After listening to economist Hank Fishkind’s economic forecast for Manatee last week, I was ready to go home and pull a blanket over my head until 2011. In the short-term, he predicted little job or population growth to stimulate the market. He projected 20,000 home foreclosures in Manatee alone (and 12,000 in Sarasota) in 2010 as adjustable rate mortgages reset early in the year. Fishkind’s PowerPoint presentation is posted on the Manatee EDC Web site at http://www.manateeedc.com/NewsPDF.aspx?ID=75.
Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida, offered his forecast for Sarasota the next day. Snaith eschewed the charts and graphs, opting instead for metaphor (comparing the recession here to open-heart surgery) and humor. The room was packed with business people who can comprehend all the charts and graphs, but they sure appreciated a good laugh as well. Still, his outlook also packed a punch. He said unemployment—the surgical scar that remains even after the patient has recovered—will continue to hover in the double digits here until 2012.
Sean Snaith (photo Maria Lyle)
Snaith sees not the V-shaped recession some economists have predicted, with a sharp decline followed by a sharp rise, nor a “U” or “W” shape, but a “gravy boat” with a sharp decline and a gradual return.
Both economists said the recession has been brutal, historically long and possibly game-changing for Florida’s economy. Fishkind compared where we are now to the era just after Hurricane Andrew, with a long period of recovery ahead. How well we recover, they both said, will depend in part on policymakers at the state and local level.
“We need smart policy to diversify and nurture non-traditional industries,” said Snaith, adding that it’s also time to create new models to finance state government. Fishkind said state policy puts us at a competitive disadvantage already—meaning the inequitable property tax system that places a higher burden on newcomers and businesses, faulty property insurance, “poor” land use policies and high impact fees for new construction.
Robert Meade of Doctors Hospital and Jeffrey Jones of JCI Chemicals also spoke at the Sarasota EDC forecast. (photo Maria Lyle)
Both expressed little faith in the Florida lawmakers to reform the state’s tax and funding models, at least in the short term. I asked Sen. Mike Bennett for his response to their abysmally low expectations of the Florida legislature.
He said, “There is probably a little bit of truth to that because there is only so much we can do. People think of our economic situation as a Florida problem. It’s a worldwide problem. We can incentivize companies to expand and grow in Florida. We can get out of their way and streamline government. We’re not going to raise taxes in any way, shape or form because that would slow the recovery.
“Our property taxes are lower than most other states,” Bennett says. “We still have a lot of people who are not convinced we have an income problem as much as a spending problem.”
Bennett is reintroducing a bill this session that would cap property tax increases across the board, and he’s very focused on rolling back unemployment insurance rates, an issue which has business people rightfully outraged. Bennett said he’s always supported closing sales tax loopholes and other reforms, but right now, shifting the tax burden or creating new ones is politically untenable.
With both businesses and the legislature focused on digging out of a hole, the outlook for big picture or long-term leadership to restore a thriving economy remains a big question mark for Florida, and an unsettling one.
Questions and answers about the Sarasota schools tax.
By Kim Cartlidge
Has the Sarasota County School District been on a spending spree with our property tax dollars? Based on some of the accusations at a recent packed Tiger Bay meeting, the school board has been on a wild ride, spending more than most districts in the country, building unnecessary schools and doling out fat teacher bonuses with scant community oversight.
When speaker Walt Augustinowicz dismissed findings of the school board’s volunteer financial oversight committee because they are, after all, school board appointees, attorney Dan De Leo had had enough. He rose to the microphone and asked if Augustinowicz had spoken to or even knew any members of the committee that reviews the district’s budget and spending. Augustinowicz said he didn’t know who they were.
De Leo, a litigation attorney with Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, does know about the financial advisory committee because as a member, he has spent hours with them poring over and questioning the district budget, sometimes down to the line item.
Dan De Leo
“I did not expect that one of the panel members would essentially make the inference that we didn’t do our job, we didn’t ask tough questions and we were somehow lackeys or puppets,” De Leo says. “If you knew any of the members of the committee you would know it’s crazy. The chair of the committee [Robert Windom] is a former Reagan administration appointee who is very conservative. The individual who authored the report [John Cranor] is chair of the Chamber of Commerce. These are conservative businessmen. We’re all people who are suspicious of government and taxes.”
The seven-member committee of CPAs, attorneys and CEOs who understand the budget better than most of us could hope to—Bob Windom, John Cranor, Mick Ferrucci, Herb Jones, Mark Rehder, Dan De Leo and Rob Lane—strongly endorse extending the one mill property tax for education for four more years.
“We made the decision in 2001 that the average Florida education was not sufficient for this community. That has not changed. To be average in Florida is to be inferior nationally and internationally,” De Leo says.
The tax is expected to raise $38 million for operating expenses for the next school year and $40 to $50 million the following years. It costs property owners $1 per $1,000 in property value annually, or $275 for a homesteaded house worth $300,000. Voters will go to the ballot to decide on March 16.
Anyone with a child in the school system is aware of school district cuts—from laid-off or reassigned teachers to reduced spending for maintenance and transportation—that have created uncertainty and stress over the past two years. The budget cuts of $42 million last year and $31 million for 2010 have been due to declining government revenues and decreased property values. But the district also faces a “funding cliff” when federal budget stabilization funds of $14.7 million for this school year and $13 to $14 million for the next school year end in 2011.
“For me, that is the really important issue that has not been discussed enough,” says De Leo. “The federal stimulus money has been a band-aid. Without it, the cuts would have been draconian. There’s going to be a huge shortfall.”
In a climate where every government, business and family is enduring shortfalls as well, the school tax extension campaign is facing more scrutiny than it did in 2002 and 2006, when more than 60 percent of voters passed it.
“It’s a fair question, and we should always be asking, ‘do we need this?’” says De Leo. “To me, it’s pretty simple and straightforward. Have the funds been used wisely and has the school board been a good steward of the money? We believe the money has been spent very wisely. We believe the community benefits a great deal.”
Read the Financial Advisory Committee Report, with data on student achievement and the committee’s opinion on COPS here.
The school board’s referendum page has more links to information about the property tax.
The Ringling Museum's Lynn Hobeck-Bates heads to the SCVB..
By Kim Cartlidge
Sarasota’s arts and cultural organizations will have a new booster beginning in January. The Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau has hired Lynn Hobeck Bates to promote Sarasota’s arts experiences to tourists and travel wholesalers.
Hobeck Bates co-managed the public relations for the highly successful inaugural Ringling International Arts Festival in October, which drew visitors and artists from more than 25 states and 18 countries. In her position as public relations manager for the Ringling Museum, she also helped lead the award-winning 30 Days of Discovery campaign to promote area attractions to local residents in the off-season.
