The Real Reason FDOT Keeps Winning the Longboat Pass Bridge Argument

Disclosure: Nick Gladding, Danielle Gladding’s husband, was sworn in as District 3 Town Commissioner for the Town of Longboat Key in March 2026. This post discusses Town of Longboat Key matters.

In June 2026, a small group of Longboat Key officials stood in the parking lot at Coquina Beach and watched a drone climb to 80 feet. It wasn't a hobby flight. The town had requested the meeting, and the point of sending a drone into the sky was to give the Florida Department of Transportation's Interim District 1 Secretary, Jamie Driggers, and project manager David Turley something a slideshow rendering couldn't: an actual sense of how tall a 78-foot bridge would look against the mangroves and low rooflines at the north end of the island. Assistant Town Manager Isaac Brownman later described the meeting as the town's chance to show "the scale and magnitude of this bridge out in the field."

Two months later, on August 17, 2026, a resident wrote into Longboat Key News with the update the north end had been both waiting for and dreading in roughly equal measure: FDOT had notified the town it was moving forward with the 78-foot design.

If you've followed this since the first public meetings in 2024, that outcome won't surprise you. It didn't surprise the town commission either, and the letters they kept sending to Tallahassee explain why. What's worth understanding now that a decision has effectively landed isn't that FDOT chose the tall bridge. It's that the argument was never really about height. It was about a number almost nobody on either side seriously disputed, and once you see that number, the outcome here starts looking less like a surprise and more like a repeat of something that already happened six miles up the road.

A 69-year-old bridge with a 42 out of 100

The bridge in question connects the north tip of Longboat Key to Coquina Beach and Anna Maria Island. It went up in 1957 and it's a bascule bridge, the kind with a middle section that lifts to let masts through. FDOT's own engineering assessment gives it a sufficiency rating of 42 out of 100, and it opens for boat traffic somewhere between 100 and 300 times a month depending on the season.

None of that is really in dispute. Even residents who want a like-for-like replacement have mostly stopped arguing the current bridge should stay as is. FDOT's preliminary engineering report put the cost of simply keeping it operational for another 18 years at $92.3 million, and that figure alone was enough to end most of the "just fix what's there" conversation early.

What's still being argued is what replaces it.

Three options, and the math that separates them

FDOT evaluated three replacement designs during its Project Development and Environment study: a low-level bascule bridge with roughly 23 to 24 feet of clearance, a mid-level bascule with about 35 to 36 feet of clearance, and a high-level fixed span rising 78 feet above the water. A fixed span has no moving parts and never opens, which is the entire point of building one.

Here's how the options compare on cost, based on FDOT's own estimates.

Option	Clearance	Estimated cost
Bascule bridge (two height options considered)	23 to 36 feet	$176 million to $194 million, depending on the report
Fixed span (FDOT's preferred choice)	78 feet	$137.6 million to $138 million to build; about $159.4 million total in 2025 dollars

The construction-cost gap is real, somewhere between $38 and $56 million, but it isn't the whole story. A Longboat Key News analysis of FDOT's engineering documents pointed to a second number that matters more over the structure's life: a drawbridge needs staffed bridge tenders around the clock plus ongoing mechanical upkeep, while a fixed span needs neither. Run that difference out over a 75-year service life and the gap in long-term operating costs dwarfs the upfront construction spread. That's the argument FDOT keeps returning to in every public meeting, and it's one the town has never really answered, because it isn't wrong. It's just not the argument residents have been having.

The town's letters, from former Mayor Ken Schneier's original 2024 message through Town Manager Howard Tipton's more recent ones, have centered almost entirely on character. In a June 2026 letter to FDOT, Tipton wrote that the town believes substantial consideration should be given to preserving the unique character and quality of life that define the north end of Longboat Key. Mayor Debra Williams raised a sharper, more specific objection in an earlier letter: the 78-foot clearance was justified using a 2022 boat survey, and at least one Longboat Key boater who would actually benefit from that exact height, Mark Fishman, whose 71-foot sailboat is docked at the Moorings, wasn't on the list FDOT cited. The town's argument, in other words, isn't only that the bridge would look wrong. It's that the number used to justify how tall it needs to be doesn't fully hold up. FDOT hasn't backed off the recommendation because of it.

