SCAN, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND THE SILENCING OF COMMUNITY
SCAN, Overdevelopment,
and
The Silencing of Community
This is the transcript of a talk given by Tom Matrullo at the Unitarian Universalist
Center in Sarasota on September 21, 2024.
It’s a real honor to be invited to speak to you today
In the coming weeks, we anticipate a parade of developer proposals as unpopular and potentially damaging as any we have seen in years.
The Board has scheduled a series of controversial land use hearings, and what makes them controversial is that they require changes to elements of our Comprehensive Plan.
The proposals will impact - in some cases severely - iconic and beloved places including Siesta Key Village to the West, Old Miakka to the East, and the Celery Fields in the middle.
To understand how it is that our planning Code can tolerate ruptures of the Comp Plan proposed by Randy Benderson, Rex Jensen, Pat Neal and DR Horton, we must go back some years to see how a highly sophisticated system of rigorous planning was dismantled - first at the state level, then within our county.
This inclination to gratify developers at the expense of the public did not happen overnight - it was a gradual decadence, corrupting the Comp Plan and reducing the public’s participation.
SCAN - short for Sarasota Citizen Action Network - was our effort to address this by connecting with people and neighborhoods across the county. To see how we got to the developer regime we have today, I will offer a few key moments that trace the long, slow train wreck that has enabled major land use decisions while shutting out public participation in shaping the future of Sarasota County.
Background: Bob Graham
I came to Florida in 1989 - to work for the Herald Tribune, which then had an office in Charlotte County.
At that time, Florida had one of the most sophisticated development review processes in the nation, thanks to this man - Gov. Bob Graham - who introduced the Growth Management Act in 1985. It required that each county and municipal government adopt a local comprehensive plan consistent with regional and state plans.
Every month I would attend the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council’s meetings in Ft. Myers. These councils -- 10 of them -- had been set up around the state to examine large scale plans called Developments of Regional Impact, or DRIs.
The regional planners rigorously examined developers’ proposals and had the power to require changes when deemed necessary.
The state’s Department of Community Affairs also had to sign off on large proposals.
So there was a three-tiered system of regulatory oversight that worked well statewide for 26 years.
In 2004, after Hurricane Charley totaled my home in Charlotte County, I moved to Sarasota
I was impressed by the Sarasota Commission at the time - with folks like Paul Mercier, Jon Thaxton, Shannon Staub, and Nora Patterson, the Board seemed knowledgeable, fair, seeking to strike a balance between the people’s wishes and the ambitions of developers.
That balance changed radically after the Great Recession of 2008, which saw a number of Florida’s builders and developers go bankrupt.
As the economy began to come back, Rick Scott ran for Governor under his “jobsjobsjobs” slogan.
As soon as he took office in 2011, Scott dismantled the cautious, layered planning designed by the Growth Management Act.
He removed the power of regional planners over large plans, and reduced the state’s Dept. of Community Affairs to virtually nothing
That basically left the job of examining and approving developers’ projects to local Boards like our County Commission.
Once the county commission gained this power, the die was cast: Developers didn’t have to undergo three layers of regulation - just one -- and that single layer the commission -- began to be pressured by many changes:
Electoral campaigns that used to operate with contributions of perhaps $10,000-$15,000 began to see much larger “gifts” from interested parties
Eric Robinson AKA “Prince of Dark Money” as he was dubbed - began managing Sarasota County campaign finances.
These were enhanced by PAC money flooding in. A web of dark money - funds with no clear donor sources or stated intentions - began to play a larger role in our elections.
This slide is just one example from Cathy Antunes’ research which traces the intricate flow of contributions in Sarasota campaigns.
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| John Thaxton |
The 2008 recession scare gave developers and builders the impetus to organize pressure tactics.
Their proposals depended on local officials whose campaigns could be influenced by nice chunks of money.
Term limits for the County Commission were proposed, and with developer backing, the measure passed, taking Jon Thaxton off the Board in 2012.
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| Christine Robinson |
That same year Christine Robinson was elected (she’d been appointed two years earlier to fill the remainder of Shannon Staub’s term).
Robinson was so pro-development that the Argus Foundation -- basically the funding source for developers’ lobbying efforts -- OFFERED HER the executive directorship of the Foundation -- its TOP JOB.
At the time, no one imagined that Robinson would -- or could -- accept the Argus directorship without resigning from the Board.
When it became clear that this was exactly what she intended to do, there was a vociferous public outcry. How, we asked, could Commissioner Robinson serve the Public by critically examining and voting on major developments, while simultaneously helping developers sell those proposed developments to the Commission?