Lynn Hobeck Bates, the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau’s new cultural and international leisure tourism sales manager. Photo by Lori Sax.
The SCVB is stepping up its cultural tourism marketing in the same manner that it put muscle behind its sports marketing three years ago with the hiring of Jason Puckett as sports manager. After an initial benchmark year, the marketer and SCVB are expected to produce results in the form of tourist draws that create measurable economic impact. Over the past three years, the SCVB has helped to attract 21 new sporting events, ranging from the much-touted state rowing championships to gymnastics, tennis, lacrosse, swimming, soccer, cricket, beach volleyball and BMX competitions for an economic impact of $18 million during the 2008-2009 fiscal year ending in September.
Bates showed her mettle and leadership during the 30 Days of Discovery campaign, which required that eight area museums collaborate on the plan, says Virginia Haley, president of the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Lynn has a great set of skills in getting people to work together. She’s very diplomatic but very results-driven. She knows destination so she can hit the ground running. By the end of January, she’ll be doing sales calls in the U.K.”
Her first task is to strengthen relationships with international travel wholesalers who sell travel packages to visitors. She’ll be finding out what visitors are seeking while promoting Sarasota’s one-of-a-kind arts encounters. “Right now, people do seem to like to see not only the presentation, but how the costumes are made, the behind-the-scenes look at the creative process,” says Haley.
Bates will also reach out to local arts organizations to find out what backstage tours or up-close experiences they can offer tour packagers. “Arts groups need to be thinking long-term about their programming five years ahead,” says Haley. “If it’s in 2012, we need Lynn to have that knowledge and lead time to build programs.”
Of course, the return of the Ringling International Arts Festival in 2010 with expanded offerings from local organizations is also high priority for the SCVB. Both are very positive steps to showcase Sarasota’s arts and offer a much-needed economic boost.
Towles Court thrives with a recent juried art show.
By Kim Cartlidge
Arts lovers, well wishers and curious tourists jammed the recent opening of the Towles Court Art Association’s first open juried art show featuring 49 local painters and sculptors with artist Tim Jaeger as juror. They spilled out of the Clair Mitchell gallery and into the grassy courtyard, where they mingled among oak trees and historic cottages-turned-studios illuminated with twinkle lights.
There is no place in Sarasota like Towles Court, Sarasota’s only downtown artists colony. A dilapidated 1920s neighborhood that was salvaged and restored in the 1990s to serve as commercial and studio space for working artists, Towles Court still feels like stepping into another time and place.
The historic cottages of Towles Court Artists Colony surround an outdoor courtyard.
If you haven’t been in awhile, now is the perfect time to check out what’s new in the tiny district, which is hidden away south of Ringling Boulevard between Links Avenue and U.S. 301/Washington Boulevard, and get an inside scoop before the guests and seasonal visitors arrive. Despite the recession, there are no vacancies in Towles Court, which is filled to capacity with both new and established galleries, restaurants and shops. In addition to the mainstays such as the Katharine Butler Gallery and Lavanda restaurant, Towles is now home to a coffee shop, Deja Brew, Daawat Indian restaurant in the former Canvas Café building, and a new Garden Café at Shoogie Boogies photography gallery and gift shop. Both well-known Sarasota painter Jon Greeley and downtown muralist Skip Dyrda work out of studios in Towles Court, and up-and-coming artists are able to rent studio and gallery space at the Celery Barn Gallery.
Artist and Ringling College grad Victoria Cooley opened her Towles Court studio one year ago in October with a determination to support herself there. She and other members of the Towles Court Art Association are finding success in diversifying. “I’m painting small canvases, and I’m also being versatile,” Cooley says. “I do murals, house portraits and pet portraits. I also work directly with clients on their needs.”
Victoria B. Cooley paints in the gallery and studio that bears her name.
Today, visitors to Towles Court can find gallery gifts for $25, handmade jewelry for less than $100 or large canvases for up to $5000. “We want to be approachable,” Cooley says. “We want people to come in and relax and feel they can ask questions.” Most of the shops and galleries in Towles Court are open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. They all open for the festive Third Friday Art Walks, and most serve wine and refreshments while visitors gallery-hop.
The Towles Court Art Association is also welcoming and encouraging undiscovered artists. The three winners of the Small Works art show--Marianthe Pastore, Lowell Eckert and Frank Creaturo--will display additional works at the Winners Exhibition, which opens on Friday, Dec. 11, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. The show runs through Friday, Dec. 18, which is also the night of the December Third Friday Art Walk.
Oil drilling debate and Bill Gates: This must be Thursday for state Sen. Nancy Detert.
By Kim Cartlidge
Despite what you may have read or heard, Florida Sen. Nancy Detert says she is undecided about oil drilling off Florida’s Gulf coast. In fact, she’s asking people to call her office and let her know if they are for or against offshore oil drilling—and to leave their names, so they’ll only vote once.
Over the summer, the voters who called her office favored drilling by 80 percent to 20 percent, percentages that she and her staff questioned, so she’s been spreading the word to more groups about her constituent polling. Right now, the tally is 50 percent for and 50 percent against drilling, and she’s receiving more than 100 calls per day.
Last legislative session, the Florida House fast-tracked and passed a bill that would have opened up near shore drilling (three to 10 miles offshore) in Florida, but the bill died in the Senate. Emotions ran high, and they still do, which exasperates Detert. She’s seen it all already—from the knee-jerk reactions to the pickets planned in front of her office to the conspiracy theorists.
“I’m not seeing that people want to learn about this—and you couldn’t pry their minds open with a crowbar,” Detert says. “When it comes to this issue, I’m taking nothing at face value. I’m questioning everything because once we put the environment at risk and let people drill, that marries us to a group of business people for a long time. Before we sign on with somebody, I want them completely vetted. I want to know who they represent.”
The Florida Senate has asked scientists from FSU and the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida—not the lobbyists—to present both sides during this year’s session. Here at home, the Sarasota Tiger Bay Club is hosting a panel on drilling this Thursday, and it’s expected to be a lively one.
Detert will be at the Tiger Bay meeting, but she’ll have to step outside at one point for a conference call with Bill Gates. Yes, that Bill Gates.
Detert attended a National Conference of State Legislators meeting in July where Gates was the keynote speaker. She was handed an invitation to a small group meeting with Mr. Gates himself. “I had no idea why I was invited,” Detert says. “I went in and it turned out to be just a bare, small room with a conference table.” About 15 other senate presidents and speakers of the house sat at the table as Gates and two staff people from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation asked questions about education in the U.S. When the meeting was finished, Gates said the foundation has set aside $360 million for education reform and targeted 10 states, Detert says. The legislators invited the table were from those 10 states.
