There surely are other painful visual reminders of the killer tornado spawned by Hurricane Milton that tore through Vero Beach last November, but one of the worst remaining eyesores is there for passing motorists to see on the ocean side of highway A1A just south of the 7-Eleven.
The vacant 8-acre wooded parcel that runs between the road and the beach has nothing but vegetation on it – or what’s left of it after the tornado made its last touch-down there on its way out to sea.
The tract of land is now nothing but a tangled mess of snapped-off or uprooted tree stumps, broken-off branches and general vegetative debris.
In the pre-tornado days, there used to be an improvised pathway to the beach through the brush, and on warm, sunny days, several cars of beachgoers could always be seen parked along the road at the entrance. No more – that pathway to the beach is gone now.
The problem is that no one seems to know for now how to get the unsightly mess cleaned up or cleared.
If the debris was along the side of the road and could be a hazard to motorists, cyclists in the dedicated bike lane or even pedestrians, it would have been the responsibility of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to clean it up – and that was done by FDOT crews in the first days after the tornado.
But what about the rest of the land just off the roadway?
Vero Beach City Manager Monte Falls, in answer to a question from Vero Beach 32963, first asked the city staff to investigate whether the owner of the land could be forced to undertake a cleanup under a city code violation.
No, was the answer. City building codes only apply to structures or buildings, and since nothing has ever been built on the land, there’s no way to use any of the normal city ordinances to force an owner to do anything.
That put the City of Vero Beach back to Square One and raised new questions: Who owns the land anyway, and has whoever owns it been paying real estate taxes on it? Could the land be seized for unpaid real estate taxes?
Turns out the answer was ‘No’ again. According to the website of the Indian River County Tax Collector, real estate taxes have been paid up and are current.
The registered owner of the property is a shadowy corporation named Vero Beach Gamma LLC with an address on Collins Avenue in Miami. The company says it has three employees and its principal is Robert P. Balzebre, whose social media profile lists him as a hotelier and investor. Balzebre could not be reached for comment.
If the principal owner is a hotelier, the next question to Falls was if anyone had ever approached the city with a plan or a request for a permit to build a hotel on this prime patch of oceanfront real estate, which may be one of the last undeveloped tracts of land in the Vero Beach area?
Apparently, maybe … sort of, but just barely.
Since 1978, the city’s Planning Office has not received any application for a site plan, according to Jason Jeffries, the city of Vero Beach’s Planning and Development Director. Jeffries said that he recalls meeting with one potential developer who inquired about zoning standards for the property. He could not say whether the developer was the putative owner Balzebre, or anyone associated with him, and the meeting went no further.
Seems like no one has any further new ideas about how to get the property cleaned up, so motorists might as well get used to looking at all the tree roots and stumps as a memorial to Hurricane Milton’s tornado as they drive by.