SCANNING Sarasota PLANNING

First published in   Critical Times ,  WSLR / Fogartyville  January 2025 Early last year, Sarasota developers achieved new levels of hubris and potentially destructive impacts. Beloved communities under threat included Siesta Key, where Benderson and others wish to build megahotels; Old Miakka, where a rural community faces intense new development from Lakewood Ranch; and a public amenity -- the Celery Fields – where DR Horton seeks to build 170 homes hard by the prime nesting area.The January 1, 2024 edition of Critical Times carried word of these impending impacts to iconic areas.  These threats sparked a group of advocates to hold public conversations as the Sarasota Citizen Action Network, or SCAN . Lourdes Ramirez says Protect Siesta Key joined SCAN “with the belief that sharing zoning and planning experiences among neighborhood leaders will not only benefit their organization but also help neighborhoods throughout Sarasota County.”  SCAN held meetings in...

  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 a...