County’s latest attempt to sell downtown parcel unproductive

Though two developers submitted proposals, Sarasota County will not sell a parcel it deemed surplus in July, 2013 — at least for now.

SKC SP, LLC, submitted plans for an eight-story, mixed-use building including a Starwood Hotel. HAAD/ARCAAD, Inc., proposed building a and a nine- to 10-story Kimpton Hotel. Neither proposal satisfied the county's requirements, however, which said they lacked details about how the projects would be funded, among other things. 

Purchase of the property, currently used as a public parking lot, carries a requirement to anyone who buys and develops it to provide 86 public parking spaces on site or nearby. To meet that, SKC SP proposed to acquire a parking lot at 2051 Main St. and transfer ownership of that parcel to the county, and HAAD/ARCAAD would have built more than 100 underground parking spaces on site.

SKC SP is affiliated with Civix, which had entered into purchase negotiations in February, 2014 to build a hotel. That negotiation was abandoned in May, 2015, when Civix failed to meet terms and conditions of the exchange agreement.

Sarasota County issued the most recent invitation to negotiate in July, 2015.

According to a memo from Isaac Brownman, public works department director and Lin Kurant, real estate services manager, neither of the two most recent proposals ultimately provided “adequate financial information detailing how the project would be funded,” and neither had a comprehensive plan to meet the county’s parking requirement.

Additionally, according to that memo, neither proposal’s economic impact analysis took into account other hotels underway in the area.

Commissioners approved the recommendation to terminate the solicitation process, to revisit selling the parcel “at a later date.”