Newsletter 147

NEWS FROM THE SUNCOAST …..

IDALIA TOOK TOLL ON COAST OF SARASOTA COUNTY

Preliminary reports on the impact of Hurricane Idalia on Sarasota County beaches showed the storm had moderate to significant impacts. Siesta, Casey and Manasota keys all experienced impacts because of onshore winds and rough surf, as county staff surveyed a variety of beach areas, as well as homes that had previously experienced losses. Officials caution that the evaluations offer a qualitative look at how beaches fared and not a measure of how much sand was lost. In the case of renourished beaches – such as south Siesta Key, Manasota Key, Venice, Lido Beach, South Lido Beach and Longboat Key – the areas where they were improved include from the upland portion of the beach into the Gulf of Mexico, noted Joe Kraus, a business professional with the Sarasota County Department of Environmental Protection. That means sand that may have left the dry portion of the beach but still remains offshore is still considered to be part of the overall beach site. That factors into whether the county or cities can receive reimbursement to replace lost sand. In the coming days and weeks, engineers will follow through with more precise measurements so those determinations can be made. Manasota Key Beach, where heavy waves and storm surge knocked out 1,600 feet of Manasota Key Road – leaving it impassible – was likely the most impacted beach in Sarasota County. Several homes that sustained damage from Hurricanes Ian and Nicole in 2022 were impacted, while several that escaped damage in 2022 suffered enough erosion to cause structural damage. Sarasota County Environmental Protection Division Manager Rachel Herman noted that south Siesta Key – which includes Turtle Beach – lost about 91,000 cubic yards of sand during Hurricane Hermine in 2016. A renourishment project replacing that volume of sand finished earlier this summer. The replacement sand, which came from an inland mine, is darker and coarser than what Hermine took away. “The color is a little bit different and the texture is a little bit different than the sand that was there originally so you can actually tell by the color whether it’s the new sand or the old sand,” said Kraus, who was part of a three-person team who surveyed that section of beach. “I will say I was pleased to see so much of the new sand still there.” For more on this story, courtesy of Sarasota Herald-Tribune, please click here: Idalia Toll on Coast

SARASOTA IDALIA TOLL MAY BE $4M

Hurricane Idalia-related damage in Sarasota County has exceeded the $1.9 million threshold needed to apply for public assistance programs, a county spokeswoman said recently. That assessment is similar to the one conducted by Manatee County officials, when the county released an initial $2 million storm damage estimate. That means both counties and local municipalities will be able to tap into state and federal reimbursement programs similar to those in place after Hurricanes Ian and Irma. Sarasota County parks and public works officials were assessing damage from Hurricane Idalia, with a goal of wrapping up the examination of homes on the barrier islands, the bayfront and area beaches, according to Sarasota County interim emergency manager Scott Montgomery. Sarasota County’s Emergency Operation Center was still active days after the storm, County spokeswoman Jamie Carson added: “Overall we’re through the storm but there’s a lot to do; there’s a lot of coordination between the county and municipalities and our law enforcement agencies.” State Road 789 was open over the John Ringling Causeway, to St. Armands Key and Longboat Key as of Thursday morning. Carson said that the primary stormwater pumping system on St. Armands is inoperable because the entire control panel was submerged and it will take up to 90 days to have a new panel made and installed. Until then, temporary pumps have been installed throughout the key. Responding to social media criticism that the system failed, Carson said: “No pumping system will prevent flooding if the island seawall is overtopped. “That’s what happened yesterday.” The biggest impact to road infrastructure was the washout of Manasota Key Road just north of Blind Pass Beach Road – the same stretch of road impacted by Hurricane Irma in 2017. About 1,600 feet of the road – located between 6780 Manasota Key Road and Blind Pass Park – was damaged. Casey Key Road was damaged in three separate sections. Public works employees were working to make the entire road passable by the end of Thursday, Montgomery said. He then added if residents don’t need to be on the roads, it would be better to stay home and let the repairs continue. County employees are also assessing debris on the barrier islands and determining whether to set up a special pickup for construction and demolition debris – such as flood-damaged furniture and drywall – Montgomery said. The county is formulating a message on how residents should prepare construction and demolition debris for pickup. To read more, please click here: Our Idalia Toll Could Be $4M

