Residents of the southern part of our island typically see trees, a marina and a low-rise community when they look west across the lagoon to the sleepy town of Micco.
But a pair of developers, who spent part of the 1970s and ’80s in Micco, want to add to that with a new, 70-room hotel they say will rise three stories above its surroundings when complete in about two years.
“I always thought that area would be developed, just because it’s so beautiful there,” Anthony Lopes, now of Franklin, Tenn., said Thursday.
In a pair of 4-0 votes, the Brevard County Commission on Dec. 18 approved the requests from Lopes and longtime friend Gene Lomando, now of Miami, to change the zoning and future-land use designations to allow the Micco Hotel to be built on the Lopes family’s 2 acres on the west side of U.S. 1, north of the Summit Cove condominiums. Commissioner John Tobia, whose District 3 includes the site, was absent from the meeting.
“The commission gave the Micco community a Christmas present,” said Doug Hillman, owner of the 70-slip Sebastian River Marina & Boatyard, on the east side of U.S. 1.
But the project is far from breaking ground, Lomando said. Much depends on the county completing a $2 million extension of sewer lines to Micco to take residents off old, lagoon-polluting septic tanks.
“If the sewer doesn’t come through, this project won’t start.” he said.
And the project also needs a $26.7 million state Department of Transportation project to add an interchange to Interstate 95 in the Micco Road area, Lopes said. That interchange would bring the Micco Hotel the bulk of its guests, he said.
The commission’s action follows several months of Lopes, Lomando and their attorney, former County Attorney Scott Knox, working with Summit Cove residents to make sure the hotel would be a good neighbor.
A handful of Summit Cove residents in October submitted to county Planning and Zoning Manager Erin Sterk a petition calling for the project to be denied. It would bring noise and exterior light to the community, as well as litter, they wrote.
But later the two groups agreed on certain points, such as the developers putting up buffer plants around the hotel and parking lot – but on the hotel’s property, not the community’s land.
“This is going to be a great development,” said Lisa Hubert, vice president of the Summit Cove Condominium Association. “You can’t stop progress. Just like Capt. Hiram’s, this will increase property values and make the area beautiful.”
In fact, Hillman looked to the hotel to give his boaters a place to stay closer than Capt. Hiram’s, a resort complex in Sebastian.
“I see transient boaters come here all the time,” Hillman said. “They tie up, they look around. ‘This is beautiful!’ they say. ‘But where is everything?’ So then I take them to Capt. Hiram’s.”
Lopes and Lomando said the county, in fact, is losing out with the current situation.
When boaters are steered to Capt. Hiram’s, they said, they take with them the 5 percent tourist taxes they might have paid to a hotel in Brevard and pay it instead in Indian River County.
Bonnie King, director of the Space Coast Tourism Office, could not be reached to estimate how much the Micco Hotel would inject into the county’s tourist-tax fund.
