private enterprise pay for private endeavors. Don’t mess with our livelihoods; don’t mess with what little heritage this town has left; don’t mess with our Harbor.

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