The Aug. 3 Sarasota City Commission meeting ran more than nine hours, gavel to gavel. Beyond the parking retreat and the transportation-plan brawl, here is what else our city government addressed.
Downtown alley with an objection
—The commission voted 4-1 on second reading to hand PFI 721 Development LLC roughly 4,145 square feet of public right-of-way, the old Osprey Court alley between 1776 Ringling Blvd. and 222 S. Osprey Ave., so the developer can assemble one big downtown parcel. Mayor Debbie Trice, the lone no vote, came armed with a prepared argument and did the math out loud: in the Downtown Core district, where 100 percent lot coverage is allowed, the vacation hands the applicant “an extremely valuable asset in the downtown area at no cost to the applicant,” while the public’s “light and air” gets “severely reduced.” She asked the developer to voluntarily cap its buildable footprint at what it owned before the giveaway. Attorney Patrick Seidensticker of Icard Merrill politely declined to commit his client on the spot, noting the project is deep into design review and that the site plan gives back about 3,600 square feet in setbacks. Resident Ron Collins wasn’t buying the hardship routine: the developer drew up its site plan “based on an alley that he doesn’t have control of,” Collins said. “That’s not on you to save his cost.” The one silver lining came via a Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich amendment locking the project’s attainable housing units in at area median income levels “for a period of not less than 30 years.” Trice, before casting her no vote, asked the city manager to have staff explore actually charging developers for right-of-way vacations in the future.
‘Nobody has no idea what you all are doing’
—The Osprey Court vote also produced the day’s most memorable dressing-down, and it came from the commission’s own clerk. After watching the board tie itself in knots over a motion, an amendment, a withdrawal and a brand-new motion, City Auditor and Clerk Shayla Griggs asked for the floor. “What you just did, you totally complicated something that could have been worked out before we got to a motion,” Griggs told the commissioners. “When we’re going back and doing minutes, we have to try to figure out what the heck just happened.” Then the kicker: “Reporters are asking me what was the motion. I don’t know. I got to relisten to it.” Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch offered a defense for the record, noting she had said out loud that she supported the vice mayor’s original idea. “She didn’t get the hint.” Duly noted, and duly transcribed.
—Citizen 1, City Hall 0
—Quietly, in the morning consent agenda, a resident watchdog beat the planning department at its own game. Ron Collins, the same city resident who twice before caught the city issuing traffic concurrency certificates using the wrong methodology and got them rescinded, flagged language quietly added to the new concurrency ordinance after its public hearing. The added text would have excluded state-granted “by right” density, meaning Live Local Act projects, from the traffic comparisons used when land is rezoned. “One side is real. The other side is artificially reduced,” Collins said. “That’s not apples to apples. That’s apples to oranges.” Rather than argue, the commission blinked: Ohlrich moved to strike the offending phrase, and the ordinance passed 5-0 as originally written by staff.
—A warehouse full of your permanent record
—The Sarasota County Clerk of the Circuit Court is getting a new records center and the city just cleared the path. On unanimous first-reading votes, the commission approved vacating a 100-foot stub of Aspinwall Street and rezoning 401 Mango Ave. from industrial to Downtown Edge so contractor Jon Swift’s family partnership can build a roughly 26,300-square-foot records facility for the Clerk. The sweetener for the rest of us: a required 20-foot public access easement along the north edge that preserves a possible future extension of the Legacy Trail north of Fruitville Road. Trice tried her new signature move, asking the applicant to voluntarily cap future development rights on the assembled land, and Commissioner Liz Alpert swatted it down as policy-by-improv: “It’s not a policy of the city.” As for what happens if the county doesn’t need the building half a century from now, Alpert offered the quote of the afternoon: “Whoever is here 50 years from now can worry about that.” Staff will draft a reverter clause before second reading anyway.
—Speak now, or speak later, or possibly both
—The day opened with the commission improvising its own public comment rules in real time. A crowd of parking protesters wanted to speak at 9 a.m. rather than wait for the item to come up eight hours later, and the board said fine, this once. Alpert warned they were “setting a precedent” and “changing our rules”; Griggs backed her up with arithmetic: past accommodations were “one person. This is like ten.” Hours later, when Control Growth Now’s Dan Lobeck invoked the policy allowing extra time for a speaker representing a group, the generosity had evaporated. Alpert noted Lobeck had already sent “five, ten emails outlining all of his objections” and said giving him more time than everyone else wasn’t fair. The commission held him to five minutes. Lobeck’s response was to have an ally, John Simon, read his leftover material into the record during the same hearing. Where there’s a will, there’s a workaround.
—The prettiest ruin at Five Points
—Downtown property owner John Harshman opened citizens’ input with a photo that needed no caption: a gutted, blighted building at Main Street and Pineapple Avenue, at Five Points, the symbolic center of downtown. “This is an image of a building that is not in a war-torn area,” Harshman said. “I’ve owned property downtown since the ’90s and have worked downtown since the early ’80s. I have never seen a building left in this kind of condition for this length of time.” His diagnosis of who benefits was pure Sarasota: “You know who really likes this? UTC and Waterside, because when our people that are visiting here see this kind of condition downtown, they think the rest of the downtown is maintained that way.” His ask: an ordinance with teeth to force absentee owners to clean up derelict buildings. The owner’s office, Harshman noted dryly, is in the building next door.
—Rooftop pools for some, waiting lists for others
—Resident Mary Ciner, calling in by Zoom, told commissioners she has spent months touring the area’s senior living options and found independent living running about $5,000 a month, not accessible, and “not open to the public.” She asked the city to amend its ordinances so dying strip malls can be redeveloped into senior housing that is both affordable and accessible, with green space and trees. Then she aimed at the luxury senior apartments rising on Orange Avenue, rooftop pool included: “I wonder now if the developers have found a loophole to build without putting in affordable units, since senior living facilities do not require affordable units or accessible units.” The commission took no action, but the question is now on the record, and it is a good one: when the “affordable and attainable” apartments the city keeps approving age out their tenants, where exactly do those seniors go?
—Meanwhile, the tropics don’t care about your agenda
—The meeting’s calmest 20 minutes belonged to Rachel Ingle, the city’s emergency manager, who presented Sarasota’s hurricane season readiness with the unflappable air of someone who has spent 26 years doing this, from the U.S. Air Force through FEMA. The city has built a new open-floor-plan emergency operations center, run its first full activation drill, and created an “H-120” playbook scripting every city decision from 120 hours before landfall to 24 hours after. Under the state’s new Senate Bill 180, the city must also stand up a permitting operation immediately after a storm, online and in person, and Ingle says the teams are trained and ready.
