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Flood Insurance Reform Act’s Shock Therapy: A Cure Worse than the Underlying Disorder? By Robert Frederickson Harvey Vengroff is moving to Belize. As a successful businessman and investor he can afford to live just about anywhere. His companies, including Vengroff and Associates, have made him a wealthy man, primarily through work in the debt collection field. His companies reportedly manage in excess of $20 billion in debt annually. Additionally, he owns and manages over 700 rental properties in the Sarasota/ Manatee county areas. His holdings also include warehouse and commercial properties throughout the region. He loves this area. Has lived here for years. Moved his business here. So why is he leaving? It’s not the climate. There’s plenty of sun and surf to be found in these parts, just as in the sun-drenched paradise of Belize, located in the western Caribbean on the southern end of the Yucatan peninsula. But the business climate? Well, that’s another story. And that’s what has him ready to light out for friendlier horizons, even if it means living the life of an expatriate American.
“The government here? It’s just stupid, some of the things they do. And it just keeps getting worse,” he said in a phone interview last week when asked to comment on the impact of the Biggert/Waters Act that has left individuals and businesses alike reeling from the dizzying heights to which their federal flood insurance premiums have risen. Biggert/Waters was passed to close a $23 billion deficit in the decades old federal flood insurance program. The deficits are fairly recent, brought on by relief efforts tied to Hurricane Katrina, the series of storms that hit Florida in 2004 and 2005, and more recently Tropical Storm Debby in 2011 and last year’s Super Storm Sandy, both of which resulted in massive property destruction in the northeast. But according to Vengroff and others who have their fingers on the pulse of the local economy, the cure provided by the Biggert/ Waters Act is worse than the underlying pathology it was created to remedy. “It just makes no sense,” he says. He tells of a house on Longboat Key he once
owned that recently came back on the market. “We had owned it in the past and were thinking about moving back to the key,” he said. “Ten years ago when we lived there the flood insurance was $5000. When my wife checked with the bank, we found out it’s now $60,000. It’s crazy.” Vengroff could handle that type of increase without much trouble, or go without coverage entirely by paying cash. But it’s the principle that bothers him. And he worries about the plight of families that rent homes or apartments from him. “These are working class people,” he says. “If I have to up their rent by $100 or $125 per month because of higher insurance, that’s a big hit for them. That means there might not be much food in the refrigerator by the end of the month.” The negative implications for Florida’s economy are far reaching. Especially in Sarasota, which depends so heavily on real estate transactions to fuel the broader economy. Story continued on page 16.
Midnight Pass: lessons learned after 30 years By Paul Roat Sarasotans have had a long-term love affair of damaging nature. We’ve scraped, scoured, cleared, filled, circumvented, and paved Mother Nature to the point that she can barely pick herself off the ground without help — and while she’s down, we keep kicking away at her. While we lament past destruction, and point to future ecological goals, we continue to pound the environment with a reckless fervor seldom seen outside of a street fight. Part of what we’ve done to the environment seems greed-induced. Raw land is too valuable to be allowed to lie fallow, so we mold it to our liking regardless of environmental damage, then tax the change of use. Regulations have meant too little and have come too late to really protect much of the environment. Part of what we’ve done comes from ignorance. We’re just now realizing we all live downstream from somebody or something, and what we flush down our toilet doesn’t magically disappear but all-too-often pops up as somebody else’s problem. But most of our historical environmental disregard is spurred by arrogance. We have simply ignored the tropical delights of Southwest Florida except where it will help us turn a buck from a tourist or a prospective new
homebuyer. Look around. When the big storm of the early 1920s destroyed the bayfront of the quaint fishing village of Sarasota, did we learn from our mistake and build smarter? No, we began to dredge and fill the waterfront, spelling doom to Sarasota’s fishing industry and starting the land boom of the 1920s. Probably the best example of officialdom’s arrogance of the environment is the story of Midnight Pass, “celebrating” its 30th closure anniversary this month. The inlet between Siesta and Casey Key was the most controversial environmental issue in town in the early 1980s. The story of what happened to Midnight Pass is one of the most bizarre environmental dramas in recent history, pitting the property “rights” of two prominent Sarasotans against the environmental good of an entire region.
On November13, Michael Shay accepted the Sarasota 2013 Volunteer of the Year award to the theme song of “Rocky”. The special Awards Ceremony was held at the Venice Community Center and hosted by Keep Sarasota County Beautiful. According to Program Coordinator, Wendi Crisp, “the Volunteer of the Year award is given to someone who demonstrates leadership efforts and participation supporting KSCB litter prevention programs”. Crisp went on to say that, “Michael was nominated by the Board of Directors for the Siesta Key Association of Sarasota, Inc. and was selected based on his contributions over the past year to Keep Sarasota County Beautiful initiatives”. Photo by Norm Schimmel
Commentary:
Sand struggle looms eternal By Stan Zimmerman
Midnight Pass showed signs of moving north to threaten to erode two houses on south Siesta Key in this September 1973 aerial picture. Photo courtesy George Bishopric. The issue served as rocket fuel for cocktail party conversations as “experts” all had an opinion on what should or should not have been done to the inlet on Dec. 5, 1983, when the pass was closed to protect two Gulffront homes from destruction due to erosion.
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Story continued on page 12.
A fifty-year plan to use sand dredged from the ebb tide shoal of Big Pass may turn into a half-century battle over climate change, sea-level rise and the fiscal sanity of beach renourishment. The City of Sarasota and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have a $49 million plan to take sand from Big Pass and use it to renourish Lido Beach. The plan calls for more pumping over the next 50 years. We need look no further than Longboat Key to the north to see the financial consequences. In 2004, Longboat residents approved a beach renourishment bond issue for $15.6 million. The town came back in 2011 to ask for $42 million more. As if the voters could somehow stop the inevitable erosion of their beaches. Commentary continued on page 3.
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