The oil billionaires who had agreed to build teacher housing on Trumbo Road in Key West have pulled out of the deal with their regrets, Superintendent Theresa Axford announced during the July 11 school board meeting in Marathon.
“On Friday, I got a call from Jed Molleston of SPGL LLC, who said, regrettably, that they could no longer help us with the Trumbo housing. They are still building the sheriff’s office housing on the lot neighboring theirs, so we do still have a reason to be thankful for their support of our community, if not the school district.”
The school board on July 11 was slated to discuss a proposed ground lease with SPGL for the school district’s Trumbo Road property, but the Friday call from Molleston made that a moot point.
Jed Molleston and his wife, Meg, own the luxury Steam Plant Condominiums adjacent to the school district’s property that houses its headquarters and administrative building.
Meg Molleston’s brother, Walter “Wag” Woodward, had infamously told the school district’s housing task force in May 2022, “We have a pile of cash that a long-legged show dog couldn’t jump over.”
But apparently, the cash will no longer be spent on teacher housing.
Axford emphasized to the Keys Weekly on Thursday, July 13 that the Mollestons sincerely regretted that they would be unable to continue with the partnership and planned housing units for the school district.
Axford told the board that members of the district’s housing task force were amenable to reissuing a Request for Proposals from potential developers of that property.
“The urgency for housing is still there,” Axford told the school board on July 11. “We are still losing teachers and having potential teachers turn down job offers here because they can’t afford housing in the Keys.”
The withdrawal of SPGL, which was going to fully fund the housing development, could give the school district more flexibility with the number of units built on the property and the height of the buildings, said Gaelen Jones, the school district’s internal services director.
“We had a lot of self-imposed limits in our agreement with SPGL, including that we wouldn’t build a third story even if it was allowed by the city’s height limits, and we had said we wouldn’t build to the maximum density allowed on that property. But presumably a different developer wouldn’t have those same concerns. I believe the maximum density was 237 units,” Jones said, adding that the city of Key West has already set aside 150 building permits for the Trumbo Road workforce housing.
The agreement with SPGL would have been limited to 80 units.
The ability to build more units with a larger density could make the project more financially attractive to potential developers, Jones added.
So now all options are back on the table for teacher housing on Trumbo Road, where school board members and administrators have talked for 25 years about moving the administration building off that property and converting it to employee housing.
