EDITORIAL: This dead parrot is a lawsuit waiting to happen … please, Lee County, let us take down the Bakery Building
It took 15 days to complete the Sanibel Causeway after Hurricane Ian crunched it. It took two-and-a-half months for the severely damaged Gasparilla Inn & Club to open up again. But we still don’t have a cell phone tower.
It certainly isn’t for a lack of trying on the community’s part. We have a cell phone tower committee that has met on a constant basis to get this ball rolling. Calls and meetings have been had with Vertical Bridge, the tower company, and a lot of the footwork to get this done has taken place. So why don’t we have a cell phone tower yet, 10 months after Hurricane Ian?
Part of the reason was disclosed at July’s Boca Grande Historic Preservation Board meeting. Board member Billy Caldwell asked Lee County Planner Peter Blackwell point blank why nothing was being done about this very dangerous situation. It was pretty obvious that Peter was not in the know about the pertinent facts. Caldwell told him to go and see it for himself when he left the meeting that day, and at the end of the conversation the Board made a motion to approve an emergency order that they were good with demolition proceeding.
They made that decision without special certificates, studies, conversation, architectural renderings and professional consultations … none of it. They said please, just get it done. Allow it to be done.
But now, still, we wait. The last I heard, it was that we were waiting on an asbestos study.
Really? An asbestos study on a historic building from the early 1900s? I think we can safely say there might be asbestos in there … and it’s been blowing around town for 10 months. I understand the logistics of removing it and disposing of it (though it often ends up in the back of an open truck, with pieces of it debris merrily dancing in the wind as they blow out), but the last time I checked, people aren’t allowed to go in there. Why? Because the building is destroyed, to the point where it cannot be fixed. In the words of Monty Python, it has passed on. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It is bereft of life, off the twig. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. The large amount of lumber being used as supports to shore it up on the outside doesn’t give a hint to the amount being used on the inside. It is a giant Jenga game.
The life-threatening problems here are multifaceted. The Bakery Building connects with, or abuts against, The Barnichol Hardware Store. As the weeks have passed, the Bakery appears to be listing slightly to the north. If the wrong Jenga piece decides to fall, part of The Barnichol could go with it. The store is still open and is very busy. In the immortal words of Billy Caldwell at the last Historic Preservation Board meeting, “You go in and go to the left hand side of the store to buy a screw and you’re taking you’re life into your hands.”
It sounds like an exaggeration, but it really isn’t. Another good storm and that parrot might cease to be … and it could take its neighbor with it.
The second piece of the puzzle is that we need to start building a monopole cell phone tower in the same spot where the old tower was, which requires digging a hole more than 30 feet deep for the base. That kind of digging with heavy machinery causes vibrations in the ground, which in turn vibrate the parrot … I mean, Bakery Building.
This isn’t funny; I don’t mean to make light of it. But at some point it becomes more like a comedy sketch than real life. Here are the stone-cold serious facts of the situation:
The average age of our population is 65 to 70. Every day that goes by, there are people on the island who need life-saving services. Some people have Life Alert buttons they push, some people have internal or external heart monitors that send constant signals to their physician crews that run on wireless lines. Some people simply need to have the option to call for help if they fall down or have a medical emergency of any kind.
We still have a lot of workers on this island who are out in this heat, doing jobs that are dangerous to begin with. If anything happens to them, what if their phone doesn’t work?
Our fire chief has had multiple meetings with all of the major cell phone carriers, trying to get more COWs out here. That is an acronym for a Cell On Wheels, a portable tower like the ones we have in place on Gulf Shores Drive and in the middle of town. They sound like an easy solution, but the carriers don’t want to spend more money to run more COWs. They are expensive to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you know.
Our cell phone bills are expensive, too. Funny thing, that.
A few months ago we had a stroke victim in Boca Grande Isles who was found unresponsive on the street. The person who found her tried to call 911, but couldn’t. She lived, by the grace of God, but our luck is running out here. There is no reason we can’t fix this – it is absolutely ridiculous.
Addendum: As of 4:43 p.m. on Press Day Eve we heard that Lee County issued a demolition permit for the Bakery Building and local contractors said the building situation seems stable enough for tower work to proceed. Now we wait to see how long it takes to get started on it.
Marcy Shortuse is the editor of the Boca Beacon. She can be reached at
mshortuse@bocabeacon.com.
