Tilting at Opportunities

Don Quixote stock image (Adobe)

In a community as diverse as Key Biscayne, it’s inevitable that residents will have a variety of opinions on nearly every topic. This is good – it’s part of the dialectic that helps assure the wisdom of the crowd. But in our island paradise, a curious but unmistakable pattern is emerging: a group of residents that seem determined, like Cervantes’ ingenious 400-year-old Spanish hero, to tilt at opportunities dressed up as crises through supposition and rumor. The latest example is the potential improvements to our library.

“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”

“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.

“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”

“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.”

-From Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, published in 1604

The windmill of a second floor addition to our undersized library on the same footprint, with the same parking areas, and likely with no major stylistic changes to its exterior, has come to be described by some as a four-story hulking giant with parking for seventy cars. To defend against this giant, costly legal actions have been initiated by the Key Colony Homeowners’ Association board of directors without establishing any financial limits nor determining whether the owners that fund the HOA are supportive. 

It seems to this Sancho Panza that the library situation is quite clear: no one is talking about or making plans to build a giant new library on the parcel in front of Key Colony. There are apparently some preliminary drawings for a larger library but only if it can be located on a larger site somewhere within the Village other than the existing library site. For the current site, all that is being considered according to several public discussions, is a doubling of the square footage by adding a second floor, which appears to my eyes to be unlikely to rise above the current treeline. If this is true then for what is Key Colony’s HOA fighting? 

If their legal action is successful it seems that the best that can be hoped for is to maintain the original agreement with Key Colony’s developer: the maintenance of the building as a library, the right to have a say by appointing one of three architects to a panel to assure that any improvement or expansion does not clash stylistically with Key Colony, and to ensure that it remains landscaped to provide a buffer between Key Colony and Crandon Boulevard. But if this is the plan in the first place, then what’s the point of taking expensive legal action? 

In other words, “what giants?”

A University of Pennsylvania study indicates that the value of having a library within a quarter mile can boost property values by 7.7 percent while one just a quarter to half mile away is only a 0.5 percent benefit to property value. This suggests that moving our library just 440 yards from its current location would cost Key Colony dearly. If the legal action of the Key Colony HOA results in a decision to relocate the library, it could cost a unit owner with a $700,000 property a potential loss of $50,000. So not only is the legal action by the Key Colony HOA expensive — $10,000 and counting; seemingly pointless if the true plan for the library is only a modest expansion; but it could result in a financial blow to every Key Colony owner. For this reason I thought, in my role as a member of the Key Colony HOA board of directors, it was important that we survey our owners and set a cap on legal expenses, but I was alone in this.

The situation with our library seems to be part of a quixotic pattern: the undergrounding of our power and other network services was some sort of a scam; the partnership of the KBCF was unethical; and the money in the open spaces trust could and should have been used to address the bacteria off our beaches. But none of this foul brood is real. Some of us are titling not merely at windmills but, worse yet, at opportunities. Let’s take care and stop. 

Godspeed.