BRADENTON BEACH – While Pines Park Investors LLC has not disclosed plans for its recently-closed Pines Trailer Park, City Attorney Ricinda Perry shed some light on a scenario that could include a rezoning of the property.
Perry spoke about the Pines to Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) members at a Jan. 16 meeting, saying the property owner has confirmed the planned redevelopment of the parcel.
“As we all know, the Pines has been through a back and forth, back and forth situation,” she said. “The FEMA statement that any water resulted in it being substantially damaged and had to be shut down, and then it was whether or not it would meet the 50% rule and there was some reconsideration of that.”
On Dec. 9, 83 of the 86 Pines Trailer Park homeowners had received notice from the city that they could repair their hurricane-damaged mobile homes with the proper permits. On Jan. 4, however, the homeowners received notification from the park’s ownership that the park was being closed. Shawn Kaleta is the manager of Pines Park Investors.
“The property owner, when they were told on a number of occasions that the property could not move forward, that it was essentially damaged beyond repair because of flooding from the hurricanes, invested funds to try to create tiny homes,” Perry said. “In the city’s floodplain ordinance, Mr. Gilbert (former City Building Official Steve Gilbert) had told the property owner that you could elevate these to a certain height, which is going to change in May. Turns out that was not the case and they got those engineered and presented to make a tiny home village to kind of keep it looking like the Pines and it had to actually to be much, much higher and look like a stilted community, which aesthetically is not where we want to go with that.”
She said financially it didn’t make sense for the ownership to put in stilted tiny homes.
“So that is actually being reworked and I can tell you preliminarily it’s looking like some type of mixed-development that’s going to salvage as much of the character that’s there,” Perry said. “But obviously with the ones that are fully damaged, it’s going to have to adjust and change based off of our floodplain ordinance, and come into compliance with that.
“So, the property owner had preliminary discussions with staff,” Perry said. “The discussion with them was pretty much anything they’re going to do would likely need to come through a PUD so that we can assess it on a very specific basis and it will go through the land planning agency and then to the commission. So, yes, a rezone to me is absolutely necessary.”
The Pines Trailer Park is currently zoned M-1, and according to the city’s Land Development Code, permitted uses are single-family mobile home units, manufactured homes, park trailers, preservation uses and conservation uses.
“The Pines, we’ll probably be talking about at the commission meeting,” Mayor John Chappie said. “The zoning for that is going to have to change, so there’s going to have to be applications.”
As of Jan. 16, Building Official Darin Cushing said his office has not received applications for rezoning.
The Sun reached out to Kaleta’s representative for comment, but did not receive a response.