SARASOTA COUNTY RANKS HIGH FOR RETIREMENT

Sarasota County has been spotlighted in another ranking, this time as the second best place to retire in the state of Florida, according to the online, consumer-focused financial information and advisor company, SmartAsset. Sarasota came in one spot behind Sumter County in the ranking of 10 Best Places To Retire in Florida according the the research survey analysis. The study determined the 10-county ranking using four criteria, including tax burden, access to medical care, opportunity for recreation and social activity. Data also included the number of doctors’ offices, recreation centers and retirement centers measured against the number of older residents in the county as a percentage of the total population. Sarasota scored higher than most on medical facilities, recreation facilities and retirement communities. Following Sarasota in the top 10 were Martin, Charlotte, Citrus, Collier, Palm Beach, Indian River, Pinellas and Highlands counties. Sarasota continues to make headlines as a destination for not only retirees but millennials, vacationers and party-goers. This year alone, the area has been named in a half dozen other online rankings and lists. In June, moving and storage company PODS ranked Sarasota near the top of its 2023 list of the top 20 cities where people are moving across the country. Please click here for more: Sarasota County Retirement Ranks High

CHALLENGE DEALS ANOTHER BLOW TO HOTELS

Plans for developing large hotels on Siesta Key took another hit recently when a Sarasota County circuit judge sided with a Sarasota resident who said local officials violated the county’s growth management policies when they approved a 170-room hotel there in 2021. The judge’s ruling is the latest legal setback following a “monumental” win by Lourdes Ramirez this year in her citizen’s challenge of the hotel before a state administrative law judge. The county has appealed that decision while a civil lawsuit challenging the hotel development order has continued. Both Ramirez’s challenge with state officials and the lawsuit she filed in circuit court focused on the maximum development allowed on barrier islands in Sarasota County after the County Commission lifted a cap on hotel capacity countywide. The decision came despite the county’s growth management restrictions on development of the area’s barrier islands. In 2021, Sarasota County removed a regulation that limited the number of hotel rooms to a maximum of 26 units per acre on Siesta Key, while approving the proposed 170-room hotel in Siesta Key Village. The county later also approved a 120-unit hotel near the Stickney Point bridge that has also been challenged in court. Those two hotels were among four proposed that, if fully built out, would have seen nearly 600 hotel rooms constructed on Siesta Key, which has not had a large hotel developed on the barrier island in decades. The other two hotel proposals have been stalled because of the court challenges. One would have seen a roughly 100-room hotel built on about two acres where a vacant Wells Fargo bank building sits today on Midnight Pass Road. The other proposal would have seen the Siesta Key Beach Resort and Suites redeveloped. The county’s approval of the 170- and 120-room hotels sparked a movement on Siesta Key leading to marches down Beach Road and packed town hall meetings in 2021 and eventually an incorporation effort that gained support of the local legislative delegation in 2022 resulting in a bill that would have allowed the residents of Siesta Key to vote to form their own town in 2024. There’s more on this story here: SK Hotels Challenged

