Sarasota downtown plan committee gets a history crash course

To help the group tasked with facilitating an updated Sarasota downtown master plan to determine where it is going, it must first learn where it has been.

During its May 28 meeting, the city’s 13-member Downtown Master Plan 2020 Update Committee heard from five witnesses who were here when the adoption of current plan came in the early 2000s. All five played a key role in the plan drafted by Duany-Plater-Zyberk & Company, led by New Urbanism guru, Andres Duany.

“The five presenters are really eyewitnesses to history,” said committee Chairman Howard Davis. “Twenty-five years ago when the current plan was done, everybody here (to present) was in Sarasota and involved in the preparation of the plan, so we're getting the first-hand information from eyewitnesses to history.”

Each presenter brought a different perspective to the creation of the current plan. They were:

• David Smith, manager of long-range planning for the city of Sarasota, who is the only remaining planning staff member from the time of the written plan.
• Molly Cardamone, who was a city commissioner and mayor at the time.
• Linda Holland, a leader of the Gillespie Park Neighborhood Association, who provided input to the plan from the neighborhood perspective.
• John Harshman of commercial real estate firm Harshman & Company, who at the time was president of the Association of Downtown Commercial Property Owners Association.
• Land use attorney Bill Merrill, who represented challengers to the DPZ plan as it was being crafted.

This month, beginning with Smith, the Observer will highlight each of the presentations as the committee dives in to its two-year task to develop the next iteration of the downtown plan to help guide future redevelopment of what is a built-out city.

Smith laid out the history of the city’s downtown plan efforts, which began with its first master plan in 1986 when the City Commission created a Community Redevelopment Agency for downtown. As difficult as it may be for newcomers to imagine, downtown Sarasota was considered blighted.

“A CRA is a public agency created to carry out redevelopment of an area due to blight or slum conditions,” Smith told the panel. “In September of 1986, the City Commission approved a resolution with a finding of slum or blight in the downtown area and created the Community Redevelopment Agency for the purpose of rehabilitating the redevelopment area and eradicating the conditions of slum or blight.”

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To help pay for public efforts to rehab downtown, the city created a tax increment financing overlay, a funding mechanism to capture the future tax benefits of real estate improvement investments to fund capital projects and investments in the district. That's similar to the TIF district that is helping fund The Bay park and potentially a new Sarasota Performing Arts Center within.

That CRA and TIF district sunsetted in 2017, the timing managing to capture the capital that was generated under DPZ’s Downtown Master Plan 2020.

“About 13 years after the first CRA plan was created, the city decided we needed to update that plan, so in October of 1999 the City Commission approved a process for updating the CRA master plan for downtown.”

The idea was to create a 20-year vision plan of downtown building form, land uses, public open spaces, public art, pedestrian and vehicle circulation, parking, mass transit and signage. It also included an implementation plan, including recommended revisions to the land development regulations, zoning code, a 20-year capital improvements program and a plan for public and private initiatives. 

Following a nationwide search, the city settled on DPZ to develop that plan and, according to city staff, it has implemented 85% of its recommendations. 

Duany’s vision did come with one caveat — the sometimes controversial administrative review and approval process for all developments within the downtown zone districts — Downtown Bayfront, Downtown Core, Downtown Edge, Downtown Neighborhood Edge and Downtown Neighborhood.

He asserted that in order for the city’s downtown to reach its full potential pursuant to the plan, the political process would have to be removed from the equation, providing a project meets all zoning code criteria.

“Mr. Duany stated that implementation needed to occur through administrative review of site plans performed by your professional staff and that the public hearing process should be limited to your Comprehensive Plan amendments, your rezoning and your adoption of the zoning code,” Smith said. “We adopted an action strategy into the Comprehensive Plan future land use chapter, stating administrative review is the process that will be used. That's been in the plan for about 22 years now.”