Tier Three condo to rise in Crystal Beach (updated w/slideshow)

If someone in a wheelchair can’t use a public beach access, Destin City Councilor Sandy Trammell says, is it really public?

During a Monday hearing on the Beach Pointe condo project proposed for Crystal Beach, Trammell objected that the “public benefit” the developers had offered — a 10-foot-wide public easement to the beach, with a four-foot wide dune walkover — wasn’t handicapped-accessible

“A handicapped child couldn’t play on this beach, he couldn’t get there on this path and he couldn’t get there from his unit” if he lived at Beach Pointe, Trammell said.

After the developers agreed to widen the walkover — but not to make it ADA-compliant — the council approved Beach Pointe in a squeaker 4-3 vote.

The five-unit, five-story Scenic Hwy. 98 condo building is a Tier Three development, a category for projects that justify going above the city’s normal height limits by providing a “public benefit” acceptable to the council. The city code measures Beach Pointe at 60 feet high — though an arch atop the building reaches 79 feet — which exceeds the Tier Two limits for Crystal Beach.

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For a video slideshow of the development , click here.

Click on http://frasersmind.freedomblogging.com/ for more on this story, a play by play of the meeting and to join the discussion. And check out Wednesday's Log for a complete wrap up of all the City Council's doings in Destin.

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Some Crystal Beach residents said they’d assumed a Tier Three condo would resemble Harbor Reflections, the 15-story Destin harbor condo tower the council approved in January. The residents said they were pleased to be wrong, but that didn’t stop them, and council members, from raising other questions:
•Councilor Jim Bagby said some of the city standards had been met based on counting areas of the beach as “developable property,” even though they couldn’t be built on.
•Some homeowners objected that if the public used the beach access, they’d wind up spilling onto the private beaches in the area.
•Would a pending Florida Supreme Court decision on beach restoration affect the public’s access? City attorneys said no, it would not.
•The four-foot dune walkover was too narrow.

When Trammell asked about ADA-compliance, city staffers said the city codes didn’t require that. Trammell said that should be changed, and making the Beach Pointe walkover handicapped accessible should be part of the public benefit.

Speaking for the developers, Choctaw Engineering’s Mark Siner said they’d be willing to widen the path but didn’t want to make changes beyond that. A wheelchair-friendly boardwalk would need to be redesigned with a more gradual slope.

Councilor Sam Seevers pointed out that Beach Pointe had already applied for a permit as Tier Two before deciding to add a fifth story to the building: If the council rejected the Tier Three proposal the developers could go back to Tier Two and not offer a public benefit.

City Attorney Jerry Miller said if the walkover didn’t meet the city code, it would be redesigned, but he didn’t see any grounds for “imposing a building standard condition” beyond that. Bagby asked why requiring handicapped access would be different from any other public benefit, but Miller said he’d rather not argue the point.

Trammell’s ADA accessible motion failed 2-5, with Bagby and Trammel voting yes, and the rest of the council voting no.
The council then granted Beach Pointe a permit on a 4-3 vote, with Kelly Windes, Seevers, Tom Weidenhamer and Dewey Destin voting yes and Bagby, Jim Wood and Trammell voting no.

After the vote, Trammell said that if federal law doesn’t require ADA-compatible beach accessways, the city should change its own ordinances to do so.