Since then, Detert has become a part of the Gates Foundation’s focus group on education reform. Hillsborough County has applied for a Gates Foundation grant focused on teacher effectiveness, and they stand a very good chance of getting it, Detert says. Education reform may be bright spot of this year’s legislative session, she adds. If her Thursday schedule is any indication, she’ll be right at the hub of two of Florida’s most critical issues in 2010.
Call Senator Nancy Detert's office at (941)480-3547 to register your opinion about offshore oil drilling in Florida.
The latest news and views from Congressman Vern Buchanan.
By Kim Cartlidge
A Bradenton Veterans Day parade, an Englewood town meeting, a call for an inquiry into the possibility of terrorism behind the Fort Hood shootings and constituent meetings will make for a relatively quiet week for Congressman Vern Buchanan, who’s in town through the weekend.
Last week, he returned to D.C. from visiting with troops and military officials in Afghanistan, after which he expressed his support for additional troops, and within days voted on the 2,000-page House healthcare reform bill. On Monday, he spoke to a League of Women Voters group about his “no” vote and the Republican plan, which he supports.
Congressman Vern Buchanan speaks to the League of Women Voters.
The House bill that passed late Saturday by a 220-215 vote was endorsed by AARP, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Nurses Association, and, conditionally, by the American Medical Association. It was opposed by the U.S Chamber of Commerce, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. The bill is now moving through the U.S. Senate.
The GOP version had three important provisions that would help contain costs, Buchanan says. It would allow associations to pool together to buy insurance as groups, allow companies to sell policies across state lines, and save an estimated $54 billion a year through tort and legal reform.
Buchanan represents the Congressional district with the largest number of seniors over 65 in the country, and he’ll be getting an earful about healthcare reform this week. He also serves on the House Committee on Small Business, and says one reason for his opposition to the healthcare bill was the provision to partially fund it with a payroll tax, or fine, on small businesses with payrolls over $500,000 that do not offer insurance benefits.
Buchanan told the League group that in his constituent polls, 75 to 85 percent of his voters say they like the medical insurance they have. His own companies pay about $1,000 to $1,200 per month to insure a family of four. Many business owners can’t afford the monthly expense, so they’re asking employees to pick up the cost. A goal of reform, he says, should be to get that cost back down to $600 to $700 a month for a family of four. “If you don’t fix the costs, I don’t care how you pay for it, it’s not going to work,” he said.
Buchanan with Sarasota County Commissioner Nora Patterson.
He fielded a number of questions about Afghanistan, partisanship, Wall Street bonuses and oil drilling off Florida’s coast, which he said he opposes. Asked what he’s learned about Congress since taking office in 2007, he said, “how little regard there is for any kind of budget. It is shocking. We have a trillion [each year] that’s discretionary, and we’re still overspending.”
With so much weighty business before Congress, it’s a good time to call or write and express your opinions or concerns. Call the Vern Buchanan office at (941) 951-6643, or visit www.buchanan.house.gov, register with your e-mail, and leave a comment there. You can also find Buchanan’s Facebook and Twitter information on the site.
A special service day draws hundreds of volunteers.
By Kim Cartlidge
While many nonprofits have suffered a decline in contributions and volunteerism in this economy, James DuPlantier of Friendship Volunteer Center reports that his participation rates have more than doubled since January.
DuPlantier organized more than 1,000 volunteers for Make a Difference Day this past Saturday, a one-day, three-county volunteer blitz of boardwalk-painting, garden-planting, park-sprucing, festival-hosting labor.
Jackson Pollocking the pines at Pines of Sarasota are St. Thomas More Catholic Church youth group members Jennifer McElroy, Alison Palmer, Andrew Rossi, Ryan Nopper and Kevin Swain.
The weather was fabulous, excuse enough to motivate people to spend a Saturday morning outdoors with friends. However, it’s not the only factor that has played into the success of these one-day events, DuPlantier says. Awareness has increased since President Obama called for a national day of service on Martin Luther King Day and signed the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act, expanding AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and other service initiatives. This month, he joined former President George H.W. Bush at the 20-year anniversary celebration of Bush Sr.’s Points of Light program, and both presidents renewed the service call.
How shall I paint thee? Ramsey Frangie of Ramate Construction and Larry Bowie paint the Selby Gardens walkway.
All that attention to creating service opportunities has made it easy to sign up and give a few hours back to the community. If you missed out on Make a Difference Day, DuPlantier has already scheduled three more national days of service this season—Family Volunteer Day on Nov. 20, Martin Luther King Day on Jan. 18, which will have a “Go Green” theme, and Global Youth Service Day on April 24. Anyone can sign up for organized activities, or create their own.
Nicole Martin of the Community Foundation of Sarasota County and daughter Lynn Martin managed to avoid painting each other at Selby Gardens.
Friendship Volunteer Center is also the HandsOn Network affiliate that will certify volunteers who want to earn a free Disney ticket in 2010. Disney will give away a theme park ticket to each person who volunteers for eight hours with an approved agency and is certified. The details for that program are still coming out, but DuPlantier will have all the information soon.
The Friendship Volunteer Center is a clearinghouse for 700 nonprofit agencies in the three-county area. If you’d like to spend a day or more as a community volunteer, call the center at 953-5965 or visit www.friendshipvolunteer.com and fill out a one-page form with your interests and contact information.
A portrait of Sarasota’s largest benefactor begins to emerge.
Portrait by Matt Buck
The benefactor of Sarasota’s fledgling, $190 million Patterson Foundation lived here quietly for nearly 30 years. She kept such a low public profile that a recent photo is hard to find, and the details of her life are being gathered, not from news accounts, but in the word-of-mouth, oral tradition.
Debra Jacobs, president and CEO of the Patterson Foundation since January, has been diligently collecting stories from Patterson’s relatives, nieces, nephews and nurses to help her in a task she terms “a daunting, but exciting challenge.” Dorothy Patterson left the foundation with a blank charter—meaning without a specific mission, geographic area or set of issues to address. Jacobs and the designation committee have been developing the foundation’s grant making philosophy and processes this year, and plan to roll it all out in January of 2010.
Without that guidance from Patterson while she was alive (and she suffered with Alzheimer’s in the years before she died), Dorothy Patterson’s history of giving, her causes and passions and her early life are all of interest to Jacobs. They all weigh in to the challenge of creating the Patterson Foundation’s mission from a blank sheet of paper.
