One resident, one hole in the road, one 311 ticket bounced between two governments and closed without a work order. Then his commissioner forgot to bring it up.
—Somewhere on Bahia Vista Street, between the mailboxes at 2301 and 2303, there is a hole in the road that belongs to everyone and no one.
—The City of Sarasota dug it. Sarasota County owns the pavement around it. And for more than a month now, according to resident Steve Martinucci, the two governments have been passing the repair back and forth like a hot casserole dish at a family reunion, each insisting the other one brought it.
“Even though that Bahia Vista Street is a County Road, because the City dug up the road to address some utilities, the County Claims that the City is responsible,” Martinucci wrote to the Sarasota City Commission. “The City claims that the County is responsible. Nothing has been done, and no work order has been created to fix the road.”
—That is the whole story, really. Everything else is commentary. But the commentary is where the fun is.
—The anatomy of a standoff
—Here is how you get a pothole with two parents and no guardian.
—Bahia Vista is one of those streets that runs through the city but answers to the county, a leftover from the days when Sarasota County built the arterials and the city grew up around them. The asphalt is county. When the road gets repaved, the county pays.
—But the water and sewer lines under it belong to the City of Sarasota, which runs the utility system inside its borders. Several months ago, by Martinucci’s account, city crews cut the county’s road open to get at those lines, then filled it back in. The fill settled. What is left is a set of depressions that every truck, bus and pickup hits at speed, producing a bang Martinucci says “can be heard for several streets.”
—He did what residents are told to do. He opened a ticket in the county’s 311Connect app. The ticket trail, which he pasted into his letter, reads like a short play in two acts.
—Act One: “Thank you for contacting Sarasota County Government. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention and we’ve transferred your request to the Public Utilities Department for investigation.”
—Act Two, same day: “Thank you for contacting Sarasota County Government and bringing this matter to our attention. We’ve forwarded your report to the City of Sarasota for their team to review it and respond as needed.”
—Then the curtain came down. Martinucci says he followed up “a few times,” was told the ticket had been closed, and spent “several hours of phone calls and speaking to supervisors” before a county employee explained the reasoning: the city did the digging, so the city owns the fix. He called the city. The city, he says, “denied the responsibility.”
—Whoever cuts it, patches it
—In the normal order of things, this is not a hard question. Road-cut rules across Florida follow one principle: if you open somebody else’s pavement, you put it back the way you found it, and you own the repair if it fails. Utilities that cut county roads get a permit to do it, and the permit comes with restoration obligations attached.
—By that logic the county’s position is not unreasonable. The city dug the hole, the patch failed, the city should fix it. The city’s position, as relayed by Martinucci, is that the road is the county’s problem. Perhaps a work order went into a queue at one building while a complaint went into a queue at another and the two have never met. Whatever the reasoning, the result is the same. Nothing has been done.
—The commissioner who forgot
—Martinucci had a plan for this. The city and county commissions were meeting jointly on Sept. 18 for the first time in 18 months, and he wrote to the county commissioners in advance asking that his concern be entered into the public record and, if possible, raised at the meeting. He could not attend himself because of a family emergency.
—Nobody raised it. The next day, City Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch wrote back.
“I hope all is well with your family emergency. I neglected to raise your issues yesterday, I apologize,” she wrote. “However I did talk to the City Manager about the issues with Bahia Vista and she is looking into it.” She copied County Commissioner Mark Smith “to respond to the county issues as well.”
—So the hole now has the attention of a city commissioner, a county commissioner and City Manager Karie Friiling, who is three months into a job she has described as a “doozy.” That is a lot of firepower for a patch. It is also, at this writing, still just attention.
—A road the city loves to talk about
—There is a rich irony here. In a separate letter to the City Commission this month questioning the city’s rewrite of its Transportation Chapter, a resident pointed out that one of the two intersections city staff chose to showcase the new volume-to-capacity standard, at the Aug. 3 hearing, was Bahia Vista at Tuttle Avenue. The city’s own jurisdictional map shows the maintaining agency for both streets as Sarasota County. The new standard, the letter noted, applies only to “City-owned streets.”
—In other words, the city put a county road on a slide to demonstrate how it will manage traffic, while telling a resident that the county road is not its problem to patch. Both things can be true in the same building, apparently, as long as they are on different floors.
—More than one hole
—Martinucci’s letter was not only about the 2300 block. He told commissioners the stretch of Bahia Vista from Tuttle Avenue to U.S. 41 is “in very poor condition,” with depressions, exposed manhole covers and uneven terrain, and that ambulances drive in the center turn lane to avoid the bumps. He asked whether the county would resurface it.
—He also renewed a request the county has rejected several times: a timed traffic signal at School Avenue and Bahia Vista, modeled on the one at Euclid Avenue, so Sarasota High School traffic can turn east without gridlocking Tami Sola Street and the side streets feeding the light at South Shade Avenue. “I can’t understand why the County and the City would not want to provide additional safety and better traffic control, access, and flow for the students and staff of the Sarasota High School,” he wrote.
—What happens next
—The fix for the 2300 block is not complicated. A crew, a saw, a truck of hot mix and an afternoon. What is complicated is the invoice, and which department’s budget it lands in, and whether admitting the patch failed means admitting who failed it.
—Friiling is looking into it. Mark Smith has been copied. Longboat Key News has asked both public works departments who owns the repair and when it will happen, and will report what they say. In the meantime, if you are driving east on Bahia Vista and you hear a bang between 2301 and 2303, that is not your suspension. That is the sound of two governments agreeing that it is somebody else’s problem.
