Please find below a link to the supporters’ comments collected by the LGPOA and compiled and emailed to all Charlotte County Commissioners on Monday the 11th of April prior to the County Commissioners’ Meeting on April 12. There have been several collected since. They have been sent and added to our list on the LGPOA website. Your full email was forwarded to the commissioners, but we removed all personal information from our post on the LGPOA website to protect your privacy. Please continue to send them if you haven’t. And, if you sent your letter directly to the Commissioners, you can let us know. We’ll only add your name and island address and let them know you previously responded.
Joseph Bokar, district 5 director, attended the Charlotte County meeting on April 12th.
The Commissioners said they read, and very much appreciated, our LGPOA responses and the others sent directly. That being said, the commissioners made it pretty clear, I believe, that the current version (I believe the third), presented by Costal Engineering, was close to meeting the approval of the Commissioners due to improvements in traffic flow for the expanded recreational boat ramp, and kayak ramp facility, and due to its consideration of minimal impact to environmentally sensitive seagrass beds. Despite each of the commissioner’s acknowledgement of our email campaign, there was no serious discussion of modification of the plan to accommodate our island requests for a transient dock, water taxi access, a barge ramp, or mainland parking for taxpaying LGI islanders or islanders’ guests in the Placida West Boat Expansion Project. This project has been in the works as a state of the art facility for boaters and fisherman since early 2020 at a cost of seven million dollars. The money is being pulled from an older (2014?) bill to use sales tax revenue for projects of this nature.
The Commissioners did, however, explicitly acknowledge that LGI has several hundred taxpayers with substantial needs on our island, especially if Eldred’s sells. They acknowledged our needs as parking and water taxi access for islanders and renters. Secondly, they acknowledged the need for barge services for remodeling and repairs. Thirdly, they mentioned the owners of empty lots may want to build sometime in the future. And lastly, and most importantly, they discussed health and safety issues: FPL needs emergency access with trucks and equipment, septic tanks need to be pumped and HVAC servicers need access.
Their response is that they will “workshop” our needs amongst themselves in June. Several ideas were suggested, one idea mentioned by Commissioner Truex was access through Don Pedro. Commissioner Joe Tiseo also appeared especially interested and sympathetic, although each commissioner verbalized their support of a “workshop” to better understand our needs and to begin to formulate solutions.
To get our thoughts to the Commissioners in an organized manner before the workshop we created a survey for your input. There are three ways to get the same survey, please fill out only one survey per household. You are receiving the link below as an LGPOA member. You will receive an email with the same link if you are on the list of islanders showing support of LGI inclusion in the expansion project and lastly, we will post this link on the Homeowner’s Facebook Forum. Remember, only one survey per household, please. The survey is 27 questions and will take approximately 13 minutes to complete. We ask for all surveys to be completed by the 29th of April, although it will remain open until we quit getting responses.
Link to supporters collected by the LGPOA:
https://lgpoa.org/update-letters-of-public-support-for-an-expanded-county-dock-facility/
Link to the revised plan for the Placida West Boat Ramp Expansion:
https://www.charlottecountyfl.gov/projects/placida-west-boat-ramp-expansion.stml
https://www.charlottecountyfl.gov/core/fileparse.php/686/urlt/20220412_BCC_Meeting_Presentation.pdf
Link to the LGPOA survey of Islanders:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WYB29XD
Thank you,
The LGPOA Board of Directors