For example, Patterson loved going to shows and the Van Wezel, and often treated her nieces and nephews to Broadway performances in New York City for their birthdays. But she found West Side Story too violent for them when they were young. She was a devout Catholic and supporter of Cardinal Mooney High School, which bears a pavilion with the Patterson name.
Jacobs and Patterson’s good friend, Sister Lucia Haas, president of Cardinal Mooney, have an idea why a woman of such wealth would leave behind a blank check. The daughter of a prison guard at Sing Sing in Ossining, N.Y., she married into a family that had amassed a fortune over generations. She didn’t behave as though entitled (baking pies for charity bake sales early in her marriage), they say, and did not consider the money her own.
Jim Patterson was heir to his family’s media empire, which was first created by his great-grandfather Joseph Medill’s ownership of today’s Chicago Tribune company from the mid-1850s. His father later founded the Daily News of New York in 1919, and after serving in the military, Jim worked his way up to managing editor there.
Dorothy and Jim met in elementary school when they attended St. Augustine Catholic elementary school together in Ossining. They began dating in high school. Dorothy was independent, down-to-earth, well-mannered and somewhat formal, but never became glitzy or showy with money. One of her favorite phrases was, “Do you need that or want that?”
They retired to Longboat Key and lived in a relatively modest house at the end of Hornblower Lane. “Dot” enjoyed parties with other couples who belonged to Bird Key Yacht Club and the Sarasota Power Squadron, many of whom were former high-ranking military and government officials.
She was widowed in 1992, but continued to enjoy the pleasures of a Van Wezel performance, a Sunday morning mass at Incarnation Church, where she loved to interact with the children, shopping at Talbot’s and dining at Euphemia Haye. She was known as a generous tipper.
The memories of her in her last years of life are sweet and poignant. Rheumatoid arthritis left her claw-handed and in pain. She would apologize to her banker for taking so long to sign papers. A nephew offered to move to Sarasota to care for her, but she told him that everyone must live his own life, and remained independent with 24-hour nursing care until the end.
Patterson will leave Sarasota a great legacy. On paper, she was a rather quiet philanthropist. But it’s telling that those close to her still get tears in their eyes when they remember her presence. In her own unassuming way, she demonstrated a magnaminity of spirit that deeply touched those who were fortunate to know her.
To learn more about the Patterson Foundation, visit www.thepattersonfoundation.org. The foundation will announce its grant philosophy and processes in 2010.
In the post-real estate bust era, diversifying Sarasota’s economy will take years of courting CEOs, millions in tax incentives and perhaps a few consultant’s studies, right?
Not if you are Rich Swier and Matt Orr, two tech-creative types with an entrepreneurial drive—and impatience—to cultivate Sarasota’s new economy now. They’ve founded Sarasota’s HuB in an unassuming building in the downtown Rosemary District with a bare bones budget (Orr says he had $600 to invest at the start) and a small, multi-tasking staff. The HuB is a business incubator targeted to creative and tech entrepreneurs who want to start companies in Sarasota.
“You can’t move businesses here, but you can move entrepreneurs here,” says Swier. Swier is well-known for his success in launching several tech companies, including Fast Pitch, as well as the Sarasota-based venture capital enterprise Startup Florida. He recently founded VentureCast, an online network that matches business investors with entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Europe. Matt Orr is cofounder of the HuB and ThisWeekinSarasota, which has grown from a local events Web site to a multimedia company that promotes Sarasota tourism on the Web, in print and on Internet TV.
Sarasota HuB is a hybrid with dual goals to cultivate Sarasota’s own version of creative-tech economy. The first is to draw creative entrepreneurs to an arts and social scene, and the second to offer the expertise and financial support that will encourage creative upstarts to start up here. The HuB grabbed attention over the summer with its well-attended, off-season Vinyl Fest and S/art/Q parties. One of the events attracted Janis Krums, a Sarasota--based entrepreneur who chose to base InBoxAlarm, an e-mail security service, here instead of in Silicon Valley, where his business partner resides. InBoxAlarm (formerly Tripwi.re) is a new launch, but the concept has already received the attention of PCmag and BNET online.
The HuB transformed into a gallery for a late summer S/art/Q event. Photo courtesy Peter Acker.
“We’re using Sarasota resources to start the business,” says Krums. “This is a support system for entrepreneurs so they don’t have to leave the area.”
The HuB is a private business incubator model that Swier would like to incorporate into Sarasota County’s public economic development efforts, but so far it has garnered neither the support nor the funding from the Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County that he’d like to see. The EDC has been working on developing its own bi-county incubator with USF.
EDC president Kathy Baylis says an incubator is a high priority, but no funding has been designated other than $10,000 to begin to write a business plan this year. “I think we’re an underserved market in terms of incubators, but we don’t have funds to fund private organizations,” she says.
She adds that the EDC wants to embrace any operation that assists business, and since she doesn’t have the incubator infrastructure yet, she has referred entrepreneurs to the HuB for help. “We’re taking baby steps,” Baylis says. “I know both of those guys well enough to know that they want to go at lightning speed. When you’re working with political entities and educational institutions, you want to make sure the time is right.”
One factor that has slowed down the bicounty effort is the change in leadership at the Manatee EDC after long-term executive director Nancy Engel resigned this year. The new director, Eric Basinger, will present his five-year strategic plan to Manatee Chamber board of directors this weekend. After that, Baylis plans to schedule a meeting with USF and Basinger about the incubator.
Meanwhile, Swier and Orr are a bit frustrated, but moving forward. “We’ve shown what can be done and we have the blueprint,” Swier says. “The community needs to go back and say we are an entrepreneurial town. We were founded by an entrepreneur. We are a creative town. We throw all our money at other things.”
A Ringling Museum festival goes Asian--and interactive.
By Kim Cartlidge
As one who has mourned the loss of Sarasota’s bygone cultural festivals of late—such as the downtown Arts Day and the Sarasota Reading Festival— I’m looking forward to a new, family-oriented event that has been taking shape to coincide with the Ringling International Arts Festival.
Next month’s highly anticipated, inaugural Ringling International Arts Festival is already a winner in my book because of its access—offering five days of contemporary dance, music and theater performances that would satisfy the most highbrow of arts aficionados—all for $10 to $30 a ticket. A co-production of New York City’s Baryshnikov Arts Center and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota (www.ringlingartsfestival.org), the festival will feature troupes from Australia, Spain, France, Israel, Scotland, England, Canada and the United States Oct. 7-11.
The Wu Ying Dong Chinese acrobats will perform the Lion Dance Oct. 10.
