Perdido Key Towers In Orange Beach Pitched By Developer

Thursday, January 12, 2006
By RYAN DEZEMBER
Staff Reporter

ORANGE BEACH -- A proposal for Perdido Key that entails three 34-story towers and would net the city two waterfront parcels worth about $4 million apiece received a negative review from the Planning Commission on Tuesday night.

The Planning Commission voted 5-1 to recommend to the City Council that it reject plans for the towers, collectively called Bellissimo. The council will likely make a final decision on the project within the next month unless the developer withdraws the designs before they vote.

Doug Bailey, an engineer working on Bellissimo for developer Pat Martin, said that the plans will likely be brought before the council.

Martin, who designed and built San Roc Cay, a marina featuring retail and restaurants, is also a developer of Bella Luna, which is under construction on Perdido Key.

He told commission members Bellissimo would bring to Orange Beach a trio of towers designed by Miami Beach architect Robert Swedroe on a unique site that touches both the Gulf of Mexico and Old River, which separates Ono Island from Perdido Key.

"Orange Beach could say it has the most beautiful building in America," Martin said, adding that Bellissimo would set a higher standard for resort design and construction in the city. "We'll bring as much benefit to this city as any project you can approve."

The two properties, which together add up to 7.64 acres, would be linked by a pedestrian walkway that would span Alabama 182 and be open for public use, according to the plans. Together the towers would feature 316 condo units and the northern structure would have a floor -- about 12,000 square feet -- dedicated to a publicly accessible spa, Bailey said.

Martin told Planning Commission members that he had met earlier with Mayor Steve Russo and City Councilman Pete Blalock and that they were open to the idea of the city acquiring the two Old River-fronting lots in exchange for rezoning the property from single-family residential and low-density condo uses to a planned unit development.

Such a classification allows the city to approve projects that may not meet certain zoning criteria such as building height or density but are deemed the best use of property. Developers are asked to provide something of "public benefit" as part of the approval process.

Martin said he has been negotiating for the lots, which sit between two other tracts that were pledged to Orange Beach as part of a rezoning for two other 34-story Gulf-front condos towers, called The Verandas, approved for a nearby site in November.

Aside from Bailey and the developer only one person spoke during the public hearing that preceded the vote. Howard Herring, who lives in the Dolphin Key Condominiums, which sit directly west of the where the Gulf-front towers are proposed, said he objected to the plans.

"We'll have a 34-story King-Kong movie-maker in our backyard," Herring said. "We bought the condominium at this place under the assumption that it was low-density housing all the way down 800, 900, 1,000 feet."

Just prior to the vote, Planning Commission Chairman Larry Alexander said that although the designs reflected "very attractive, good-looking" buildings, the plans didn't offer enough to be considered a planned unit development. He also said that the project goes against a set of recently adopted zoning rules that discourage high-rise development on both sides of the beach highway.

"I just took a trip through Panama City over the holidays and goodness, I don't want us to turn into that where we've got buildings right beside the road that tall," Alexander said. "It's absolutely a canyon there."