When the dust settled, Robinson served out her term as both Commissioner and as lobbyist for Argus
The most telling - and disheartening - part of this was that none of the other Commissioners said “boo.” The Board was now well on its way to replacing public service with private loyalties.
The developers now were pressuring the Board to change the Comprehensive Plan -- to delete some inconvenient rules and -- not to put too fine a point on it -- to shred the careful code that aimed to create well thought-out communities, with open space, wildlife corridors, appropriate buffers and more.
In 2016, attorney and Control Growth Now founder Dan Lobeck was closely monitoring this activity, and wrote reams of insightful commentary -- some of which I published on the Citizens’ Blog.
Dan noted that proposed revisions to the Comp Plan:
Would delete the policy which states, “Establish a system to measure new developments and determine whether the developments employ smart growth principles to help promote a sustainable community.”
Deleted the important goal of protecting the natural environment, neighborhoods, agriculture and historical resources.
Deleted the requirement that the County will coordinate future land use with environmental characteristics and the availability of facilities.
Deleted the current prohibition of development in a 100-year floodplain.
These and many more promises, rules and goals of the County Comp Plan were in fact eliminated or compromised in 2015-16.
After Rick Scott’s destruction of intelligent planning on the state level, our Board followed suit, turning our Comp Plan to mush.
The Comprehensive Plan was a three-way contract formed between the People, the County, and the Developers -- it gave us standing and a voice in the master planning of our County.
This work of our Board and the emissaries of the developers not only tore up a set of systemic promises -- it performed a public laryngectomy, surgically removing our voice.
The principles, goals, values and prohibitions that the people had fought to include in our planning process no longer had any force in the Comp Plan. It had been gutted.
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| Aerial image of a "recycling facility" as proposed for the Quads |
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| RALLY AT THE CELERY FIELDS |
No way were citizens going to quietly watch the county sell our public land near our precious Celery Fields for a dump. The people came out in force - to rally and protest, both at the Celery Fields and at the public hearing of August 23, 2017.
The Board was split: Two commissioners, Hines and Detert, opposed the dump. Two others, Moran and Maio, both tight with developer Jim Gabbert - were for it. Paul Caragiulo was in the middle, under strong pressure from both sides.
After an epic, day-long hearing that included some of the most eloquent public testimony I’ve ever heard, Caragiulo joined the people and voted against the dump.
That vote of Paul’s was heroic, and marked the end of his political career - the developers dumped him for giving more of a damn about the people and the environment than about Gabbert’s development.
Gabbert then bought some private acreage next to I-75 and built a smaller facility - a Waste Transfer Station - or WTF - that exhibits piles of junk to all driving along the highway.
It was now widely understood that two commissioners were so bought and paid for that they no longer served the people or the land.
It was also clear that if the people wanted a voice in shaping the County, they had their work cut out for them
Since 2017, the Board’s composition has changed -- but what about its approach to planning?
The only Commissioner who remains from 2017 is Mike Moran, who supported Gabbert’s dump, and is now running for Tax Collector. Moran has led the Board to ever greater dystopian heights, approving virtually everything our developers throw up to them.
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| Totals show lawful contributions for the 2024 races |
In this year’s Board elections, Teresa Mast enjoyed the admiration of Argus and the developers. She used her campaign manager’s daughter to close the District 1 primary and defeated Alex Coe.
Running without an opponent, Mr. Cutsinger in District 5 was warmed by $105,000 from his “friends.”
Tom Knight with plenty of popular support defeated Neil Rainford in the District 3 primary. Rainford was DeSantis’s appointee, and had substantially larger developer support than any other candidate.
Both Alex Coe's and Shari Thornton’s totals show how the developers feel about them.
The major players funding the candidates have been operating here for quite some time.
You can see how they support their favorites by going to the Supervisor of Elections site, which tracks traceable contributions.
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1. Of course, the developers contribute far more than reported contributions. They pour millions into PACs,
2. For the shadier moolah trail, see Cathy Antunes’ “Local Dark Money”
August 2024: The Debby Debacle and Pat Neal
This brings us to a remarkable Board meeting that took place a few weeks ago. It was a revelatory event -- showing, with weird inevitability, that the trending currents we’ve been tracing this morning were all coming together to reach a high-water mark
On August 27, the Board returned from its summer vacation, and faced two major challenges:It had to deal with the fallout from Debby, the August 5th storm that sat on us for more than a day dropping enormous amounts of water, flooding homes in Laurel Meadows, Colonial Oaks, Pinecraft and elsewhere.
