Chris Goglia says the structure sheltered flood victims during Helene and should never be sold. The consultant who justified it warned its financing numbers were “for informational purposes only.” The commission gets both sides Monday, and the public gets no microphone until Sept. 7.
—The garage finally found a defender.
—On Friday afternoon, Chris Goglia — in his seventh year as president of the St. Armands Residents Association — sent the mayor, city commissioners and city manager the first full-throated defense of the structure at the center of Sarasota’s parking war, three days before the commission takes up the parking program at Monday’s workshop.
“I’ve grown quite fond of the St. Armands Parking Garage,” Goglia wrote. And then he made a case that has been missing from a summer of revolt: that the garage is a safety asset.
—During the 2024 hurricanes, he wrote, it was a place to move vehicles above the flood — used by many Longboat Key residents at no charge, he notes, “but that’s another story.” It could have staged emergency equipment and supplies for the barrier islands: gasoline, backup stormwater pumps, generators, bulldozers. And during Helene, “It may have saved lives.” His account: people who stayed on the island and got flooded “walked across the street through 4-5 feet of flood water in the pitch dark to spend the night there.”
—Goglia remembers what came before the garage. Cars blocking mailboxes and driveways on the residential streets. Litter. Emergency vehicles struggling to get through. Festival parking lining the grass medians of John Ringling Boulevard — “extremely dangerous,” he writes, on a divided state highway that doubles as an evacuation route.
“Despite the financial situation, the St. Armands Parking Garage is still needed,” his letter argues. In season — when the Circle’s shops and restaurants do the majority of their sales — the merchants “desperately need this parking for their customers and employees.” He calls the garage “an award-winning, generational asset that provides clear public benefit, which should be protected and preserved,” and says it “didn’t cost any more than a parking garage should cost.”
—On the proposals now circulating to sell it, Goglia is direct: “If you sold it, the concern is that it would someday be knocked down and become something else.” And once the bond is paid off, he warns, the city could also sell the Fillmore surface lot, “a site where we already know developers want to put a hotel.” The result: “We’d lose much-needed public parking spaces and instead get increased, lasting congestion. Nobody wants that.”
—He likens the whole debate to the city’s proposed performing arts center: “Does the city need it? Is it worth the cost? Some would say yes, and some would say no.”
—Even Goglia has a complaint, though — and it is eleven years old. Visitors approaching St. Armands “may not even realize the garage is there,” he writes, pointing to the single small sign that marks it. He proposes a series of larger, attention-grabbing signs along the causeway, with suggested messaging welcoming visitors to St. Armands and Lido Beach and advertising the garage’s rate. Better signage, it happens, was on the city’s own consultant’s list of recommended fixes in 2014 — part of a $208,000 menu of alternatives the city passed over on its way to a $17.5 million garage.
—Goglia’s letter lands in a consequential window. Monday’s commission workshop will not take public comment; the first meeting at which residents can address the commission on the record is Sept. 7. His defense of the garage now sits alongside a week of resident letters protesting the open house at which no one was allowed to speak — and alongside the question that has followed the garage since before it was built: whether the projection that justified it was ever real.
—Read the full LBK News investigation into how one consultant’s projection built the St. Armands garage and broke Sarasota’s parking — including the complete 90-page feasibility study, available for download — here: https://lbknews.com/how-one-consultants-projection-built-the-st-armands-garage-and-broke-sarasotas-parking/
