Anna Maria Island, Florida: Our Gulf Coast Community and What Congress Must Protect

There is a particular quality to Anna Maria Island that is immediately apparent to anyone arriving for the first time and unmistakable to those who return year after year. It is quieter than it should be, given how beautiful it is. The Gulf water is genuinely clear. The island's three municipalities — Anna Maria City at the north, Holmes Beach in the middle, Bradenton Beach at the south — have resisted the high-rise condo development that has transformed most of Florida's Gulf Coast. No chain restaurant dominates Pine Avenue in Anna Maria City. No parking garage towers over Coquina Beach at the island's southern end.

That character has survived because the people of Anna Maria Island have fought for it — at the local government level, through zoning decisions and building height limits and short-term rental policies that communities all over Florida have struggled to maintain. But it has also survived, or failed to survive in certain respects, because of decisions made in Washington: flood insurance rates, beach renourishment funding, FEMA maps, reinsurance regulation, and the federal policy environment that determines whether coastal homeownership on a Florida barrier island remains financially viable for anyone who is not extraordinarily wealthy.

The 2026 race for Florida's 16th Congressional District — which covers all of Manatee County, including Anna Maria Island — is, among other things, a decision about who will represent this community's interests in Washington for the next two years. That deserves a direct conversation about what those interests actually are.

Anna Maria Island: What Makes It Irreplaceable

Anna Maria Island sits at the northern end of a chain of barrier islands extending south from Tampa Bay along the Gulf of Mexico. The island is roughly seven miles long and never more than a mile wide, with the Gulf of Mexico on its western shore and Tampa Bay and Sarasota Bay along its eastern edge. Its geography creates the calm, clear Gulf water — protected from open-ocean swells by the curvature of the coast — that gives AMI its distinctive character as a family beach destination.

The beaches themselves are the island's defining feature. Bean Point, at Anna Maria City's northern tip where Tampa Bay meets the Gulf, offers a natural, minimally developed beach with the kind of solitude increasingly rare on Florida's coast. Manatee Public Beach in Holmes Beach is the island's primary family beach with parking, amenities, and the broad Gulf expanse that makes it a consistent favorite for visitors and residents alike. Coquina Beach at the southern end near the Cortez Bridge offers calm waters, picnic areas, and the view across the intracoastal to the Cortez fishing village that gives the southern end of the island its particular sense of place.

The dining and shopping along Pine Avenue in Anna Maria City and along Bridge Street in Bradenton Beach are part of what keeps people returning — not just the beaches. Independent restaurants, small galleries, local shops, the Rod and Reel Pier extending into Tampa Bay at the island's north end: these are not incidental to AMI's appeal. They are part of what the island's residents have chosen to preserve against the forces of development and homogenization that have transformed so much of Florida's coast. That preservation has real economic value for the restaurants and shops that benefit from it, and real quality-of-life value for the people who live and work here year-round.

The Cortez Fishing Village: A Living Piece of Florida History

Just across the Cortez Bridge from Bradenton Beach sits the Historic Cortez Fishing Village — one of the last working commercial fishing villages in Florida and a community that has operated continuously since the 1880s. Cortez is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is home to the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage (FISH), which has worked for decades to document and preserve the maritime culture of this corner of Manatee County.

The Cortez fishing families who continue to work the waters of Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico are part of a tradition that predates the tourism economy that now dominates the island across the bridge. Fish houses, boat yards, the weathered docks and nets that define the village's appearance: these represent a Florida that most of the state's visitors never see, and that the state's rapid development has eliminated almost everywhere else along the Gulf Coast.

Federal fisheries management policies — the rules that determine catch limits, gear restrictions, and access to fishing grounds in federal waters — directly affect whether commercial fishing families in Cortez can sustain their livelihoods. The representative from FL-16 votes on fisheries legislation, on coastal zone management, and on the environmental policies that determine the health of Tampa Bay, which feeds the fishing economy of Cortez and the restaurant economy of Anna Maria Island. Those are not abstractions for the people who depend on them.

The Federal Issues That Define Life on Anna Maria Island

The National Flood Insurance Program. Virtually every mortgaged property on Anna Maria Island carries flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is administered by FEMA and reauthorized by Congress. The NFIP's Risk Rating 2.0 system — implemented in 2021 — recalculated flood insurance premiums to more accurately reflect the actual flood risk of individual properties rather than the broader flood zone classifications used under the old system. For barrier island properties, this has meant premium increases that range from significant to severe.

A Gulf-front property in Holmes Beach that once paid $3,500 annually for flood insurance might now face a premium of $8,000, $12,000, or more — with the NFIP rate caps limiting annual increases but not preventing eventual convergence with actuarially sound rates that reflect the genuine risk of coastal flooding on a low-lying barrier island. For many long-time island homeowners, particularly those on fixed incomes or those who purchased at prices that made sense under the old insurance cost structure, these increases represent a genuine financial crisis that threatens their ability to remain in their homes.

Congress controls the NFIP. Every reauthorization bill, every amendment to the rate structure, every proposal to allow private flood insurance to compete with the NFIP — all of these require a vote from Florida's 16th Congressional District's representative. Anna Maria Island homeowners deserve someone who understands the program's effects on their specific situation and will advocate for fair, sustainable reforms rather than simply voting with party leadership on whatever bill comes to the floor.