On Saturday, Oct. 10, the Ringling Museum education department will present an interactive Asian Family Fun Fest to celebrate the rich arts and artists of that region as well. The Fun Fest will take place in the Ringling Museum’s courtyard from 1 to 4 p.m.
Festival goers will stamp their “passports” as they experience the arts of China, India, Japan, Thailand and the Himalayan region. Featured performers include the Wu Ying Dong Chinese Acrobats, the children’s dance troupe from Tampa’s Thai Buddhist temple, Japanese Taiko drummers and yogis from Garden of the Heart Center in Sarasota.
Families will be invited to decorate and fly Chinese kites, fold origami boats and birds, create sumi-e brush paintings, fashion Himalayan prayer flags and learn kai-awase, a Japanese memory game played with clamshells. The activities will be presented by local clubs and artisans, including Sarasota’s Sumi-e Society and New College’s Origami Club.
Inside the museum, attendees can visit the Paths to Paradise: The World of Buddhism exhibit, which was the inspiration for a number of the activities. The exhibit features objects from the museum’s permanent Koger and Dr. Helga Wall-Apelt collections and private collections in Sarasota.
The Fun Fest is being billed as “an afternoon experiencing the best Asia has to offer,” says Dwight Currie, Ringling International Arts Festival project coordinator. Festival admission will be free with paid museum admission that day. Admission for children under six is free. For more information, visit www.ringling.org.
Family Promise of Sarasota restructures to meet homeless needs.
By Kim Cartlidge
Criminal and family law attorney Marcia Lockwood had her doubts this week as she prepared for a volunteer open house. Who would show? Would there be enough interest in the organization she’d put her heart into over the summer to sustain its volunteer-driven, hands-on mission?
Four months ago, Family Promise of Sarasota voted to suspend operations. Donations were down, and the interdenominational program to help homeless families get back on their feet needed to restructure. It was a difficult decision that involved letting go of the staff, followed by a long summer of frank discussions among the board and coordinators who represent the 12 congregations that participate in the program.
Lockwood, who is president of Family Promise, put out an invitation for volunteers to serve on the finance, fund-raising, board development and public relations committees. Fifteen minutes before the open house was to begin, more than 20 people were lined up outside her office.
Family Promise board members Marcia Lockwood, Betsie Danner, Meryl Clayton, Sally Reeder, Lynn Zoller and Jane Swabb greeted new volunteers at an open house this week.
This October, Family Promise plans to accept another family into its newly restructured program. A grand opening of a new day center is slated for November, although the organization is still seeking an appropriate, low-cost, downtown space in Sarasota where families can seek jobs and get counseling services.
That’s the very good news.
The bad news is that family homelessness, which had begun to decline, is on the rise again. As the Washington Post reported this month, joblessness—not addiction or mental health issues or other behaviors often associated with chronic homelessness—is often the root cause. Single mothers who once had steady jobs and two-income families who were earning modest-to-middle-class incomes, but not saving, have been showing up at homeless shelters across the country.
Family Promise could not have engineered its own recovery at a better time. The organization serves those families by offering shelter within its network of churches and synagogues, meals prepared by congregation members and intensive job counseling and life coaching for 90 days. Its volunteers donate thousands of dollars of in-kind services based on each family’s needs—from dental work to auto repairs to computers for school-aged children.
But what drew Lockwood to the organization was its human touch. As each family goes through the program, dozens of members of the community, all from different religions, offer face-to-face support and encouragement to a family in need. That human contact enables parents and children to learn to trust, to accept help and to interact with people from diverse backgrounds.
It’s all based on a national model that was established 20 years ago as Interfaith Hospitality Networks in New Jersey. Today, Family Promise has more than 140 community affiliates nationwide. In Sarasota, each congregation that participates will house, feed, and converge upon a family in crisis any number of kindnesses for one week several times a year. Volunteers say they get attached, and follow the families even after they leave the program.
It’s a grassroots solution to homelessness that creates a safety net, and a community, for one family at a time. Family Promise of Sarasota can be reached at (941) 952-1800.
It's a moment homeowners in trouble want to avoid.
By Kim Cartlidge
I was sitting among a standing-room-only audience this past weekend, young, old, some wheelchair-bound, all crowded together and listening intently to the seven speakers on the stage.
They were lawyers, housing pros and a credit counselor, and they were conveying their most sage advice about how to avoid home foreclosure.
It was a scene many of us wouldn’t have imagined three or four years ago during the housing boom. Now people with worry on their faces were scribbling notes and leaning in to whisper to one other. One speaker recounted the usual trials that individuals report when they try to negotiate with a lender, such as being bounced from person to person on the phone without getting any answers, or finally reaching a live person, and then sending paperwork that somehow gets lost. Several nodded their heads in agreement.
Well over 200 people crowded into that single presentation, which was one part of the Hope for Homeowners seminar sponsored by the Community Alliance of Sarasota County and Sarasota County government. Still, the turnout amounted to a fraction of those facing the loss of their homes here, where 8,400 foreclosure cases are pending and more are being added each month.
Facing foreclosure? Listen to good advice from Chief Judge Lee Haworth.
The fear and panic can overwhelm people, especially if they’ve received a foreclosure notice. Twelfth Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Lee Haworth, who has instituted a “rocket docket” to move cases forward, estimates that as many as 90 percent of foreclosures in his courts are uncontested.
Even among people who don’t have an employment or medical hardship, talk of turning over a devalued home to a bank and walking away is hardly uncommon these days.
What many people don’t know is that Florida a recourse state. That means that the lender has right to recoup the difference between the note and the fair market value of the home, plus interest and attorney’s fees, even after taking back the property. A lender can seek a deficiency judgment and garnish wages or lay claim on some of the assets of a former homeowner. The judgment in Florida stands for 20 years and follows the homeowner from state to state.
“It’s an ‘Aha’ moment for some. The lender has recourse against the borrower in excess of the collateral,” says Haworth. Haworth has not seen many cases of it recently in local courtrooms, but, he says, “It still hangs out there as a danger and a potential problem for owners.”
The solution for troubled homeowners is to speak to a lawyer, preferably before the bank even knows they’re in trouble, but especially if they’ve received a foreclosure notice and have only 20 days to respond. Haworth has seen people write defenses on their own that have no legal standing, such as illness or financial hardship. “People are afraid of lawyers,” Haworth says. “It’s a shame, because this is an area where they can really do some good. Until they talk to an attorney, they’re not going to know whether they have defenses or not. If you have a defendable case, at least explore the option of defending it.”
