Six weeks after the Planning Board killed it, a split City Commission approved the hotel-and-apartments plan for the old Winn-Dixie at U.S. 41 and Bahia Vista. The plan has exactly one change: an extra foot of sidewalk.
—The Midtown Plaza hotel has been raised from the dead.
—At the end of a marathon meeting Monday, the Sarasota City Commission granted the owners’ appeal and approved the site plan the city’s Planning Board rejected in September, reversing that board’s 3-2 denial with a 3-2 vote of its own. Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich and Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch voted no.
—The project is a six-story, 145-room hotel, a six-story apartment building with 91 units, 23 of them attainable, a parking structure and a sliver of retail on the site of the long-dark Winn-Dixie at U.S. 41 and Bahia Vista Street, directly across the Trail from Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
—Same Plan, Friendlier Bench
—The owners did not go back to the drawing board after September. They went to a different bench. The plan before the commission was the one the Planning Board voted down, and the development team argued it never needed changing.
—Attorney Charles Bailey, consultant Joel Freedman, architect Javier Suarez and ownership partner Gavin Meshad made the same case they made in September: the project is a major improvement over a vacant store and a largely empty parking lot, it meets every requirement of the zoning code, and it is the best version of a site plan that has evolved for years. City staff recommended approval both times.
—Meshad pitched the apartments as housing for the people who keep the hospital running, priced for medical staff, first responders and service workers.
—Compactor on the Corner
—The objections that sank the project in September did not go away. Arlington Park residents and the two dissenting commissioners zeroed in on the trash compactor planned near the corner of East Avenue and Prospect Street to serve the hotel, the apartments and the shops, and on sidewalks of varying widths along East, Prospect and U.S. 41.
—The new driveway onto East Avenue, which Planning Board members warned would become the project’s real front door, remains in the plan.
—A Project the Code Was Written For
—In a sense, the commission was ruling on its own handiwork. The 2020 Commercial General rewrite that a divided commission passed for exactly this kind of aging plaza is what allows the 65-foot hotel, the residential density and the attainable-housing trade. The hotel’s height bonus calls for a $150,000 payment into the city’s affordable housing trust fund. Under the conditions city staff recommended and the developer accepted, the attainable apartments would stay priced for households at or below 120 percent of area median income for at least 30 years.
—The Buck Stopped Here
—The approval clears the way for the dead supermarket to finally come down. For Arlington Park, what remains is the courthouse, and whether neighbors take that route is the next question.
—In September, the neighborhood asked who was paying attention and got three votes for an answer. On Monday, the question went to five people the whole city elected, and the answer came back the other way.
