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Condo owners with docks to fight pending fee spike

By Sheila Mullane Estrada, Times Correspondent
In print: Wednesday, August 6, 2008

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TIERRA VERDE — A proposed tripling of rental fees for submerged lands paid by condominiums with private docks has raised the ire of condo owners here.

The new rates proposed by the state for condo associations could mean they will have to pay thousands more.

That's bad enough, but worse is the fact that single-family homeowners pay nothing at all, said Jack Pyle, a Tierra Verde condo owner.

"It's not fair. Just because we chose to own a condo, we get penalized," Pyle said.

The Village of Tierra Verde, where Pyle has lived for 20 years, has a 48-slip marina. The condo association pays about $7,000 a year to lease 49,700 square feet of submerged land for the marina. Under the proposed Department of Environmental Protection rule change, that annual cost would rise to about $25,000, Pyle said.

There are 112 waterfront condos in Pinellas County that pay the state to lease the submerged ground under their docks. Ninety-six condos pay a lease rate of about 14 cents per square foot. That rate is now slated to increase to 40 cents per square foot. The remaining 16 condos now pay either a higher rate or a flat rate.

There are 4,766 multifamily wet slips in the county, according to a November 2007 report compiled from Pinellas County property appraiser records.

Submerged-land lease rates also are expected to rise for public and commercial marinas.

However, both current and proposed state rules exempt most private homes from lease fees for submerged land.

There are 14,386 single-family homes with docks that have up to two slips per dock, according to Pinellas property records.

Permitting and/or lease fees are required only for single-family-home docks that are oversized, are in an aquatic preserve or manatee sanctuary, or in environmentally fragile areas.

The new DEP submerged-land lease rates would increase revenue from that fee from about $1.2-million this year to $3.5-million if it is approved by the DEP's board of trustees — Gov. Charlie Crist, Attorney General Bill McCollum and Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink.

Last year, the DEP decided to review the rate structure for leasing state-owned submerged land to condos, marinas and other public-use dock facilities. Sink and McCollum were concerned that the existing fee structure was too complicated and did not provide adequate income for the state, according to Marguerite Jordan, DEP public information officer.

Public hearings were held this year, the most recent in Tallahassee on July 22.

The DEP is accepting written public comments through Aug. 23, but no further public hearings are scheduled. The final draft of the new rules relating to submerged land leases will then go to Crist and the other DEP trustees for a final decision. If approved, the new rates could go into effect within 30 or 60 days.

Pyle and several other Tierra Verde condo owners are hoping to short-circuit this process.

On Monday, they plan to mail letters to all 537 condo associations throughout the state, alerting them to the pending submerged-land lease changes.

"We hope they will join us in this fight," Pyle said.

If the associations are not successful, Pyle said they may consider filing a class-action suit against the DEP and the state.

"It does seem discriminatory for the state to charge one group of people one thing and not charge another group," Pyle said.

Terri Pentek, a homeowner at Anchor Cove, also in Tierra Verde, has enlisted several other nearby condo associations to join Pyle's battle with the DEP.

"It's a big deal for us," she said, explaining that the submerged-land lease fee for her condo's 90-slip marina would jump from about $17,000 to more than $56,000 if the new rules are approved.

"That's outrageous," she said. "We demand to be treated fairly and levied the same as single-family dwellings: zero."