No. of Recommendations: 6
I confess I did not know MaL didn't have a golf course. I thought it was a country club (which usually has golf courses). I did know that it didn't have a marina, but because it is being affected by king tides (because of climate change Trump says isn't real), I thought it had access to a waterfront.
There's nuance, which is why I think you and Dope might be confused.
Membership in Mar-a-Lago brings automatic membership at Trump International. There's shuttles that take you from the MaL property to the golf course. So the club of Mar-a-Lago brings along with it access to golf facilities, but they're not part of the property.
MaL is waterfront property. But it doesn't have a marina - they don't have boat slips, and it appears that they haven't even improved the seawall to allow for lateral dockage. They might not be able to get one, either. I do boat slips from time to time as a development lawyer, and while the Florida Administrative Code provides a general permit for one slip per single-family home on the water (meaning you get it automatically if you abide by the criteria), MaL isn't a single-family home. It's a private club, and thus is probably treated as a commercial use by the Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund (the government agency which owns all the submerged bottom under Florida waters). Commercial uses can't travel under the residential category.
If I recall from a few months ago, Trump is the one who did some finagling to have it a club-only property, and many of the other "features" albaby has mentioned, in order to reduce/avoid taxes.
Worse, for the purposes of this conversation. He bought the property, but soon realized that it was a White Elephant. It was costing him a fortune in upkeep, and who really needs a house with 65 bedrooms? He asked Palm Beach to let him tear it down and subdivide, and they told him he couldn't. When he pled poverty and that the mansion would fall apart because it cost too much to maintain, they allowed the 'private club' as a compromise - that way there would be some revenue to cover the cost of keeping up the house. But the downside was that he had to actually maintain the mansion as-is and the number of memberships was capped (500 IIRC), so while it would generate some revenue it wouldn't be a full-scale commercial intense use in the residential neighborhood.
So it's not a great property, especially now. Now that it's become not only Trump's own "Little White House," but the location of some significant historical events itself, MaL is a shoe-in to head onto the National Register of Historic Places. Which means it's going to be frozen in amber for all time. Even the modest changes that might have been possible to make it more practical to a non-Trump owner are now going to be off the table.