The homeowners insurance crisis. Florida's homeowners insurance crisis hits coastal communities hardest, and Anna Maria Island is on the front line. The combination of hurricane risk, the exit of major national insurers from the Florida coastal market, and the litigation and reinsurance cost dynamics that have driven up premiums across the state has created conditions on AMI that challenge the basic economics of homeownership for all but the wealthiest buyers.

Many island homeowners are now paying $15,000 to $25,000 annually in combined property insurance and flood insurance premiums — a cost that makes modest AMI properties effectively uninsurable for buyers who need mortgages, and that has accelerated the displacement of moderate-income residents and long-time homeowners who cannot absorb annual double-digit premium increases. Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, Florida's insurer of last resort, has been raising rates under state legislative mandates designed to make it actuarially sound — but for homeowners who have nowhere else to turn, the direction of those rates has only one direction.

The federal government's role in this crisis runs through reinsurance regulation, through its capacity to create federal backstop mechanisms for catastrophic coastal risks, and through Congress's willingness to address the litigation environment that has driven private carriers from the market. These are not issues where immediate federal solutions are obvious, but they are issues where congressional advocacy, oversight, and legislative creativity can make a difference over time. John Peters has been clear about treating the insurance crisis as the emergency it is for families and communities throughout this district.

Beach renourishment and coastal restoration. Anna Maria Island's beaches do not maintain themselves. Longshore sediment transport, storm erosion, and the gradual narrowing of barrier island beaches due to sea level rise require periodic renourishment — the dredging and placement of sand to restore beaches to their historical width and elevation. The Army Corps of Engineers' beach renourishment program, funded through federal appropriations, determines how frequently and extensively AMI's beaches are restored after erosion events.

Beach renourishment is not merely an amenity. It is coastal protection infrastructure. Wider, higher beaches absorb storm surge energy before it reaches beachfront structures. They reduce wave action on dunes and sea walls. They extend the buffer between Gulf storm energy and the island's developed areas. A representative who understands the connection between beach renourishment funding and coastal resilience — and who will fight for the Army Corps appropriations that fund AMI's renourishment program — is performing a genuinely protective function for the community and for the taxpayers who would ultimately bear the costs of inadequately protected coastal infrastructure destroyed in a major storm.

Short-term rentals and housing affordability. The explosion of Airbnb and VRBO properties on Anna Maria Island over the past decade has fundamentally altered the island's housing market. Properties that once provided long-term rental housing for workers in the island's tourism and service economy have been converted to short-term vacation rentals, reducing the supply of housing available to year-round residents and driving up the prices of the housing that remains.

Florida state law significantly preempts local government authority to regulate short-term rentals — a continuing source of frustration for island municipalities trying to preserve residential character. But the federal tax treatment of short-term rental income, the broader policy debates around platform economy regulation, and the federal housing policy environment all shape the context in which the AMI short-term rental economy operates. A representative who has engaged with these issues and understands their implications for real communities like Anna Maria Island will approach them differently than one for whom these are abstract policy categories.

Hurricane Season and Federal Response on AMI

Anna Maria Island sits directly in the path of Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, and the island has experienced the consequences of major storm events in ways that have shaped its building codes, its evacuation culture, and its relationship with FEMA. The quality of federal hurricane response — the speed of disaster declarations, the efficiency of FEMA individual assistance programs, the availability of Small Business Administration disaster loans for island businesses, and the Army Corps emergency response capability — varies enormously across events and depends heavily on how aggressively a congressional representative advocates for their constituents in the immediate aftermath of a storm.

The lesson of Hurricane Helene and other recent Gulf Coast events is that the speed of federal response is not automatic. It requires a representative who can get on the phone with FEMA administrators, who can push supplemental appropriations through Congress, who can cut through bureaucratic delays and get resources to the families and businesses that need them. The people of Anna Maria Island deserve that kind of advocacy in Washington — not a freshman member waiting to be told what to do by party leadership.

Anna Maria Island in the FL-16 2026 Race

The voters of Anna Maria Island, Holmes Beach, and Bradenton Beach are part of the Manatee County electorate that will cast ballots in the August 18, 2026 Republican primary and the November 3 general election. The open seat created by Vern Buchanan's retirement means that for the first time in nearly 20 years, the FL-16 congressional seat will be decided without an incumbent's advantage on the ballot. Every vote in the primary matters more than it has in a generation.

I am running for this seat because the issues facing communities like Anna Maria Island — the insurance crisis, the flood insurance program, the beach renourishment funding, the hurricane response infrastructure — deserve a representative who has actually engaged with them at the level of detail that effective advocacy requires. Not talking points, not campaign positions drafted by a consultant who has never set foot on AMI — but a genuine understanding of how federal policy shapes daily life on a Florida barrier island.

The island is worth fighting for. Its beaches, its character, its fishing heritage, its role as one of the last Gulf Coast communities that has preserved something of old Florida while remaining economically vital: all of it is worth a serious, engaged congressional representative. I am asking for the opportunity to be that representative.