Palm Beach Town Council OKs Secret Service guardhouse for Mar-a-Lago
During an at-times heated discussion, the Town Council this week narrowly approved a new guardhouse requested by the Secret Service for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.
On a 3-2 vote at Wednesday’s Development Review meeting, with council members Ted Cooney and Julie Araskog dissenting, the council approved building the guardhouse inside the property’s east-facing gate, with several conditions, including:
Mar-a-Lago must return to the council to review an updated traffic plan and its performance, and the new traffic management plan will be made an official part of Mar-a-Lago’s declaration of use agreement.
The guardhouse will be removed once there is no need for the Secret Service to protect anyone on the site.
To build the 232-square-foot guardhouse about 30 feet inside the South Ocean Boulevard gate, Mar-a-Lago and the Secret Service had to request a special exception and site plan update. This was the project’s second time before council members, who voted in March to delay reviewing the requests until an updated traffic management plan was submitted to the town.
The council had also requested that the Secret Service be present at the next meeting. Instead, each council member met individually with the Secret Service and attorney Harvey Oyer III, the agent for the project, at Mar-a-Lago, saying they discussed security matters that could not be mentioned in a public meeting.
Trump has designated Mar-a-Lago as his primary residence, entitling him to Secret Service protection there.
Because the property is a National Historic Landmark, the design and location of the guardhouse had to be approved by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In a previous meeting, architect Rick Gonzalez said his team spent about 10 months working with the trust to get the plans approved.
The guardhouse will have a restroom, desk for Secret Service agents, impact glass and be made of concrete block, plans show.
The location of the guardhouse will allow three or four cars to line up inside the gate and off South Ocean Boulevard. Now, the Secret Service and Mar-a-Lago security screen vehicles on South Ocean, before they pull onto the property.
At the beginning of the meeting, Oyer asked that the issues of traffic and building the guardhouse be separated.
“The guardhouse is not your traffic issue,” he said. “The traffic issue is a much bigger issue affecting that end of town that is not in any way precipitated by the guardhouse, because the Secret Service has been stopping people in this location for six years now, and they’re going to continue to stop people in this location, whether they are covered under a canvas tent, in an armor-plated concrete building or standing out in the sun and rain. They’re going to continue doing that. So that does not have a direct impact on the traffic.”
The traffic management plan was not submitted as part of the requests but based on an ask from the council, Oyer said.
Council members disagreed, with Cooney saying that because approving the guardhouse would make the updated traffic plan part of the declaration of use agreement, it had to be part of the discussion.
Palm Beach police Capt. Joseph Guelli, who oversees the area around the Mar-a-Lago Club, said there isn’t enough room in that area for the volume of traffic trying to get off the island, particularly when events are beginning at Mar-a-Lago. He said the the police department’s recommendation would be to use the Southern Boulevard entrance to Mar-a-Lago, on the south side of the club.
There are security issues associated with that entrance that are legitimate, council member Lew Crampton said. “So basically we are dealing with a situation that can’t be resolved except to go with the best we can from here,” he said.
Araskog, who participated in the meeting remotely as she did for Tuesday’s Town Council meeting, said this is an unprecedented situation because no president has ever made a private club his primary residence.
“I have to say that this use has changed,” she said, “and while we did agree that that could be his residence and we were told the residence was one area, it seems like it’s expanded, and I’m wondering if we can, through the declaration of use, do some limitations so that maybe then you can use that south entrance. Because we said 'residence,' we didn’t say 'residence, office, this, that and the other,' so I’m a little confused.”
Araskog proposed adding requirements into the declaration of use, including requiring events to only start at a certain time, or limiting the events while Mar-a-Lago is Trump’s residence, to help prevent the lengthy traffic tie-ups that can happen near the club.
“There are problems all over the town, and it appears as if we’re asking Mar-a-Lago to solve other background traffic issues,” Oyer said, pointing to other contributing factors in the congestion around Mar-a-Lago, including construction on Southern Boulevard and an influx of residents since the COVID-19 pandemic. He added, “It is a fair request to ask us to relook at a traffic management plan that has not been looked at in years. It is a very unfair request to ask Mar-a-Lago to solve all of the town’s traffic problems at South Ocean and Southern Boulevard, so I don’t want to conflate the two.”
Araskog asked that the matter be deferred once again so she could discuss a possible solution with Oyer, that she said couldn’t be discussed during the public hearing. Council President Maggie Zeidman said she felt there was no reason to defer the issue again. “I think we’re going down a whole rabbit hole here,” she said.
The guardhouse does have to be separated from the traffic issues, Crampton said. The town approved the uses now in place, including the property being a club and used as a presidential residence, he said, reminding the council he was the lone dissenting vote in March to postpone the decision pending an updated traffic plan.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach council approves Secret Service guardhouse for Mar-a-Lago
