Sarasota County aims to collect $350K from failed studio

Sanborn Studios is dead, at least from a legal standpoint.

Sarasota County officials plan to go after at least $350,000 from the founder of a now-defunct movie studio who failed to deliver on 117 jobs in return for the subsidies. 

The county and the movie studio founder, Ken Sanborn, had been involved in a series of lawsuits and counter suits regarding the money and the wording of the contract. Earlier this month, Circuit Court Judge Rochelle Curley issued her final judgment in the case, which spanned more than two years. 

County spokesperson Jason Bartolone, while saying he couldn’t comment on the final ruling, in an e-mail wrote that the “county plans to institute collection proceedings to recoup the money.” The funds would then go back in the general incentives fund. 

The crux of the issue is Sanborn Studios, a Lakewood Ranch-based movie and TV production studio founded by area entrepreneur Sanborn, was given the $650,000 in September 2010. The contract, said Sarasota officials, called for the firm to add 117 jobs, at an average annual wage of $72,029, by September 2013. The firm failed to create the jobs and therefore breached its contract, the county alleged.  

Sanborn, in several counter claims, said the county violated its ethics codes, disregarded its own audit reports; and, most damningly, deliberately undermined Sanborn Studio’s business.

In an interview Friday, Sanborn’s Tampa attorney David Boggs told the Sarasota Observer that per the judgment, Sanborn Studios LLC is dissolved. Boggs, though, points out that the county, by the definition of the contract it wrote with Sanborn, can only go after the LLC for the money — not Sanborn personally.

“There is only one defendant in this lawsuit, and that’s the LLC,” said Boggs.

The total $650,000 in incentives-for-jobs was the richest incentive for a single company in the history of the five-year program, which has since been revamped. Companies no longer get funds before producing jobs. 

Sanborn and a spokesman who had worked with him when the lawsuits were filed didn’t return calls seeking comment. The facility that some of the money was used for is now Jumpin Fun Sports Trampoline Park.