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 a...