The developers in Sarasota have had their say; now it’s our turn. On May 8, the Sarasota County Commission will consider changing the county’s long-range land use plans called Sarasota 2050. At TWIS, we believe that long-range planning is a special kind of public process, and we spent a lazy afternoon pondering the best ways this could possibly go.

In the tech world, project managers have a post-project meeting called a post mortem to step back and see what the hell happened. So that’s what SRiQ is going to do with the story we did about the intersection of Fruitville and Beneva Roads. To recap, the city of Sarasota received two bids for a piece of publicly-owned property at the corner of Beneva and Fruitville Road: one for $1.4 million-ish and another for $3 million. So naturally the city commission, working on behalf of the public and its land [...]

There’s a land-use cage match underway on Fruitville Road. The city has agreed to sell a piece of land at the corner of Fruitville and Beneva Roads to Benderson, the mall developer who wants to put — what else — a strip mall there. This move was controversial among some city commissioners, who thought the $1.4 million sales price was too low. On July 2, another investor, Commodore Realty, offered $3 million in cash. They would put multi-family residential, mixed-use development there, along with banks and a restaurant on the [...]