It’s here. Gone. Here again.
The structure with a solid roof and open columns previously built and removed from the deck of an illegally constructed Sarasota Bay stilt-house was back Aug. 30.
Added in July by Raymond “Junior” Guthrie, the ramada-like structure, which originally featured a staircase to a second-story with railings, was dismantled between late July and mid-August.
Guthrie said he took the structure down “because everybody was complaining.”
He told The Islander Aug. 30 he put it back up the weekend of Aug. 21-22 and described the ease with which it can be erected:
“It’s got four bolts. I take it on and off, like a (car) convertible.”
Guthrie built the stilt-house without permits or permission in 2017 on state-owned submerged land yards off the A.P. Bell Fish Co. docks in Cortez.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection successfully sued Guthrie in 2018, but a series of extensions on a judge’s final order that the structure be torn down allowed it to remain standing.
According to Guthrie and A.P. Bell Fish Co. owner Karen Bell, Guthrie transferred ownership of the stilt-house in late May or early June to Cortez Core, Bell’s nonprofit organization.
The transfer is part of a stilt-house preservation plan Manatee County commissioners and state legislators outlined in support letters written to the DEP in April.
According to the plan, Cortez Core is tasked with modifying the exterior of the structure to more closely resemble historic net camps — barren shacks built over the water in the 19th century to house cotton fishing nets.
Guthrie said Aug. 30 he did not get permission from the new owner, Cortez Core, or Bell, the organization’s president, to reassemble the shade roof.
Bell did not respond to Aug. 30 phone call, text and email inquiries about whether Guthrie needed her authorization to use or modify the stilt-house.
Guthrie and Bell maintain the 1,200-foot stilt-house — built with a steel roof, electricity and other amenities — is a modern-day net camp or net camp replica built on existing pilings left from older net camps.
Guthrie has said repeatedly he uses the structure for cast net building and family get-togethers.
Other members of the Cortez community, including John Banyas, owner of Cortez Bait & Seafood and Swordfish Grill, have said they occasionally use the structure for net mending.
The fishing village has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1995.
Though the listing makes no mention of a Guthrie net camp, there is a section about net camps in general.
An aerial photograph of the Cortez waterfront from an unknown date in the past on Bell’s “Keep the camp” Facebook page includes a structure in the same approximate location as the stilt-house, and Guthrie maintains his family has built structures on the pilings in that location for three generations.
The latest extension to maintain the house on the court order that it be removed from the Bay expired May 7. Robert Schermer, Guthrie’s attorney, filed for another extension May 11.
As of The Islander’s press time Sept. 6, the DEP had not filed a response to Schermer’s motion.