Brian Seymour of Law Firm Gunster: 5 Questions

Land use attorney Brian Seymour has negotiated some of the biggest developments in Florida’s booming Palm Beach County.

Seymour, co-chairman of the real estate practice at Florida law firm Gunster, has negotiated such major developments as the Palm Beach Outlets, the Major League Baseball spring training complex in West Palm Beach, the Brightline station in Downtown West Palm Beach and the Avenir development in Palm Beach Gardens.

Commercial Observer caught up with Seymour recently to talk about the region’s growing pains, the challenges of pitching density in the court of public opinion, and the future of Palm Beach County.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: Palm Beach County has seen an intense spate of growth since the pandemic, along with a lot of grumblings about traffic and costs. How do you balance those two things?

Brian Seymour: Well, it’s tough, right? In all things in life, you’re either moving forward or moving backward. There’s really no stagnant. And so the key is that we all have to talk to each other and work together.

One of the things that we try to do and we work with our clients on is really understanding that those are issues that we’re all going to face. And it’s something that matters to a developer. Most of the public doesn’t always see that. But a developer doesn’t want someone unable to get to their properties. So if you’ve got an office building, you want to try to get people there. But we have to balance all of it.

Traffic is a reality. I think the county has really, in the last several months, been very good about making sure that we’re starting to have a countywide discussion.

Historically, it was individual discussions without a lot of coordination, and that creates problems. The best way to deal with the issues that arise as growth occurs is collaboration. And it’s collaboration amongst the various public sector entities, as well as some engagement with the state level, as well as neighborhoods and the development community to make sure that things all work, that they can all be funded, that we work towards that future together.

What is your biggest challenge?

If you’re a land use lawyer, your biggest challenge really doesn’t change that often. It’s the concerns of neighborhoods, and how we manage some very complicated issues, because we deal in a lot of engineering issues, whether it be water, sewer, traffic, that are very complicated. 

People have long had concerns and issues, and they raise those concerns politically. The difficulty sort of comes and goes in the sense of how much that happens. 

The goal is when we try to work together, when we try to manage those issues, when neighbors work with us, we can solve the problems. When they don’t, it makes it much more challenging. We’re in a mode right now — in some areas, not all — where there have been very much no-change mentalities. And that’s a challenge because we have got to manage what we’ve already got, much less deal with what’s coming. 

You can’t stop people from moving here. All you can do is make it more expensive and bring in different folks and make it more challenging for those of us who are here. And it’s hard to explain that.

I have lived here for almost 30 years. And I care deeply about this community. I live in this community, I raised my kids in this community, and I work in this community. I’ve worked in the same office building for my entire career, in the same law firm for my entire career. I’ve been around this county. I’ve seen it grow and change. And so I care about all that. 

But what happens is, when I show up, a lot of times people think I’m just there to — one person said the exact words — “ruin my community and kill people.” I was actually told I was there to ruin the community and kill people. Those are difficult things to have to deal with.

I probably shouldn’t have smiled when you said that because it wasn’t meant to be funny, but it sounds a bit extreme.

Yeah, look, it is. Ruining communities is not what we do. Before we all moved here, there was somebody else who was living by themselves with nobody around them, and then somebody came, and then somebody came, and then somebody came. 

So we’ve all sort of gone in patterns. And at some point, that was the concern of the folks who were here before all of us. And I understand that people are worried about change. Change is very difficult in any circumstance, right? And so I try to be conscious of that. Our clients are conscious of that, and we try to work with that. 

And so I don’t take any of it personally, most of the time. People have lied about what I’ve said, I take that a little personally. But, we’re in a place in Palm Beach County where people want to be here and we can’t really stop it. 

We all want to try to make it so that it works for the best. It doesn’t always look that way and people don’t always see that, but that’s really a lot of the discussion that we have with our clients on a daily basis.

What do you think Palm Beach County is going to look like in a decade or two decades?

A hipper version of what we are now. We’re going to get younger — we have, and we will continue to get younger. We’ve diversified our economy significantly over the last 20 years in this county. And I think we’ll continue to do that, which will provide great opportunities. 

I think we’ll see some of our downtowns grow and become places where people want to live and work and really spend their lives in those locations. We’ll always have suburban opportunities for people who want it, but I think we’ll see a little more of the downtowns that grow.

Hopefully we’ll see some diversification of the office ownership in Downtown West Palm Beach to provide some competition on pricing, which I think is important. 

Ultimately, what we’re going to see is a vibrant place that people really want to live, with high-quality education. We do have some tremendous education in Palm Beach County.

There’s a little bit of a myth. Both of my kids went to the public schools here in Palm Beach County and got phenomenal educations. And I know hundreds of people like that. 

You mentioned that there’s really one owner of office space in Downtown West Palm right now. Do you see that changing?

I think people are still coming and we’re still going to need more office. We still get calls for more office. 

Jeff Greene’s got to finish this building. And Charles Cohen is going to finish his building. Steve Ross invested in West Palm Beach, and he has every right to do that, and he’s reaping the rewards, and other people can come and compete if they want to compete. If he wants to buy up every office building, he can. And eventually equilibrium will hit one way or the other, because there’s only going to be so many opportunities. But if we get a couple more office buildings, whether they’re his or anybody else’s, frankly, space will help.

Jeff Ostrowski can be reached at jostrowski@commercialobserver.com.