Sarasota County rushes to get records storage project underway

For two years Karen Rushing has pressed the Sarasota County Commission for new space to store the county's voluminous and ever-expanding collection of legal documents. It will likely take two more years for that space to be occupied, but at least it’s officially underway.

The Clerk of Circuit Court and County Comptroller told the County Commission during the Fiscal Year 2025 budget process the current aging, severe weather vulnerable and too-small storage facility is no longer adequate for the volume being produced. So critical is the situation that boxes of records are are piled up at her offices in the Historic Courthouse.

Relief, though, is on the way. On Aug. 3, the Sarasota City Commission unanimously approved a right of way vacation at the terminus of Aspinwall Street and a rezoning of a portion of the site to allow the Swift Family Ltd. Partnership to combine two parcels to build a 27,000-square-foot office and warehouse building it will lease, with plans to sell the property to the county. 

Combined at 1.2 acres, the parcels are at 2250 Aspinwall St. and 401 Mango Ave. Construction will take approximately two years, Rushing told the Observer.

Courtesy image

“The most important feature of the building is that it will be a secure building providing proper protection to vital records,” Rushing said. Those records include confidential information, land records, cemetery records, tax rolls and more, some of which must be retained in perpetuity. “Also a more adequate place to store evidence,” she said.

Currently, Rushing’s office has 13,117 square feet of storage at the Northgate Center, which is at nearly 100% capacity. There are another 4,473 square feet at the Historic Courthouse for a combined 25,004 cubic feet of horizontal and vertical capacity. The new facility will provide 26,295 square feet of storage floor plus office space. In addition to paper records, Rushing also oversees digital storage.

Rushing sounded the alarm about the impending storage problem during the Fiscal Year 2024 budget cycle, telling the County Commission the current facility is too small and not adequately equipped for storage of court records and legal documents, some of which the county must keep for as long as 75 years before being destroyed, others in perpetuity.

Stored documents include:

• Juvenile court records, 75 years
• Code violation records, five years after case closed
• Cemetery records, permanently
• Tax rolls, permanently
• Library user information, 30 days after expiration
• Citizen complaints, one year after case closed
• Wills, 20 years
• Public auction records, five years

How long the new facility will serve the county’s needs is hard to predict, according to Rushing.

“This is difficult to answer because of changing laws and volume,” Rushing said. “The life of the facility would be increased if certain documents were no longer required to be stored in paper. Destroying documents that have met their retention period requires staff to audit the documents to make sure there are no concerns with the destruction. We try to balance the use of staff with the availability of space.”

Photo by Andrew Warfield

The right of way to be vacated lies at the western end of Aspinwall Street at Mango Avenue, terminating at the Seminole Gulf Railway tracks, across from One Stop Housing’s Sarasota Station affordable housing development. The space is currently used for parking.

In exchange for the street vacation, Swift will provide a 20-foot-wide easement on the northern end of the site along Mango Avenue to connect to a future Legacy Trail extension, should it be built at that location. 

The building projects include weather-hardened construction, a 2,200-square-foot evidence vault with high security specification, humidity control, 25,000-kilowatt backup generator and fire suppression systems.