And somehow, in the same meeting, the Board had to pivot from that disaster to approving a giant Pat Neal development. This wouldn’t be easy, as Debby had revealed that the County was unprepared for heavy rainfall. Pat Neal’s huge project was largely in a floodplain.
At the hearing, the public demanded answers to the feckless way the county handled the flood. We were also there to oppose Neal’s 3H Ranch.
Six managers of public works and emergency management were tasked with telling the Board what they did during the storm. They said they didn’t expect the storm to be more than 6” because that’s what the weather reports were saying - in fact the reports were saying 6 to 10 inches. Key questions were looming, but where were the answers?
- The managers did not say why the county refused to provide sandbags on August 4, when people were asking for them.
- They didn’t explain why Emergency operations did not open a shelter for those who were flooded out of their homes until Wednesday August 7.
- They didn’t explain the absence of timely public communication during the emergency - the usual information warning people what roads were closed, updating when shelters might be open, how much longer the storm was expected to last, how waters might rise even after the rain stopped - which did in fact happen - and so forth.
This was a serious public embarrassment, but it was nothing compared to what the Board then did at the hearing.
The Board. Did. Nothing.
They asked no questions, avoiding anything that could suggest that perhaps our stormwater system has not been properly maintained, despite the public’s paying millions in stormwater assessments each year. Our elected representatives were adamantly incurious:
They didn’t ask why a relatively new neighborhood that had never flooded before saw 84 of its 86 homes inundated by waters showing high readings of fecal coliform bacteria.
They also didn’t ask why there were no sandbags. No shelter. No public communication except from the Sheriff.
Nor did they ask, or receive, insights as to why certain areas like Laurel Meadows were inundated -- or where that coliform bacteria came from.
The Board did what it often does when the public is asking valid and important questions. It gave itself permission to put itself on mute.
This silence of the Board is its way of coping with uncomfortable questions, with responsibilities it will not recognize, or with accountability for liabilities arising from long neglect - as occurred with the Wastewater plant problems they were sued for in 2019.
The upshot of this rather hardcore indifference is that we the people in turn are muted.
We speak, but the conventional connection between our voices and the ears of our officials is broken -- No communing, no communication, no community.
It’s as if we were never there.
At the Debby/Neal hearing, we saw the confluence of everything we’ve talked about today: our Broken Comp Plan, their refusal to ask the important questions, an irresponsible planning review - only Commissioner Smith noted that Pat Neal’s “Plan” is not binding - he can change it at will.
Having orchestrated its way around the Debby Debacle, the Board approved Pat Neal’s giganto 3H Ranch Rezone over the objections of nearby residents, and over the reality that a substantial portion of Neal’s 2,700-acre Ranch is a floodplain.
As Dan Lobeck foresaw, the Board of 2016 had already gotten rid of that little problem.
One might call this the de-democratization of our public life. When elected officials vanish into silence, the public realm becomes a private tomb, housing the remnants of the body politic.
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Commissioner Smith’s Comments
It wouldn’t be fair to say there was no evidence of conscious thinking about the Neal proposal.
Some people we met through SCAN
In a way, that silence of the Board gave SCAN its impetus. If the Board wouldn’t listen, we needed to get out of our silos and connect with other areas of the County. We met some amazing people this year. We visited with folks in North Port, Venice, North Venice and Sarasota, and listened to their experiences.
More Folks at SCAN
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Warm thanks to:
Generating Earth Connections
Unitarian Universalist Environmental Justice Committee
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This is the text and slides of a talk presented Sept. 21, 2024 at the Unitarian Universalist Center in Sarasota, Florida. It was followed by an excellent presentation by Susan Schoettle which starts at 45:30. Both talks may be seen, preceded by some music and introductory remarks, on Youtube.
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Further Reading
Petition to study hydrology before agreeing to more big plans:
Perform a Comprehensive Hydrology Study
Pause intensification in vulnerable watersheds
Deliver a wastewater spillage analysis report and prevention plan
Florida Land Use and Land Cover Change in the Past 100 years
Stroud: History and New Turns in Florida’s Growth
Analysis and 2011 Update on the Bert J. Harris, Jr., Private Property Rights Protection Act
Local Dark Money - an online exploration by Cathy Antunes
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World -- Jeff Goodell
The Intersection between Community Design and Mental Health - 1000 Friends Webinar and Slides.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
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