Six miles north, this same argument already ended

If you want a preview of how this plays out once a decision sticks, you don't have to guess. The Cortez Bridge, a nearly identical 1956 drawbridge connecting Bradenton Beach to Cortez just north of Longboat Pass, went through the same fight a few years ahead of this one. Town officials there wanted a drawbridge. FDOT wanted a fixed span. FDOT's design won.

That project is now fully through design, a $6.7 million phase that's complete, with construction on a 65-foot fixed-span bridge expected to start in 2026 just north of the existing structure. FDOT expects the work to take about 1,200 days, roughly 40 months, putting completion in fall 2029 at the earliest. The old drawbridge stays open the entire time traffic shifts onto the new one, then it comes down.

Longboat Pass isn't nearly that far along. There's no construction funding secured, and town staff have said plainly that nobody currently serving will still be in office by the time a shovel goes into the ground here. But the design fight itself, the part that just resolved with FDOT's August notification, followed the Cortez script almost exactly: years of public meetings, formal letters from the town preferring a bascule design, and a final recommendation that landed on the fixed span anyway because the maintenance math never moved.

There's a longer-view comparison worth sitting with too. The Ringling Causeway Bridge connecting Sarasota to Bird Key was also once a controversial fixed-span replacement for a drawbridge, opposed loudly enough that public meetings had to move to Robarts Arena to fit the crowd. Longboat Key Town Commissioner BJ Bishop, who lived through that fight, has since called the finished bridge an icon that shows up in almost every marketing document about the area. Whether the Longboat Pass bridge earns the same reversal in twenty years is impossible to know from here. What's clear is it wouldn't be the first bridge on this stretch of coast to go from the thing everyone fought over to the thing nobody notices anymore.

What actually changes, and when

For anyone on the north end wondering what this means for a Tuesday morning walk to Coquina Beach or a boat trip out through the pass, the straight answer is not yet, and maybe not for years. Design is a separate, funded phase that comes next. Construction has no money attached to it right now, which is a very different position than Cortez, where design is finished and crews are close to breaking ground.

When it does eventually get built, the current design would raise the bridge at roughly a 4.5 percent grade, a touch gentler than the 5 percent grade on the Ringling Causeway, climbing about 1,700 feet on each side to reach the full 78 feet. That grade is exactly what worries residents like Irina LaRose, who runs a salon on the north end and has said her mostly 65-and-older clientele use the current low bridge as part of a daily walking and biking routine. Whether that habit survives a much steeper crossing is an open question no rendering can answer. The design also calls for a 12-foot shared-use path on the south side and an 8-foot sidewalk on the north, both wider than what exists today, which FDOT points to as a genuine improvement for anyone on foot or on a bike once it's finally built.

For boaters, the calculus splits the same way it did in the public meetings. A 78-foot clearance means the pass stops closing for openings altogether, which matters if you keep a tall vessel at the Moorings. It also means residents who valued the modest, human-scale drawbridge as a defining feature of the north end lose that permanently, no matter how the sidewalks turn out.

None of this resolves quickly, and nothing about the August notification means concrete gets poured next spring. Readers who want to track the project directly, including meeting notices and the full engineering record, can follow it on FDOT's project page. But if the last two years are any guide, the design conversation on Longboat Pass is functionally over, and the number that decided it was never really about looks.

If you're already living on this stretch of the island, or thinking about it, and want a clearer read on how infrastructure decisions like this one tend to unfold over time, Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty has been watching Longboat Key change since long before this particular bridge fight started.

More on the Area

Longboat Key — the island end to end
Bay Isles — the gated community at the south end

Danielle Gladding lives in Queens Harbour inside Bay Isles on Longboat Key. She has been a licensed Florida Realtor since 1981 and a broker since 1987, and runs Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty with her daughter and Sales Partner Alison Kanter, who was born and raised in Sarasota and has been licensed since May 2023. Danielle: (941) 539-8535 · Alison: (941) 306-9786