- June 10, 2026
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East County’s Mark Stanoch has a prediction for Manatee County: If the Board of County Commissioners focuses on economic development, residents will sit in less traffic.
Stanoch is running to represent District 1 on the commission, where traffic is a major concern, especially in the Parrish area.
“Stop the development” is a familiar rallying cry among many Manatee County residents and some commissioners and candidates, too, but Stanoch sees another solution to the county’s traffic congestion — “rational development.”
“I call it rational because it’s built on data,” he said. “You have to make policy decisions based on data, and when you don’t have the data, you have to at least build models so you can predict what the outcomes will be. I don’t think (Manatee County) does enough of that.”
Stanoch performed a data analysis using information from Florida Commerce, the Federal Reserve Economic Data, the Bureau of Workforce Statistics and Economic Research and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program that shows Manatee County has a net outflow of 30,262 workers to surrounding counties every day.
The data Stanoch compiled indicates that those commutes are a major contributor to traffic congestion, so widening roads isn’t a good solution because the county would only be helping workers travel to and from neighboring counties.
Stanoch’s solution is to develop the economy and, at the same time, improve the roads. He called Manatee County an “exporter of labor.”
“(Labor) is one of the most valuable things you have in a county, and we’re giving it away,” he said. “More than half the houses that we build here in Manatee County are for the benefit of other counties. Think about it. It’s absolutely crazy.”
Stanoch’s predilection for predictions comes from a job he held with Chase Econometrics. Econometrics is mathematical modeling of economic systems. He built macroeconomic models of the U.S. economy.
Stanoch's specialty was forecasting, which takes data from the past to inform about the future. He forecasted factors like rainfall in West Texas for an electric cooperative and gate attendance for Walt Disney World.
His forecast for Manatee County is that the population will keep growing because there is no way to stop people from moving, but he found that “rampant growth” doesn’t work either. When Stanoch looked to the past, he saw a county that had failed to balance housing development with job creation.
When looking at which industries are at work in Manatee County, construction holds a higher percentage in the county at 13% than the state at 9.6%.
“We’ve got to diversify our base here,” Stanoch said. “I’ll tell you who I’m jealous of is Pasco County.”
The Moffitt Speros Outpatient Center opened in January. It was the first phase of a 775-acre campus that will create thousands of jobs.
If elected, Stanoch would start looking in his own district with the industrialized area near SeaPort Manatee. If job creation is focused in corridors where infrastructure already exists, rural lands in District 1 can be preserved simultaneously.
“I guess if there’s a distinction between me and maybe the other people running is that people are great at describing problems. I’m more on the solutions side,” he said. “Now, I don’t have all the answers, but I think in those kinds of terms.”
Stanoch also knows how to bring people together to achieve a common goal. He spent five years as the Microsoft relationship manager for Dell.
He noted that Microsoft is located in the Pacific Northwest, which has more tattoos per capita than the rest of the country, and Dell is located in Round Rock, Texas that has some of the best barbeque in the country. The cultural differences made the two companies “organizationally divergent.”
Yet Stanoch won back-to-back awards throughout all five years by bringing the two teams together.
He also served as a principal at IBM Global Services and led two technology startups, which both sold to publicly traded corporations.
Once in retirement, Stanoch and his wife, Annette Stanoch, who also has a technology background, became involved in conservative politics following the 2020 election. First, they joined Defend Florida. Then, they started using their skills to improve election integrity and help conservative candidates build websites.
Now, Stanoch is an active member of the Manatee Patriots. He manages the nonprofit’s website and distributes its weekly newsletter. He noted that the club is conservative, not partisan. Registered Democrats are members of the group, as well as Republicans.
Additionally, Stanoch organizes the scholarship fund for the Victims of Communism Florida and is an active member of the Knights of Columbus chapter at Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church. Stanoch is a fourth degree knight, which is the patriotic arm of the group.
Like so many of the high-performing residents who retire to the Lakewood Ranch area, Stanoch laughed and said, “We’re retired and we’re not.”