That was the message of the seminar as well—homeowners don’t have to go it alone or give up. Those short on cash for a lawyer may be eligible for free representation from Legal Aid of Manasota (941-366-0038). The 12th Judicial Circuit also has a list of lawyers who have undergone foreclosure law training and will take on cases at reduced rates. Additional resources and informational videos are online at www.scgov.net/homehelp.
There is help for local homeowners facing foreclosure.
By Kim Cartlidge
Attorney Anne Weintraub’s first brush with Sarasota’s home foreclosure crisis began three years ago with a stack of unopened mail. A client called, saying he had been receiving letters from his bank, and could he bring them in. Weintraub opened the envelopes, one by one, and placed them in order to piece together what was happening. She discovered the gentleman was unknowingly about a week away from a bank auction of his home.
Attorney Anne Weintraub answers call-in questions from homeowners on ABC7 news every Friday during noon and 5:30 p.m. broadcasts.
Weintraub, a partner with Syprett, Meshad, rescued him from the jaws of foreclosure with a short sale of his house. Since then, she’s seen about 400 clients who were in default or running out of financial resources to carry their homes. Weintraub handles that gray area of negotiation between investor/lender and homeowner who is upside-down or can’t pay. “There are no rules, no law and no logic,” Weintraub says. So far, she has a perfect record. None of her clients who wanted to stay in their primary homes have gone into foreclosure.
Once a lender/investor (which Weintraub distinguishes from a loan servicer, who processes the payments), sends a foreclosure complaint, the lender and borrower are governed by foreclosure laws. But it’s Weintraub’s mission that nobody should get to that point. The harassment tactics some lenders use to collect past due mortgage payments are illegal in Florida, but many borrowers don’t know understand their rights. They don’t know what options they have to modify their loans or, if they need to sell, how to negotiate a short sale. Yet as Sarasota County’s foreclosure rate has skyrocketed, with nearly 8,500 cases currently pending, both the legal community and borrowers are getting savvier.
The bottom line, says Weintraub, is that lenders don’t want to have to manage foreclosed properties. Still, many operate as they did in a pre-real estate bust era, putting up roadblocks to resolution. The key for borrowers and homeowners is to seek out advice early on. Weintraub sees clients who stop paying their health insurance so they can make a mortgage payment, and then they get sick and can’t work. They borrow from their retirement funds to make their payments. Or they see that they’re too upside-down to ever recover their home as an asset. That’s when it’s time to see a lawyer, she says, although most people still don’t seek advice early enough.
Homeowners who are behind on payments but have not received a foreclosure notice can call the Florida Bar's Florida Attorneys Saving Homes hotline at (866) 607-2187 for a referral to a pro bono lawyer. The 12th Judicial Circuit Court Web site has a list of local attorneys who will represent homeowners for a reduced fee. Even those who are already in foreclosure may be eligible for free representation from Legal Aid of Manasota (941-366-0038).
Many homeowners, like Weintraub’s first foreclosure client, freeze up in fear at the thought of even missing a mortgage payment. The message Weintraub would like to send is that relief is possible, and that foreclosure can, in most cases, be avoided. It’s a matter of asking for help.
Sarasota County government has created a Web site for homeowners at www.scgov.net/homehelp with foreclosure prevention resources and instructional videos. On Saturday, Aug. 1, Weintraub, 12th Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Lee Haworth and other local experts will speak at a free Hope for Homeowners housing seminar at 9 a.m. at the Venice Community Center, 326 S. Nokomis Ave. Social service and credit counseling agencies will be on hand as well to answer questions. Call 861-5000 for more information, or visit www.scgov.net/homehelp.
Cirque du Soleil is coming to Sarasota in the fall—but not to stage a performance of Saltimbanco. Circus executives will visit Ringling College of Art and Design to share the inside scoop on managing an international creative enterprise.
As Cirque du Soleil celebrates its 25th year during 2009, the company continues to add programs and expand worldwide. More than 90 million people have attended performances, and 15 million are expected to attend its 20 shows this year.
Dr. Wanda Chaves
Dr. Wanda Chaves, the lead faculty for the Ringling College’s new Business of Art and Design Bachelor of Arts program, is behind Ringling’s evolving relationship with Cirque du Soleil. A former University of Tampa management professor who has consulted with corporations such as Walt Disney, Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, she first pursued a partnership four years ago when UT asked her to develop a business leadership course. As a professor who had worked for creative companies, she envisioned presenting Cirque du Soleil as a case study.
Chaves was undeterred by the fact she didn’t know anyone within the organization. “I called La Nouba [the company’s Orlando show venue],” she says. She not only centered her course around Cirque du Soleil’s growth model and challenges, but was able to draw two executives from the company’s Montreal headquarters to speak to students.
When Chaves joined Ringling’s Business of Art and Design program, she kept up her contact with Cirque. She recently returned from Montreal, where she met with both the vice president and assistant vp of casting and performance, who oversee hiring and training talent from all over the world. This fall, they’ll speak to her Leadership in Creative Environments class about leadership challenges, and then present to a larger group of students and faculty about innovation and creativity. They are expected in late September or early October, but the venue and details are still being worked out.
Around the same time that the Cirque executives are in town, company founder Guy Laliberte will travel to the International Space Station. His poetic social mission, as it’s being termed, to outer space has a humanitarian purpose. Laliberte plans to address the world from space to promote Cirque’s One Drop initiative to provide access to clean water to impoverished nations around the world.
Cirque du Soleil is an original, not just on stage but on the business side as well. “They see the intersection between business and creativity because they live in that world every day,” says Chaves. In numerous ways, the company’s practices embody Ringling’s fledgling, but innovative, right-brained business curriculum. The program enters its second year in August with a great deal of promise that, like the animation program, it is on its way to becoming another Ringling College standout.
You never know when these impromptu performances will pop up.
By Kim Cartlidge
What are we going to do about these kids?
Expecting us to drop everything for a few minutes and just enjoy ourselves—and in the middle of such worrisome economic times, no less.
Florida Studio Theatre summer camp performers at downtown's farmers market.
At Saturday’s downtown Farmers Market in Sarasota, 75 local kids swarmed upon Lemon Avenue at 9 a.m., and after a wink and a nod from their choreographer, Kelli Karen, staged a spirited surprise dance performance to Disco Inferno. Several dancers started it off, and then more joined in until they were lined up between First Street and Main as astonished vendors and visitors watched. Then, as quickly as they had arrived, they dispersed.
Only two of the vendors knew they were coming, and even market manager Ken Shelin says he didn’t find out about it until five minutes before it happened.
