Cortezian alters, defends rogue house built over state water
Ramada-fied.
Raymond “Junior” Guthrie removed second-story railings and a staircase the week of July 26 from a ramada on the deck of the house he built without permits over the water in 2017.
The ramada addition has a solid shade cover, as opposed to a pergola, with open rafters.
“I took it down. I can’t have anything that I want to have. You all dictate to me what I can have and cannot have, so it’s gone,” he said July 28. “The railing’s gone. The stairs are gone. It’s just a sunshade sitting out there.”
The deck addition appeared sometime in July, weeks after Guthrie said he transferred ownership of the house to Cortez Core Inc., a nonprofit under the direction of A.P. Bell-Star fish companies owner Karen Bell.
“I didn’t know he had added on to it until recently. I told him to take it down,” Bell wrote in a July 27 text message to The Islander.
Guthrie said the addition was meant to give shade to people working outdoors on cast nets.
“It took me one day to build a platform that is a sunshade, so you can get out on the back deck. But the camp is no larger. The footprint has not increased.
There aren’t two stories. It’s a sunshade,” he said.
Guthrie built the stilt-house on what he said are ancestral pilings just yards from the A.P. Bell Fish Co. docks in Cortez in 2017.
In 2018, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection sued Guthrie for building the structure without permits and lacking a lease for the state-owned submerged land — and won.
A series of extensions on a court order that the stilt-house be removed from the bay have allowed the structure to remain standing, and support letters sent in April from Manatee County commissioners and state legislators laid out a plan for preserving the house.
Guthrie and Bell maintain the structure is a net camp, but historic net camps were barren shacks built to store cotton fishing nets in the 19th century.
Guthrie said his family and other members of the community weave and mend cast nets there.
“This is a modern-day net camp that has been in my family for generations. And I don’t understand what the big deal about the camp is. I have rebuilt it three times in my lifetime,” he said.
“It was a net camp, and then it turned into a clam camp — we raised clams out there — and now it’s an old net camp that we utilize for our own pleasure and anybody else that wants to use it,” Guthrie said July 28.
Several cast nets were hanging from the ramada July 24, along with a hammock.
Multiple boats were moored there that day, and people could be seen fishing and swimming.
When asked about recreation at the stilt-house, Guthrie said: “We’re not allowed to use it? Why not?”
“For us not to be able to utilize something we built, we paid for … it’s nobody else’s business,” he said.