Sarasota Quietly Bills St. Armands $270,692 for the Garage at the Center of Its Parking War

Every September, the most contested structure in Sarasota gets its bill approved in the least contested way city government knows: a consent agenda. This year, the annual assessment for the St. Armands parking garage passed in a batch vote with no discussion, 45 seconds of title-reading, and a roll that tells you exactly who is paying for the building that broke the city’s parking system, and how far their money doesn’t go.

—At 10:14 a.m. on Sept. 8, City Auditor and Clerk Shayla Griggs began reading the title of Resolution 26R-3413 into the record. It took her 45 seconds. It was the only time the St. Armands parking garage assessment was mentioned all day.

—Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch pulled six items off the consent agendas that morning, a $3.5 million park grant, a Penny surtax reshuffle, the personnel ordinance, the Benderson rezones. The garage bill was not one of them. At 10:20 a.m., on a motion from Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich seconded by Ahearn-Koch, the commission adopted the balance of Consent Agenda 2, and with it the annual assessment roll for the St. Armands Public Parking Garage, 5-0 by roll call, without a single question, comment or pause.

—That is how the city has handled the garage’s bill every year since 2016, and in an ordinary year the vote would deserve exactly the attention it got. This is not an ordinary year. The garage sits at the center of a parking revolt that has consumed five commission meetings, an open house, a workshop, a general manager’s resignation and, two days after the last workshop, an assault on a parking officer. There is a live proposal from a downtown business owner to sell the building. There is a rebuttal from a commission candidate, a defense from the island’s residents association president, and a commission that has promised to decide the Parking Division’s future after the Nov. 3 election.

—So this year, LBK News opened the attachment nobody discussed. Exhibit A of Resolution 26R-3413 is the assessment roll, the document that names every property owner in the special district and the maximum each can be billed on the tax notices going out this fall. It is nine pages of the most concrete answer available to the question Mayor Debbie Trice put on the record in August: somebody is going to pay for the parking.

—Here is who, and how much, and what happens to the rest of the bill.

—What the Commission Adopted

—Resolution 26R-3413 is the annual assessment resolution required under Section 2-422 of the city code, the yearly reaffirmation of the special-assessment machinery the commission created in May 2016 with Resolution 16R-2569, the Final Assessment Resolution for the garage project. The 20-year assessment window opened with fiscal 2016-17 and, in the resolution’s own words, “remains open and ongoing.”

—The new roll covers the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2026. City finance staff project it will generate approximately $260,000, every dollar of it earmarked for principal and interest on the St. Armands Series 2017A debt, the bonds the commission authorized 3-2 in 2017 to build the garage, bury the median power lines and dress up the entryways.

—The resolution also started a clock: the City Manager was directed to certify the roll to the Sarasota County Tax Collector before Sept. 15, one week after the vote. The assessments will appear as non-ad valorem line items on the November tax bills of 71 commercial parcels on and around the Circle.

—How the Bill Is Calculated

—The methodology, fixed in 2016 and carried forward each year, has two tiers, and together they read like a map of who was supposed to benefit from the garage.

—Tier 1 is about proximity. Every parcel is assigned an “equivalent distance unit” based on how close it sits to the garage at 47 N. Adams Drive, with the base charge running $2,695 for a full unit and stepping down through 0.67, 0.50, 0.40, 0.33 and 0.29 weightings as the storefronts get farther away. The closer your building stands to the structure, the more the city decided the structure is worth to you.

—Tier 2 is about square footage, and it is where the roll gets pointed. Restaurant space is billed at 98 cents per square foot. Everything else, retail, offices, galleries, is billed at roughly 35 cents. A restaurant pays nearly three times as much per square foot as the dress shop next door, on the theory that diners occupy parking spaces longer than shoppers do.

—The two tiers together produce each parcel’s “Max Annual Payment,” the ceiling on what the owner can be billed. Add up all 71 ceilings and the roll tops out at $270,692. The city expects about $260,000 to actually come in, a gap that tracks the discounts Florida builds into early payment of tax bills.