The performers are attending summer camp sessions at Florida Studio Theatre, and the dance was inspired by a widely viewed YouTube video of an impromptu dance performance to Do-Re-Mi at the Antwerp train station in Belgium. “The joy of having art in an unexpected place is what caught our fancy,” says Beth Duda, associate director of youth education for FST.
The FST staff scoped out locations around town, and found its first willing accomplice in Liz Nolan, head librarian at Selby Library. Last Tuesday, the troupe walked to the library in small groups in order to blend in with library patrons. At 2 p.m., the music started and to the surprise of library staff and guests, this is what happened.
I watched both local performances because my daughter, who took part in them, tipped me off. Here in an arts town almost devoid of street performances, I witnessed the spectrum of reactions among Sarasota’s crowd, from those who stopped to share the dancers’ infectious delight to others who were baffled or managed to ignore it.
Duda says the theater staff has talked about creating more surprise performances, maybe even with FST’s adult troupes. “I think we will probably do something similar. You never know where we might strike,” she says.
Bertha Palmer. Photo: Sarasota County History Center
Name a socially prominent art collector and entrepreneur who had a huge impact on Sarasota’s development. A historic figure who died owning nearly one-fourth of the land in the county--and who did not own a circus
A year from now, Linda Mansperger hopes Bertha Honore Palmer’s name and her story will be as familiar to residents here as that of circus magnate John Ringling. Mansperger is executive director of Historic Spanish Point, which was part of Palmer’s homestead in the early 1900s
Palmer was the Chicago socialite who married millionaire Potter Palmer at the age of 21. Yet in Sarasota as well as in Chicago, she was no lightweight, but an astute business woman and philanthropist who advocated for women before they could vote.
Next year is the 100-year anniversary of Bertha Palmer’s arrival in Sarasota, and a high-profile steering committee is planning a year-long celebration of performances, lectures, exhibits and galas to honor her contributions. Sarasota County Commissioner Shannon Staub and Sarasota Mayor Dick Clapp are leading the steering committee, and Hans Johnsson is coordinating all the groups and logistics. It’s all still in the creative planning stages, so there’s time for community organizations and individuals to get involved
Palmer offers a great history lesson, especially for mothers, daughters and grandmothers who appreciate women who were ahead of their time. She left a mark that touches more of Sarasota than most of us realize
One of Palmer’s most powerful positions was that of chairwoman of the Columbian Exposition Board of Lady Managers for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where she oversaw creation of a women’s pavilion to showcase women’s arts. She was a reformer and contemporary of Jane Addams who advocated on behalf of women and children in Chicago. As an art collector, she especially admired the impressionists such as Monet, Degas and Renoir, and her collection is now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In Sarasota, she first visited in 1910 as a widow and purchased tracts of land for her winter estate, which grew to include ranches and orange groves; some of her property was donated to become today’s Myakka State Park. From the time she was widowed in 1902 to the time of her death in 1918, she is said to have doubled the value of her husband’s estate to nearly $16 million
Last month, the Chicago History Museum opened an exhibit in honor of Palmer’s 160th birthday. Next year, Sarasota will claim her as a pioneer who embodied the spirit of many who followed her—a wealthy, connected, driven, lover of the arts and the Florida landscape who could have lived anywhere but chose Sarasota.
For some, the journey to graduation day is much harder.
By Kim Cartlidge
Josue Delgado is a soft-spoken “A” student who looks forward to donning a cap and gown as much as every other graduating senior in Sarasota this week. Although he bears long scars across his scalp that are visible when he gets a haircut, most of his classmates don’t know why. He says he’s led as normal a teenaged life as possible, hanging out with friends, listening to music and playing poker and Texas Hold ‘Em. Yet Josue has become an unsung hero among teachers and staff at Sarasota High who know this ordinary student has an extraordinary will.
His family moved to Sarasota from Mexico in 1997, intending to stay for a little while, Josue says. His mother, Maria, works as a hotel housekeeper, and his father, Catarino, cuts metal for a truck trailer manufacturer. They arrived here speaking no English and liked the place, so they decided to stay.
When Josue was 14 and a student at Booker Middle School, he had a terrible headache and a seizure. Doctors discovered a cancerous brain tumor. Since entering high school, Josue has endured eight surgeries—to remove the tumor, reconstruct parts of his face and to insert a shunt to regulate fluids in his brain. There’s not a day of high school that he has not been under treatment, and his weekly chemotherapy will continue for another year. “I doze off sometimes,” Josue says, smiling. He’s given up his favorite sport, soccer, and most other extracurriculars for now. Yet unlike many seniors, he hates to miss a class.
His inspiration to keep going has been his parents, Josue says, and his face lights up when he speaks of them. They are his heroes. He sums up what he’s learned from them and from his four-year battle in few words. “Keep fighting,” he says. Josue plans to attend State College of Florida, Manatee/Sarasota in the fall and hopes to move on to the University of Florida. His dream is to attend medical school to become a pediatrician.
Sarasota’s high schools have a generous share of overachievers, students who’ve won local and national recognition for their accomplishments. Other students we may not hear or read about have risen above adversities and personal challenges to remain focused on their studies. For them, the graduation walk will be a formidable, if more personal, accomplishment. For the past 11 years, the Sarasota County School District has recognized their achievements at its Most Improved Students banquet at Michael’s on East. This year, the district honored 60 students and awarded grants to the seniors to continue their studies beyond high school. The grants were sponsored by local foundations and Northern Trust Bank.
Josue Delgado won the top award for Sarasota High and a $5,000 check. “He’s a tremendously deserving young man,” says Sarasota High School principal Jeff Hradek. “The treatments are very draining. There’s a great physical and emotional toll. He keeps the focus on his future dreams and aspirations. He has a great spirit and a great character.”
When he walks down the aisle to accept his diploma this week, this unassuming graduate who has not been able to take a single day of his high school career for granted will still be fighting for his health and for his dream. Josue Delgado has already won the admiration of those who understand how arduous a journey it has been.
A matchmaking event for young professionals and nonprofits.
By Kim Cartlidge
Mash up a speed dating event in a roomful of well-groomed, energetic young professionals with a nonprofit appeal for volunteer business and marketing expertise, and you can begin to imagine the excitement of Tuesday’s night’s Community Connections meeting at the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. Seven of Sarasota’s first responder agencies made three-minute pitches to a crowd of about 70 professionals, each of whom signed up to commit eight to 10 hours of their time to one project over the next two months.
