When were the oldest gates that use the cards installed? That's how old the software could be. It could be running an a Pentium PC or a VAX minicomputer, and have severe limitations compared to modern computers. And have extremely high maintenance costs - companies don't like supporting very old systems; they want you to upgrade to the latest. Upgrading/replacing the back-end system every 10 or 20 years makes complete sense.
Next would be upgrading the card readers & cards. How many gates are there? Every single one of them would need to be replaced, and probably rewired & networked with wi-fi or modern network cabling. That doesn't sound cheap. Or, the whole system could be scrapped in favor of license plate readers - Oh, wait, FL doesn't require front plates, so that's out. Every resident would need to get the new dongle. That sounds like a nightmare.
And everything can't be replaced all at once, so there would need to be a time (months? years?) when both systems worked at the same time. That's not cheap or easy.
The gates control traffic flow. They tend to be at places where golf-cart traffic intersects car traffic. The gates let both types of traffic see each other. If there was nothing, I think we'd have a lot more golf-carts getting run over by contractors & residents.
Sounds to me like the people in charge publicized the decision making as required & OP missed the memo.
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