SHORT-TERM RENTALS HAVE LONG-TERM IMPACT

Noise, traffic and changes to community character are the topics that tend to dominate recent debates about the area’s booming increase in short-term vacation rentals. But Cicely Hodges at the Florida Policy Institute is more concerned with short-term rentals’ severe impact on affordable housing. Hodges is the institute’s new housing and community development policy analyst, adding her statewide expertise to a special focus on Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. In Hodges’ recent analysis of short-term rentals, she found that the city of Sarasota and its surrounding unincorporated communities alone have a whopping 6,654 active short-term rentals listed through AirBnb and Vrbo – an increase of more than 1,000 units since 2021. The analysis comes as the Sarasota City Council considers extending its regulations on vacation rentals from the barrier islands to its mainland neighborhoods. On the mainland, the city counts about 700 vacation rentals, though some might be owner-occupied and therefore not subject to regulations. Hodges’ numbers on Sarasota were gleaned from AirDNA, an online vacation rental data and analytics company, and they encompass a slightly bigger area. The website’s map of Sarasota’s 6,654 listings include the mainland city as well as the barrier island communities of St. Armands, Lido Key and Siesta Key, and parts of unincorporated Sarasota County. The latter is significant because a Sarasota County ordinance bans short-term vacation rentals or stays of less than 30 days in single-family residential districts. The volume, Hodges noted, is likely exacerbating the housing crisis by cutting into the supply of long-term rentals through the conversion of those units and buildings into short-term vacation homes. “It’s driving away rental opportunities,” Hodges said. “How many people are forgoing housing or choosing to rent short term?”In addition, studies show that short-term rentals contribute to rising overall rental rates and home prices. Please follow the jump for more: Short-Term Rentals Have Long-Term Impact

HARBOR ACRES ESTATE RECORD LISTING

The most expensive residential listing for sale in Sarasota was put on the market recently for $33.8 million in the Harbor Acres neighborhood — $11.8 million more than the second-most expensive single-family home on the market. The property, at 1233 Hillview Dr., was listed by Michael Saunders & Co. and includes 11,275 square feet with eight bedrooms, eight full bathrooms and four half-baths in the bayfront estate on slightly less than an acre. The Sarasota luxury real estate market has seen a return to normalcy after record-setting years in 2021 and 2022, when home prices appreciated faster in Sarasota-Manatee than almost any other area in the nation. However, sales have been slower in 2023 as the post-pandemic buying frenzy cooled, according to real estate agents in the region. Last year, a Harbor Acres home sold for $17.5 million, the highest recorded sale in the two-county area for a single-family home, according to Stellar MLS data. Despite the market cooling, the recently listed property could sell for more than last year’s record given that the previous record sale occurred on a property where the home was built in 2005.

The contender — currently listed for almost double the current record — at 1233 Hillwood Dr. was built last summer. “Completed in July 2022, the modern British West Indies-style residence was designed by Naples-based Stofft Cooney Architects, built by Perrone Construction of Sarasota along with remarkably landscaped grounds designed by Stephen Hazeltine of Venice,” marketing material from Michael Saunders & Co. stated. The Realtor marketing the property said the current owners did not buy the house to build a speculative residential project, but instead had plans to live in the house. While the list price may raise some eyebrows, the realtor notes that Sarasota still has catching up to do with other Florida destinations known for their pricy real estate, while also pointing to increases in cost of construction and labor. The realtor said: “You couldn’t build that listing today for that price. And you couldn’t find an available lot.” There’s more on this story here: Harbor Acres Estate Record Listing

TOURISM DIPS IN SECOND QUARTER

Visit Florida has dropped the latest numbers for our state’s tourism, and they show a dip in travelers. In the second quarter of 2023, the State of Florida saw a little more than 33 million visitors. It’s keeping us on pace to beat out our record from last year, but we have 1.2% fewer tourists compared to what we saw during the same time last year. “We figured that we would start to even out and become more manageable because the numbers from 22 were just not sustainable,” explained Stacy Ritter. Ritter is with Visit Lauderdale, and she said they were expecting a slower summer. The reasons as to why we have had one vary. “From what I am told,” stated Ritter. “Americans are crawling all over Europe. There’s a lot of pent-up demand for people who have been there for years. I also think there is some Florida over-saturation. For a couple of years, we were the only place you could come with no competition, so people came, and they came back and back again. But now they can go everywhere.” Why they are choosing to go elsewhere also varies. We spoke to Ritter last month when roughly 10 convention events had pulled out of Greater Fort Lauderdale. Now they are up to 13 since May. According to the numbers, in Q2, most of Florida’s international tourists were from Canada, followed by the United Kingdom. As for what those in the tourism industry are hoping to see next, hopefully, a busy winter, “We expect it will even out, it will be similar to 22, if we collect a half a million or a million dollars less of TDT, in calendar 23 compared to 22, we will consider it a very successful year,” stated Ritter.

