St. Pete Beach hotel development

St. Pete Beach officials are drawing a line in the sand.

A 104-unit resort pitched for a vacant stretch of Gulf Boulevard was shot down again this week by city officials, who said they would rather preserve the city’s limited pool of hotel rooms for smaller projects elsewhere.

The St. Pete Beach City Commission voted unanimously to deny a variance, conditional use permit and a request to draw from the city’s lodging unit pool that would have allowed the Bodziak Hayes Architects’ Windward Pass Resort to move forward, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported.

The proposed development, planned for a 2.67-acre site in the Bayou Residential District, would have included a lazy river, two outdoor bars, a rooftop terrace, an indoor arcade and a mini-golf course.

The denial followed earlier scrutiny from the city’s planning board, which first reviewed the project in December. The developer returned with a slight modification, reducing the height by 4 feet, but commissioners were unmoved.

The project would have required an allocation of all 104 units from a citywide density pool that currently contains 261 available units.

“I’m not comfortable giving that many units from the density pool to one project that potentially costs anything else that could happen in the Town Center district, where I think there’s a lot of potential for some good, small projects to happen,” Commissioner Karen Marriott said during the meeting.

Applicant Bodziak Hayes Architects had argued that the irregularly shaped site necessitated a variance to meet setback requirements and make the project feasible.

Architect Jack Bodziak also pointed out that many surrounding buildings are eight to 10 stories tall, while the proposed resort would have been significantly lower.

Mayor Adrian Petrila countered that the Bayou Residential District is meant to act as a buffer between intense commercial development and lower-density neighborhoods.

Plans for the resort were first introduced at a community meeting in September 2023. With this latest denial, the project now appears dead in the water.

— Judah Duke