- April 25, 2024
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When some Sarasota County voters cast their ballots in the Aug. 23 primary election, they will select the finalists in two of the five districts that comprise the County Commission. Voters in Districts 2 and 4 will see all new names on the ballot as Chair Al Maio of District 2 and Commissioner Christian Ziegler of District 4 rotate off the board.
It marks the second single-member district election since voters in 2018 approved the new representation in countywide referendum, in which only residents of the district elect their representative.
County commissioners serve staggered, four-year terms and are subject to a limit of two consecutive terms.
District 2, which for the most part covers the city of Sarasota, has three Democrat and two Republican candidates. District 4, which cuts a swath across the middle of the county between between the city and the greater Lakewood Ranch area to the north and Venice and North Port to the south, has one Democrat and two Republican candidates. One primary winner from each party will advance to the Nov. 8 general election. Unopposed candidates will advance automatically.
Age: 70
Occupation: Realtor, substitute teacher, not-for-profit CEO
Previous government service: Former Sarasota city commissioner, former Sarasota mayor.
A former mayor and city commissioner, Sarasota native Atkins saw the opportunity to serve countywide thanks to county voters upholding single-member districts earlier this year and a redrawn District 2, after he says he was drawn out of the former District 1 before the 2020 election.
He said he hopes a successful campaign will encourage more city and county residents to get involved in government.
“I think one of the most important things is I’m going to bring the Commission back to the people,” Atkins said. “We have over the last 50 years less and less people participating in the process. They have taken not only referendums and not only skewed them, they've taken the power away from the people and tried to keep making it more and more difficult to get issues on a referendum. They’ve taken referendums we’ve passed and disrespected them.”
Atkins said the county has altered the 2050 comprehensive plan in favor of developers, disregarding the public participation process in what the future of county should be, suppressing opportunities for workforce housing.
“Attainable housing is the primary issue as it relates to how we are going to survive the developments in Sarasota County,” he said. “We need to get not only inclusionary zoning, we need to get developers participating in correcting the ills they have created in our community because they can make a difference.
Responsibility for environmental issues such as last year’s red tide, Atkins said, lie at the feet of the county.
“The county has made the citizens of Sarasota County suffer for over 40 years with wastewater treatment,” he said. “The county has not implemented the eradication of septic tanks near tributaries, waterways or sloughs and they are contaminating the bay. Our problem with fecal matter in the bay is the county. We are also we were having problems with seepage of all the other runoff the county has.”
Age: 40
Occupation: Attorney
Previous government service: Sarasota city commissioner (current), former mayor of Sarasota, former prosecutor.
Brody said he is hoping to make the leap from City Commission because the issues the community faces are “broader than just the city limits.”
“I think we have come a long way since I was first elected and we've accomplished a lot, but I think it's important to take a broader view of these areas, and so the county is a natural step to do so. I ran as a change candidate for the City Commission. That's what the community wanted and I think that’s what the county wants as well.”
What needs changing? Brody said there is a disconnect between the County Commission and the residents, particularly in the area of growth and development and the lack of attainable housing.
“Smarter growth policy is very much in demand by our residents,” Brody said. “I think I am the only candidate in my primary being attacked by local developers in the mail. I can take a lot of what I've learned in the city and bring that knowledge to the county of how to get some changes made.”
His five years as a city commissioner, Brody said, provides him with an understanding of the nuances of government service.
“I think it's really important to have elected officials who stand up for communities they feel or are under attack. As a commissioner, I've really taken that responsibility seriously whether it's mailers anti-Semitic flyers that are being dropped in our neighborhoods, some of them homophobic, anti-LGBTQ issues. It’s important that people have someone in these positions who will speak up for them and stand with them, and I'm committed to that."
Age: 58
Occupation: Carpenter/contractor
Previous government service: None
A regular speaker at both Sarasota City Commission and County Commission meetings, typically offering pointed criticism of policies that favor developers over residents, Cosentino describes himself as a candidate who will work for the people. Although a city matter, he calls Sarasota’s proposed comprehensive plan amendments working their way through Tallahassee a “developer giveaway.”
So what can he do about that as a county commissioner?
“As a county commissioner, perhaps I would have more weight sitting in front of the City Commission because it would be peer to peer at that point,” Cosentino said. “The whole thing is getting the developer influence out of our government and just having having a government that works for the people instead of works for the developers.”
As development pressures continue to move southern Sarasota County, Cosentino said lessons learned in the city and in the north county can be applied in the south as Venice and North Port development encroaches on rural areas.
“When you look at what's happening down south, it's actually a larger scale of what's happening all over Sarasota County. Our government generally subsidizes the millionaire developers,” Cosentino said. “But now they’re subsidizing the billionaire baseball team owner, which was the catalyst that kicked everything else off (in North Port). It makes all the surrounding property now get rezoned commercial.”
Cosentino said he believes overdevelopment is not inevitable and smarter growth is feasible.
“I do not understand the race to become the next Miami Beach. Why can't we just be a good mid-sized community with a high quality of life?” he said. “Do you think they could put a big hotel in the middle of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard? They have a vision, they write land development regulations and they follow them. It's that simple.”
Age: 60
Occupation: Grant writer
Previous government service: None
Frustrated by what she said is overdevelopment and under-representation, Ramirez said the County Commission is beholden to the development community and not residents of Sarasota County.
