SRIA finalizes hotel/condo policy
BY PAM BRANNON Gulf Breeze News franklin@gulfbreezenews.com

Santa Rosa Island Authority (SRIA) Chair Vernon Prather introduced the most time consuming topic of last week's board meeting as the "infamous" condo/hotel policy/ordinance. Then, 90 minutes later,the board had given final approval to the document.

"We have been waiting since January for this to get done," developer David Brannen said. "Now that we know what we can build, we can move ahead with the Clarion and with the resort that will eventually take the place of the Best Western."

The Island Authority spent 90 minutes going through paragraph after paragraph and line after line, making revisions. The board voted to make the lease fee for all rooms to be rented on the beach a flat 3 percent.

It was decided that 90 percent of the units within a development could be no larger than two bedrooms with two baths - then they changed their minds. The final amended vote was to allow 50 percent of rooms within a condo resort or hotel/motel development to be larger than two bedrooms with two baths. They also changed the ordinance to allow no restrictions on cooking and laundry facilities for rooms more than 825 square feet in size.

General Manager Lee introduced a hotel interruption fee policy, saying hotels will have to continue to pay the SRIA lease fees if they tear down a hotel to rebuild a larger or more modern structure.

"We operate on lease fees. That is what keeps us going. So if a hotel developer decides to tear down what has been there as a functioning operating hotel to build something new on the same spot, we cannot lease that space or assign that number of rooms to any other developer," Lee said. "So we have put together a hotel interruption fee schedule we need to include in this ordinance. We are asking the developer to pay the highest lease fees that they had paid us during the last five years of the existing hotel's operation during the time the facility is torn down and the new one is not operational."

For example, Lee said if the resort paid $200,000 a year in lease fees in the past, then the developer would pay that fee to the SRIA for every year it takes to rebuild and open.

"But then we will give them a credit in lease fees for the first two years of operation that would equal what they paid us while they were rebuilding." Lee said. "So if a developer paid us $600,000 during a three-year period of rebuilding, we would give them a credit of $300,000 each of the first two years they reopen. But with larger rooms bringing in larger fees than the previous hotel on that spot, we will still be getting some lease fees from the new facility, to be sure. So it won't hurt us. And it is only fair, so they won't be throwing away that $200,000 a year - or whatever they have to pay. Right now we are getting $80,000 a year from the Best Western. So when they tear it down to rebuild, they will pay us $80,000 a year while it is not operational."

The board agreed to give each developer 12 months after conceptual approval to get their development order or else the number of rooms originally approved would revert back to the SRIA to assign to some other developer.