BELLEAIR BLUFFS — For more than a year, Belleair Bluffs officials and residents have heard bits and pieces of local business owner and hotelier Tony Utegaard’s plans to build a boutique luxury hotel on a long-vacant parcel on West Bay Drive.
The item has been discussed several times since the City Commission approved a pair of ordinances that altered the code regarding transient lodging in the city’s commercial district last summer. However, few details of the project had been unveiled, aside from Utegaard’s promise during a June 2025 work session to make a “$30 to $40 million investment in the community” on a hotel similar to The Fenway in Dunedin.
On Sept. 3, the full scope of the proposal came into clear view during a public hearing on the development agreement between the city and the Belleair Bluffs Hotel LLC. The plans include turning the 1.67-acre lot between the Bluffs Plaza and the Belleair Causeway into a 100-unit, 75-foot-tall boutique hotel that Utegaard said he wants to be considered “the Don CeSar of Belleair Bluffs.”
“I’m here to show the vision of what it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Utegaard said during the Sept. 3 City Commission meeting. “And the big reason why is because we don’t have a hotel anywhere near here.”
Utegaard, who has lived in the area for 15 years and been in the hotel business for more than 20 years, explained how after the 2024 hurricanes wiped out many lodging options on the Gulf beaches, “it became more and more apparent we needed a place for our guests, a place for weddings and bar mitzvahs and birthday parties, all the things you do at a hotel.”
Once he secured the property from the owner, who he said refused to sell it for more than 50 years because “she didn’t like what people were going to do with it,” Utegaard began the process of working to ensure his project “will become a landmark for Belleair Bluffs for the next 100 years” and to quell residents’ concerns.
“When people hear ‘hotel,’ it’s human nature to immediately think, ‘MTV Spring Break’ gone wild,” Utegaard said, a reference to the once-popular TV show dedicated to holiday debauchery.
“But we want to do something classy. We want to do something elegant,” he added. “We want something that 100 years from now is the Don CeSar of Belleair Bluffs that becomes a community landmark, and we’re investing millions and millions of dollars more than necessary to make sure it is that.”
Utegaard said he listened to all the feedback and came up with solutions to the issues of noise, traffic, vagrancy and privacy, mainly by focusing all the activities on the front of the building facing busy West Bay.
“We’ve done a lot to alleviate the impacts of our hotel,” he said.
That list includes keeping all the guest parking in the front of the building, eliminating outdoor dumpsters, putting the pool on the third floor above the drive-up portico instead of on the roof and not incorporating a rooftop bar into the building’s design.
“We don’t have a rooftop bar,” Utegaard stated. “The top floor of the hotel has a very high-end boutique restaurant, and it has a patio, and a quiet outdoor seating area. Think Bern’s Steak House, not Waffle House.”
He said all the deliveries would be conducted through the front doors to eliminate noise and traffic in the back, which abuts a residential neighborhood, and Utegaard noted none of the hotel windows will open.
“The way we designed the hotel is we intentionally don’t have any balconies at all,” he said, a move designed to cut down on noise and curtail smoking. “And the hotel has no opening windows for the same reason.”
He also said they decided to position the building so “the shadow isn’t going to affect any neighbors.”
Regarding one of the biggest concerns, traffic, Utegaard said a study that went through the state revealed the amount of traffic the 100-room hotel would generate “was so negligible it was unaddressed” in the report.
“Almost any other permitted use on that property would generate more traffic,” he said. “You could put a gas station, a bank, another business with a drive-thru, a car wash, and all those would generate significantly more traffic than a hotel.”
Utegaard said the busy road “has 20,000 cars a day on average drive by that spot,” and that the hotel would add 100 to 150 more vehicles based on the traditional ratio of one to one-and-a-half parking spaces per room.
“Today, things are different,” he said thanks to the advent of ride share services and things like golf carts.
“So, it brings down the actual parking that’s needed.”
Utegaard stressed that being a longtime resident of the area who owns a bakery across the street from the hotel space puts him in the position to build a project that will be the right fit for the area.
“We’re not some big, cold outside corporation here to snatch a piece of Belleair Bluffs,” Utegaard said.
“We are Belleair Bluffs, and we’re here to do this for the benefit of our community.”
During the public comments, opinions on the project were mixed, but no one was explicitly against the plan.
“This vista is my new scenery,” nearby resident Patricia Chandler said, adding she “appreciated the concerns you’ve addressed about the noise. But the rooftop area is still a (privacy) concern for me.”
Heather Brink, who lives directly behind the property, said she was also mainly concerned about privacy.
“We will be the ones mainly affected,” she said, adding, “It’s going to be a major life change for us, and it’s very concerning.”
However, one 22-year area resident said he thought the project was “great. This is what we need, extra rooms for visitors, and it will be a very good job creator. And I think it will be a great addition to the community.”
Harbor Bluffs resident Christina de la Cruz agreed.
“I think having the hotel here is an exceptionally good idea,” she said, noting her in-laws “are not beach people” and she doesn’t want them to stay far from their home when they visit.
“And I think us having a Biltmore (style hotel) here in our neighborhood can only make it better.”
The Belleair Bluffs Hotel development agreement is set for a final public hearing Monday, Sept. 15, where the proposal will be approved or denied.