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by Floyd Egner
Publisher, Tropical Breeze

Safety Harbor’s biggest downtown development project is going back before city commissioners for downsizing and a request for an additional 21 years to complete the project.

A pair of condominium buildings overlooking Safety Harbor’s marina would be pared back to a single building with a 40 percent smaller footprint, if Harbour Pointe’s proposed amendment to its site plan is approved. At left is an artist’s rendering of the original proposal and below is a revised drawing. Review by the city commission does not dictate architectural details of a plan, but governs factors such as the number of floors, overall height and amount of required parking.

Harbour Pointe Village originally was approved in 2003 as a pair of five-story condominium buildings and 32,337 sq. ft. of commercial space in a separate building at the corner of Main Street and Bayshore Boulevard. As the first retail building was constructed, plans went through a series of modifications. The 40,424 sq. ft. Shoppes at Safety Harbor officially opened in January 2007 with seven retail tenants and the corporate offices of its builder, the Olympia Development Group.

Now the developers are proposing to downsize the prominent pair of waterfront condominium buildings into a single, smaller building of the same height with an extra floor squeezed into the 65-foot height limitation. An underground level of parking also has been restored in the latest plan and nearby townhomes have been reconfigured to take advantage of recently acquired land parcels.

City commissioners previously have approved time extensions and major amendments to the project, but this is the first time they have been asked for a five-year window to begin the condominium construction and as much as 21 years for its completion.

“Adverse housing market conditions (particularly condominiums) that have arisen since the project was originally approved make it unlikely that development will occur in a continuous fashion…,” Safety Harbor Community Development Director Matt McLachlan said in a staff analysis accompanying the request.

City commissioners will have to decide whether to grant the request for the extraordinary extension of time to complete construction. Current code requires building permits to be issued within one year of approval of a site plan. Although time extensions can be granted, delays in beginning construction ordinarily require the entire plan to be brought back to commissioners for review. Such reviews potentially can result in a plan being completely revised.

The application for major revisions to the project plan comes less than six months after Olympia began marketing the townhomes portion of the project, eight two-story units to be built on Iron Age Street. The new plan changes the configuration of the townhomes from a row of townhomes to two “quad” buildings with a courtyard between. The configuration accommodates a proposed new development of 11 townhomes immediately to the north on additional property Olympia acquired during the last few years. A portion of that property currently is designated as a parking lot in the site plan.

Olympia’s Chief Financial Officer, Eddie Entreken, previously said none of the townhome project would be constructed until units were sold. “We are not going to build spec units,” he said in March as the model center opened in Suite 109 of the Harbour Pointe office building.