—The Big Payers

—The roll’s headliner is no surprise to anyone who has eaten on the Circle. Columbia Restaurant of Sarasota Inc., with 17,547 square feet of restaurant space at 411 St. Armands Circle, carries a maximum bill of $21,245.73, nearly 8 cents of every dollar in the entire levy, or about $58 a day, every day, for a garage a block away. The Columbia’s owner, Richard Gonzmart, was among the business voices who wrote the commission this summer objecting to the extended paid-parking hours; his restaurant is simultaneously the parking program’s single largest private underwriter.

—The top ten lines on the roll:

—Those ten parcels, one in seven, carry $99,629, more than a third of the entire assessment. At the other end, 27 of the 71 parcels owe less than $2,000, with the smallest bill, $1,071.89, attached to a storefront on Fillmore Drive. The median parcel pays $2,462.

—Count by owner instead of parcel and the concentration sharpens. The Shmalo Family LLC holds four parcels on the Circle totaling $7,826. St. Armands Circle Partners Ltd. holds two totaling $10,642. And 313-321 St Armands Circle LLC appears three times for a combined $10,573.

—Scott MacDonald, the Crab & Fin owner who now serves as president of the St. Armands Circle Association, has said publicly that his garage assessment runs about $12,000 a year, nearly a quarter-million dollars over the life of the bond, and that owners accepted the deal in 2015 on the promise that the money would flow back into the district’s landscaping, lots and infrastructure. “It’s just not fair,” he told a local television station last month, arguing the city is now blaming the district for a parking division that was losing money before the garage existed.

—Restaurants Carry Half the Load

—One structural fact jumps out of the arithmetic. Restaurant space makes up just 26 percent of the assessed square footage in the district, 88,981 of 337,562 square feet, but because of the 98-cent rate it generates half of the entire square-footage tier, about $87,000 of $174,000. The Circle’s kitchens are, by design, the garage’s financial base, which is worth remembering every time the parking fight is framed as a dispute between the city and “the merchants.” Within the merchant class, the restaurants pay the freight.

—Shore, at Both Ends of the Roll

—The roll also quietly documents the next chapter of the Circle’s most-watched project.

—The parcel at 465 John Ringling Blvd., where Shore operated its open-air restaurant for a dozen years until the 2024 storms drove it out, still sits on the roll under the Leonard family name at $6,392.03. And across the Circle, the two parcels at 24 and 28 N. Boulevard of the Presidents, where the Shore redevelopment has been moving through the city under Kauffman Shore Properties LLC, together carry $11,375.03 and the roll’s only handwritten-style annotations: “pending combined with below” and “pending closure see above.”

—That is the same project whose consultants asked the city in July about buying eight spaces inside the public garage, and were told a purchase “is not allowed and would be in violation of the parking bond.” The applicant that tested the garage covenant is also, on this roll, one of its larger contributors.

—What $260,000 Does Not Cover

—Now the other side of the ledger, the part no one at the dais mentioned because no one mentioned anything.

—Debt service on the St. Armands project runs roughly $1.1 million a year through 2038. The assessment the commission just certified covers about $260,000 of it, less than a quarter. The rest is supposed to come from the garage and the district’s meters, and as LBK News detailed in its investigation of the 2014 feasibility study, it never has. The garage has averaged about $212,000 a year against a $751,000 projection its own consultant labeled a sample. The city comes up roughly $628,000 short annually, the general fund is owed $1.64 million from the parking operation, 91 percent of it traceable to the St. Armands fund, and at least $12.1 million in principal remains outstanding.

—Which means the annual assessment resolution is, functionally, the only part of the garage’s financing that performs as designed. The property owners’ share arrives on time, secured by the tax roll, every year, exactly as the 2015 staff report predicted when it called a special assessment “a more secure method of financing” than parking revenue. The insecure method is the one the city bet the bond on, and the shortfall it produces is what set off everything that followed: the extended hours, the higher fines, the revolt, the suspension, and the question now hanging over the November election of whether the Parking Division survives in its current form at all.