Please click here for more, courtesy of ABC Action News Tampa: Tourism Dips In Second Quarter

BOBBY JONES GOLF CLUB EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS

Sarasota residents and visitors will soon be able to play golf at the upgraded Bobby Jones Golf Club. Richard Mandell, the architect for the renovation of the golf complex, said the 18-hole course and driving range are expected to open in early November. The Bobby Jones nature park will also open then, while the nine-hole short course will open later. The re-opening marks the start of a new era for the municipal golf course. City leaders wrestled for years over the fate of the course, originally constructed by legendary course designer Donald Ross in the 1920s. They ultimately decided to reduce the number of holes in the golf complex from 45 to 27 and turn some of the property into a park. They also voted to permanently conserve the property, ensuring that it will never be subdivided or developed.

The nature park will be open to members of the public and will include trails that can be walked or biked. Mandell, the project’s architect, and the construction crew are restoring the 18-hole course designed by Donald Ross. They’re also building a nine-hole, adjustable, par 3 course. Mandell said they’re in “the grow-in stage.” The grass for the course has been planted, and now it’s growing. It needs to be mature enough for people to play golf on it. Mandell said the construction team will also rake the sand in the bunkers and remove weeds from the course. “We’re pretty much done,” he said, “and as long as the weather cooperates, I know it’ll be grown in in early November, and it’ll look great and it’ll play great.” Please click on the link for more: Bobby Jones Golf Exceeding Expectations

NEW PANEL TO FIND USES FOR VAN WEZEL HALL

As development and planning for a new performing arts center on the Sarasota Bayfront moves forward, the Sarasota City Commission has selected seven people to serve on a long-discussed panel that will help determine potential future uses for the existing Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall once it no longer operates as the main home for touring concerts, comedians and Broadway shows. The city, which owns the Van Wezel and will also own the new facility, has an agreement with the Sarasota Performing Arts Center Foundation to split the estimated $300 million cost of building a new 2,250-seat hall, with a smaller secondary performance space, education facilities, rehearsal rooms and offices. The building is intended to be the dominant feature in the new Bay Park Conservancy that is being built in stages in and around the parking lot for the Van Wezel. There have been heated community debates about the need for a new performing arts hall and whether the 1,700-seat Van Wezel, which opened in 1970, could continue to serve the community’s needs. Proponents for a new facility say a hall needs more seats to attract top Broadway touring productions. They say the Van Wezel itself is prone to damage from sea level rise and requires costly improvements, among other issues. Supporters of the Van Wezel say any building issues can be addressed more cheaply through renovations than what it would take to build a new facility, and that the Van Wezel is capable of continuing to serve the community for years to come. And the hall has booked the biggest Broadway musical on the road, “Hamilton” for next season.

The Sarasota Orchestra, a major local tenant of the Van Wezel for its Masterworks concerts, hasannounced plans to build its own music center outside the city limits on land just west of Interstate 75. There’s more on this story here: Panel To Find Use For Van Wezel

