ST. PETE BEACH, Fla. — Hundreds of new rooms, half a dozen new buildings and parking garages, and multiple restaurants and bars.
Those are just some of the highlights of a 20-year plan to redevelop TradeWinds Island Resorts on St. Pete Beach.
Supporters like Robin Miller, the President and CEO of the Tampa Bay Beaches Chamber of Commerce, say the redevelopment will modernize the family resort, provide amenities and beach accesses both guests and non-guests can use, and create $3.5 billion in economic impact over 20 years.
“This is a catalyst project,” Miller said. “It is a responsible project, and it’s designed and presented in a way that they’re not asking for anything outside of what they’re allowed to do, and there are a lot of concessions that they’re making to give back to the community.”
If ultimately approved, it would be built in four phases, connecting existing buildings by building new ones in between. It would add 629 new rooms in all three new guest towers.
However, during a Monday meeting of the St. Pete Beach Planning Board, some, like Deborah Schechner, pushed back and argued that the expansion was too large for St. Pete Beach and could worsen the already bad traffic.
“With this and the Sirata and the others to come, we will now be a tourist community with residents. Right now, we’re residents with tourists, which we liked and why we moved here,” she told the board members. “If this was the only project, gee, it looks great. But it’s not the only project, and that’s wherein the issue is. We cannot have blocks and blocks and blocks of walls.”
The development team tried to calm those concerns and argued that the redevelopment plan would fit nicely in St. Pete Beach.
The planning board recommended approval of the project’s conditional use permit in a unanimous vote.
City commissioners will get the final say on the project at a meeting on Apr. 15.