—The bonds become callable on Oct. 1, 2027. Katherine Hermes has proposed the city use that date to sell the garage outright and retire the debt. Commission candidate John Harshman has answered that a buyer demanding a normal return would need the garage to gross nearly $2 million a year to justify a $12 million price, roughly ten times what it earns. Chris Goglia, the St. Armands Residents Association president, has countered both with the summer’s only full-throated defense of the structure, as the high ground that sheltered vehicles and, he believes, saved lives during Helene. The one thing all three agree on is the thing the consent vote confirmed: as built and as financed, the garage cannot pay for itself, and someone has to.

—Meanwhile, in the Same Room: The Next Garage

—If the assessment vote was the saga’s quietest moment, the same meeting supplied its loudest echo, and almost nobody connected the two.

—Ninety minutes before the consent vote, Housing Authority President William Russell stood at the same podium asking the city to commit to $8 million in financing for 160 public paid parking spaces inside his agency’s McCown redevelopment in the Rosemary District. City Manager Karie Friling told the commission a market study of parking rates was due within the week, and that she would return in October, “once we do the underwriting on our side and make sure that the revenue that is projected to be received will cover the cost of the $8 million.”

—Anyone who has read the St. Armands file felt the floor tilt. A public garage. A bond. A revenue projection doing the load-bearing work. In 2015, city staff warned that financing built primarily on parking revenue was unproven; the warning was filed and the bonds were sold, and eleven years later the district’s property owners are the only reliable payers on the note.

—Ahearn-Koch pressed the point from a different angle, asking Russell directly how a public paid garage advances the Housing Authority’s mission, and noting the commission has “never taken any kind of a formal vote” to fund it. Russell’s answer was candid: “It’s just so baked into all the design and financing at this point that I can’t really conceive of separating it out now.” Trice extracted a commitment that the city will sign nothing binding with the Florida Housing Finance Corporation until an affirmative bond vote is taken.

—That vote comes this fall, from a commission still digging out of the last garage built on a projection. The October decision on McCown may be the truest referendum yet on whether Sarasota learned anything from St. Armands.

—The Public Wasn’t Done Either

—The morning’s citizens’ input made clear the ceasefire Friling requested in August is holding about as well as a paper umbrella.

—Katherine Hermes returned to the podium with a tennis metaphor: hit the ball hard once and it blows past your opponent; hit it hard again and they are lined up waiting. She cited the city’s own Aug. 31 workshop figures, citation revenue up 70 percent in July alone, enforcement activity up 30 percent, and told the new city manager to her face: “You guys came out swinging.” The money being pulled out of the local economy to fund the Parking Division, she said, is extraordinary, the signage is still wrong, the city recently waived one of her own tickets because staff could not decipher their own rules, and enforcement officers are absorbing the public’s fury. “We can’t leave it kicked down the road until November,” she said.

—And in the day’s small, perfect grace note, gadfly attorney Dan Lobeck reached the end of his three minutes on an unrelated budget item and got out exactly three words of his next topic, “parking garage issues,” before Trice thanked him and moved on. Even at the meeting where the garage’s bill was approved, the garage could not get a sentence in.

—The Fine Print

—One last detail from the packet, for connoisseurs of the file. The certification form attached to the resolution, the document that accompanies the roll to the Tax Collector, opens with the signer swearing she is the “Interim City Manager of the City of Sarasota” and closes with a signature block reading “Kari Frilinger, City Manager.” Karie Friling has been the permanent city manager since early summer, and her name has an E in it. The paperwork imposing $270,692 in legal obligations on 71 property owners misidentifies both the title and the name of the official certifying it.

—It is a clerical error, and it will be fixed, and it changes nothing. But in a file where a narrative dated the site visits to the wrong day, a sample spreadsheet became a revenue pledge and a “future parking adequacy” projection became a present-tense shortage, it feels less like a typo than a tradition.

—The tax bills go out in November, the same month as the election. The 71 owners of St. Armands will pay theirs, as they have every year, on time and in full. They are the only part of this system that always has.

—Read the full LBK News investigation into the 2014 feasibility study that built the garage here: https://lbknews.com/how-one-consultants-projection-built-the-st-armands-garage-and-broke-sarasotas-parking/ and the residents association president’s defense of the structure here: https://lbknews.com/garage-gets-a-defender-as-island-president-answers-sarasotas-parking-revolt/