“It's not the loudest voices that the County Commission is listening to. It's just the developer voice,” she said. “They go to a meeting with with hundreds of people in the audience and they listen to one person, the one who gives them the most money.”
She said the transition to single-member district representation can be a step in the direction to change that.
“Maybe countywide voting makes sense if you had less than 100,000 people in the county, but we're at 400,000 people, and it's obvious to me that the county commissioners don't even know who they have in this in this county, much less in their district.”
Although District 2 is largely Sarasota the city, Ramirez said she is aware of the growth challenges in south county, adding that for too long the emphasis on developing the infrastructure has been focused on the north.
“I see a lot of infrastructure being put in place in northeastern part of the county, all surrounding Lakewood Ranch and UTC, but I don't believe there's enough effort on the people in North Port and Venice,” Ramirez said. “Why does it take so long for the county to address the south county when it comes so easy for them to find money for all this development out east, like Lakewood Ranch Boulevard, where there's not a lot of people living there? … They have to look at amenities that are missing down there. You can see where the county is biased, where they're putting the money.”
Age: 67
Occupation: Architect
Previous government service: None
As a resident of Siesta Key whose office is there as well, Smith, a 50-year resident of Sarasota County has a one-word answer for his highest priority as a County Commission hopeful: traffic.
He adds a few more words to extrapolate. “My office is on Siesta Key and I live out here. Traffic is a big one. Water quality is another one, not only the quality of the water we're drinking, but also making sure our sewer doesn't end up in the Bay. Also opening up Midnight Pass would be one of my goals. I remember playing out there as a kid and how you can’t even stand at the water’s edge and breathe.”
Smith pointed toward his daughter as an example of lack of affordable housing across the county. With a good job making a decent living, she lived at home while looking for a home to purchase. Giving up, she moved out of state.
“We've got to tackle that one, which is challenging considering construction costs and land costs right now, but people who work here can't live here and that's been a problem for a long time but I believe we need to really tackle that whether it's inclusionary zones or what the county is working to develop 750-square-foot starter apartments that are counted as half density in order to get the impact fees lower and make them affordable.”
Smith advocates concentrating new housing along existing infrastructure to the extent possible, employing adaptive reuse of vacant or underutilized commercial centers, particularly in the growing south county cities.
“The 2050 plan has a lot of good aspects of how growth should go out east to maintain the environment and make it as fiscally feasible as possible. … But if you put the workforce housing way out of town you defeat the purpose of it. The goal is to get workers as close to work as possible.”
Age: 33
Occupation: UX designer
Previous government experience: None
As a software designer for the real estate, development and property management industries, Kuether brings an insider’s perspective to what he says is development that exceeds the county’s ability to facilitate it. The only candidate in his 30s, Kuether said single-member district voting presents a “golden opportunity” for some new faces on the County Commission.
“A lot of the reason why I jumped in is because many of the issues that are happening around Sarasota County are tied to the way the Commission has worked with developers over the years,” Kuether said. “The developer community has had a lot of sway over the commissioners, I believe, over having really effective residential and commercial development.”
It’s a lack of control, Kuether said, that results in environmental issues that can have a lasting impact on the county.
“We are kind of missing the natural push and pull that the Commission needs to be doing, and that’s caused the issues in affordable housing, access and infrastructure not holding up to the population boom, as well as some of the effects that we've seen on our environment,” he said. “We've allowed variances on our environmental guidelines, and now we're suffering the consequences in things like red tide.”
The influence of developers, Kuether said, will not be enough for the county to build its way out of the current affordable housing crisis. Citizens have good ideas, he added, but they’re not being received by county government.
“People are just not being heard,” Kuether said. “The current County Commission holds public forums to check off their boxes, and they're not really using them as they're intended, which is to help find some compromises between the neighborhood organizations, the citizens and the developers. That's how we get ourselves into a county that kind of functions better for everybody. It's by really listening some of these compromises and forcing some concessions from the developers.”
Age: 72
Occupation: Construction company owner
Previous government service: Past member of Sarasota County Charter Review Committee and Sarasota County Planning Commission.
A construction company owner, Hawkins is a lifelong resident of District 4. And he says he knows a thing or two about home construction and workforce housing, expertise he’d like to bring to the County Commission. The county, he said, has created its own workforce housing shortage by straying from its comprehensive plan, forcing workers to live far and wide and commute to employment centers from North Port, Myakka or even St. Pete.
“The truth is we have no workforce housing program going in Sarasota County right now. We have to have housing for the people who work here, not just the people who are retiring,” Hawkins said. “I'm a general contractor and I can tell you if they let me put a couple of houses on a regular lot, I can build a house 1,200 square feet for a $200,000 and the land’s only going to cost $50,000 or $75,000 and I can sell that for $300,000 to $325,000. That's workforce housing and we could do that starting tomorrow if we wanted to.”
Providing workforce housing is one thing. Serving it with infrastructure is another. Hawkins said the county is lacking in roadway and utility upgrades and expansion to handle the strain on the transportation and sewage systems today, much less in the future as explosive growth trends toward south county.
"We don't even have enough infrastructure to handle what we have now,” he said. “Our wastewater treatment plant was outdated 15 years ago and can't handle the dark water coming out of it, so they've been pumping that into Philippi Creek and that causes red tide and kills sea grasses. We haven't done a good job of taking care of what we have built. We we need a north-south corridor from Lorraine Road all the way down to North Port and we just haven't been doing that.”
The Sarasota Observer made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact the candidate.