STATE OF THE ARTS

Across the country, professional theaters that once thrived in their communities have been scaling back, laying off staff, dropping programs, reducing performances, or even shutting down, leading to what has been dubbed a crisis in American theater that began when COVID forced many to go dark in 2020. Cal Shakes in the San Francisco area is not producing shows this year, while Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago will be idle until next year and the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut no longer has a home theater. ACT Contemporary Theater in Seattle and Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles are altering performance schedules, while staff has been cut at The Public Theater in New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Dallas Theater Center. The moves have created nervousness about the stability and future of the entire industry, with some wondering if they can’t survive, what about other theaters. While the impact is being felt across the country, leaders of professional theaters and other performing arts organizations in the Sarasota area say that even as they are still recovering from the financial challenges posed by the COVID pandemic, the arts are actually growing in the Sarasota area. For many companies, attendance has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, and there are concerns locally and nationally that patrons got out of the habit of attending live performances, discovering the ease and comfort of evenings spent at home watching streaming services. Like most arts organizations across the country, local companies benefited from emergency federal funding through the Paycheck Protection Program and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, which allowed them to keep people working, even though some reduced the size of their staffs, at least temporarily. “We have navigated together in a lot of ways and have done so pretty well,” Rebecca Hopkins, managing director of Florida Studio Theatre, said of the local arts groups. “That’s not to say organizations haven’t been hurt here, but we seem to be stabilizing across the board. That makes Sarasota very special. We are an outlier right now and it is because we are an arts town. Arts is a core of the Sarasota community and the community protected these arts organizations.” That was evident in the tens of thousands of dollars in grants awarded by local foundations to support the arts, and the millions of dollars in ticket sales that were donated back by patrons after performances were canceled. Click here for more: State Of The Arts

CORAL RESCUED FORM KEYS HEAT RECOVERING

Marine biologist Lauren Burk leaned down and squeezed out several ounces of a nutritious soup of amino acids, phytoplankton and brine shrimp from a pipette into a kiddie-pool size tub filled with two dozen fragments of Staghorn coral. It was feeding time at the Mote Aquaculture Research Park for coralsrescued after a mid-July wave of warm water in the Florida Keys triggered a mass bleaching event. They arrived with more than 2,000 other Staghorn and Elkhorn corals evacuated from nurseries designed to produce coral to repopulate the Florida Reef Tract. Corals are colonies of tiny polyps that eat plankton. They live in a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae algae, which feed on coral waste and carbon dioxide and provide the coral oxygen and organic products of photosynthesis. Those two dozen corals have recently taken up residence in a 20,000-gallon tank in Mote’s Florida Coral Reef Restoration Crab Hatchery Research Center, along with a host of other Staghorn coral. On a recent Tuesday, Burk, along with Kari Imhof, a marine biologist with Mote’s coral health and disease program, and research technician Chloe Manley, were tasked with feeding all the corals in that 20,000-gallon tank, a process that included Imhof getting in the tank and removing a rack of corals transferred to that tub for feeding. The corals spend about a half hour in the mini pool filled with sea water and essentially being hand-fed by Burk. “That gives them time to do a full polyp extension and grab what’s floating around,” Imhoff said. “In the ocean, in the wild, they have a lot of different things swimming around – microplankton, shrimp – when they’re in captivity like this, it’s important we introduce new nutrients.” Please click here for more: Corals Recovering At Mote

RINGLING PLANS YEAR-LONG ECLECTIC FESTIVAL

While planning an eclectic slate of international artists appearing throughout the season for The Ringling’s Art of Performance series, Elizabeth Doud said she always has the sense of a busy weekend festival in mind. The series is an outgrowth of the Ringling International Arts Festival, which featured roughly a dozen different shows in an extended weekend each fall for nine years. “I look at the series as a protracted festival. People harken back to RIAF and I’m trying to keep that energy while stretching it over the year,” said Doud, the Currie-Kohlmann Curator of Performance at the museum. Doud joined The Ringling in 2019, two years after RIAF ended, but she has maintained the festival’s spirit in planning each season. For 2023-24, she has booked 12 mainstage dance, theater and music programs, along with six artist developmental residencies, more than a dozen free and discounted master classes and artist talks and a showcase of works in progress by Sarasota area artists. The new season will have a Francophone undercurrent with French-speaking artists from around the world, as well as programs intended to reach Spanish-speakers and a more diverse group of the region’s population. “There’s a very new population and Sarasota is in a moment of change with different expectations of what’s needed, and we’re trying to address that,” Doud said. She added that she has been meeting many French-speaking artists from around the world at a variety of festivals and the timing worked to bring some of them to Sarasota during the same season. The series and season kick off at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 20 with the White Hot Fête party in the museum courtyard featuring La Dame Blanche, otherwise known as Yaite Ramos Rodriguez, a singer, flautist, percussionist and dance hall artist from Paris via Havan. She is the daughter of Jesus “Augaje” Ramos, of the Buena Vista Social Club, and will provide the entertainment for a party to launch the season, along with DJ Moses Belanger of Montreal. Food and beverages will be available for purchase for regular ticket holders ($35, $31.50 for Ringling members). VIP tickets are $125. Most performances will be presented in the Historic Asolo Theater (or the HAT) in The Ringling’s visitor center. There’s more to read here: Ringling Plans Eclectic Festival

MOSQUITO-BORNE ILLNESS ADVISORY LIFTED

Sarasota and Manatee counties lifted the mosquito-borne illness advisory recently, months after seven cases of locally acquired malaria were reported in Sarasota County since May. County mosquito control braced for potential mosquito-borne illness outbreaks following Hurricane Idalia. Standing water and opened windows caused by storm outages can lead to the perfect breeding grounds for mosquito-borne illnesses, but mosquito control in both counties has not observed any new cases. While the advisory has been lifted, Wade Brennan, director of the Sarasota County Mosquito Control District, asked residents to remain vigilant. “That doesn’t mean we don’t want people to take precaution,” Brennan said. “There’s still possible risk.” Both Sarasota and Manatee counties have been under a mosquito-borne illness alert since June 19. There have been eight Florida counties with mosquito advisories and five counties with health alerts. The malaria concern was focused on northern Sarasota County in the DeSoto acres park area and in a southern Manatee County area that extends from Sarasota Bay in the west to Interstate 75 in the east and from University Parkway to roughly three miles north. Sandra Fisher-Grainger, Florida Mosquito Control Association president and director of Hernando County Mosquito Control, said just under a dozen invasive species have been discovered in Florida over the last year. Fisher-Grainger said these species are capable of spreading disease by catching rides on cargo or passenger planes or laying eggs on people or items that are transported from country to country. “Through climate change, the ease of travel, and more trade with other countries, it’s just making it easier for mosquitos to come here,” Fisher-Grainger said. There’s more on this story here: Mosquito-Borne Advisory Lifted

SHIFTS IN LOGGERHEAD TURTLE NESTS

Florida set a record for loggerhead turtle nests, but how did Sarasota and Manatee counties fare? Preliminary data shows there have been 133,414 loggerhead nests in Florida as of Aug. 31, breaking the previous annual record of 122,707 in 2016. Nests are laid seasonally from March to October, and female turtles lay about five to seven nests in a season. The number of hatchlings from one nest could be anywhere from five to 100. Mote Marine Laboratory’s Sea Turtle Conservation and Research Program monitors 35 miles of beaches in Sarasota and Manatee counties daily for new nests. They reported a decrease in nests but an increase in false crawls – when a female turtle crawls on the beach to lay a nest but returns to the water because she was disturbed or couldn’t find a suitable nest site. In the 2023 season, there were 4,097 nests and 5,653 false crawls, and in the 2022 season, there were 4,373 nests and 4,891 false crawls. Mazzarella said a one-to-one ratio of false crawls to nests is considered to be okay, but she’s seen a record number of sea turtle disorientation – when artificial lighting disturbs the ability of nesting females and hatchlings to find the sea from the beach. While the draught hasn’t caused problems with hatchlings, Hurricane Idalia washed out a number of nests in Manatee County, Mazarella said. Of the 405 total nests total for this season, there were 76 on the beach when the storm hit. The group reported that 64 of those nests were washed out. Turtle eggs can drown with too much water because of the lack of gas exchange from the egg, Mazzarella said. There are also times when the eggs are pulled out into the water and are not viable because the embryo detaches from the yolk sack. Mazarella added that turtles spread their eggs across time and the beach, so even if a natural storm or disorientation happens, it’s not a total loss for that turtle. Please click on the link for more: Loggerhead Turtle Nests