Sarasota’s nonprofits are working with dwindling paid staffs (due to layoffs) and fewer financial resources just as need is escalating. Jay Lockaby, Leadership Chair of the Sarasota Chamber’s Young Professionals, said to the crowd, “Imagine having a business and your costs double and you can’t raise prices. You’re helping need in a serious way.”
“Right now, we’re deluged with foreclosure cases,” said Elizabeth Boyle, managing attorney of Gulfcoast Legal Services. The agency can’t hire more lawyers, but seven law school interns have agreed to review cases over the summer. Boyle asked for help squeezing workstations into the Gulfcoast office. “We’re looking for treasure hunters, designers and engineers,” she said. “My goal is to change a file room into an office space.”
Linda Harrradine and Nishit Patel of Legal Aid of Manasota seek help with their Web site.
Manasota Legal Aid, which recently merged with the Family Law Connection, is also inundated with requests for help from its panel of about 500 area lawyers who volunteer their time. Nishit Patel, managing attorney, asked for a Web site that would reduce the time its staff of seven (three of whom are part-time) spend on the telephone on intake and referrals. With a recent rise in cases and an annual budget of $500,000, the agency hasn’t the time or funds to redefine its mission or streamline the information-gathering process.
Beth Bush of Red Cross asked for social networking advice and a group to help launch Club Red for young professionals ages 21-40. Dan Dunn, executive director of All Faiths Food Bank, requested volunteers to help feed homeless children over the weekends this summer through its Backpack Kids program. Jessica Hays of Safe Place and Rape Crisis Center (SPARCC) pitched for a committee to plan an awareness event in the fall. Janice Knopp of Independent Transportation Network sought a campaign to attract volunteer drivers for seniors who need rides, and Terrence Meneely of Jobs Etc. asked for keynote speakers for the agency’s new professionals network meetings.
After the pitches, the crowd broke into smaller groups and brainstormed with the agency reps. They committed to complete their projects by July 15.
The out-of-the-box event may be Sarasota’s best new model for engaging volunteer talent and generating fresh ideas. But one of the nonprofit leaders said he’s just as gratified by the higher level of cooperation among agencies. “It’s nice to see all of the agencies teaming up for a better outcome,” says Terrence Meneely. “We’re having to lean more on each other. We’re starting to understand how systemic we are. The collaboration is there.”
For more information about the Community Connections agencies or photos of the event, visit the Nonprofit Resource Center at www.cfsarasota.org.
Rothenbach Park is no dump. In fact, Sarasota’s newest park out east of I-75 is one of the greenest in the county, 450 acres with four miles of nature trails, facilities that incorporate sustainable materials and technology, and FPL’s first solar array on the west end. And I certainly enjoyed our Sunday morning bicycle ride exploring it.
Rothenbach Park’s shaded entrance leads to two playgrounds and a pavilion with restrooms, picnic tables and a concession area.
But Rothenbach Park was built upon what was once a hill of garbage, Sarasota’s old landfill, which was closed in June of 1998 and officially capped in 2000. That’s given some people a bad impression.
Frank Coggins, county solid waste manager in charge of maintaining landfills, says they should worry more about the snakes and gators than coming into contact with any garbage or toxins. There was almost no industrial waste in the landfill to begin with. The site was covered with about three feet of soil, a layer of high-density polyethylene, which doesn’t decompose, another two feet of soil, and grasses and trees to keep it all in place. It’s surrounded underground by a wall of bentonite and sand, and the county closely monitors the water levels, pumping out and treating any leachate generated by the waste.
Okay, there is a bit of an “eewww” factor when you think about that great circle of life and decomposition that’s occurring under the joggers, rollerbladers and bikers as they ascend one of Sarasota’s rare hills. But it’s also remarkable that the county persisted through the permitting process with multiple government agencies over many years, conducted scientific studies and addressed all the design issues “to build something out of nothing,” as Coggins says. “The park is not high maintenance,” he adds. “Maintaining an old landfill is always high maintenance.”’
The Oak Hammock Trail.
Which is why, for example, park goers won’t encounter any wild boars in the park. They root, and they can damage the protective layer of soil and polyethylene, so they’re fenced out, and the fences are checked regularly. The deer, however, are so abundant that Coggins warns against petting them.
Rothenbach looks a little barren from the street, but the trails that wind through shaded oak hammocks and the varieties of trees and wildlife have already been discovered by local photographers.
In fact, if anything, Rothenbach Park is a little too fertile. While the county is figuring out how to protect the FPL solar array from damage by human visitors, I snapped this on Sunday morning.
Oops. Too much sun, maybe?
Rothenbach Park is located at the end of Bee Ridge Road several miles east of I-75. For more information, visit www.scgov.net.
Sarasota’s two new city commissioners celebrate their wins.
By Kim Cartlidge
Nancy Turner, Turner Campaign Manager Kate Lowman, and City Commissioner-Elect Terry Turner celebrate at Broadway Bar on election night.
It was door-to-door grass roots campaigning and a well-orchestrated get-out-the-vote effort that led to yesterday’s wins on the Sarasota City Commission, say our two new commissioners, Suzanne Atwell and Terry Turner. About 16 percent of city voters cast ballots in the run-off. Turner won the most votes with 3,165, Atwell was second with 2,889 and Paul Caragiulo came in a close third with 2,780 votes.
Voters elected the two candidates who have the most experience with Sarasota’s local government, and who are ready to hit the ground running at their first official meeting in less than a week—this coming Monday at 2:30 p.m. They’ll be sworn in this Friday at City Hall at noon
Turner, a former controller, banker and economics professor, credited the 50-plus supporters who canvassed the neighborhoods on his behalf. “They were working seven days a week. It was just amazing,” he said.
Last minute, PAC-funded mailings against Turner, depicting him with his face crossed out, and robocalls to voters saying that Turner would be a divisive force on the commission may have actually worked in the campaign’s favor with some voters, said campaign manager Kate Lowman
“When I talked to voters one-on-one they appreciated my financial background and focus on sustainable economic activity. I think people wanted an independent voice,” Turner said.
Robert Atwell and City Commissioner-Elect Suzanne Atwell enjoying her victory party at Sarasota Vineyard.
Atwell, who has been active in neighborhood and city issues, gave credit to the “extraordinary support by my team,” and her message of civility and consensus-building. “I want to be a model of civility,” she said.
“It doesn’t hurt that I’m a woman,” she adds. “I couldn’t say it at the forums, but it was glaring. It’s extremely important that we have balance.” With Mayor Lou Ann Palmer’s departure, Atwell with take her place as the only woman on the five-person board.
Her campaign volunteers focused on getting out the vote, making thousands of calls to voters in the week leading up to the run-off and working each precinct on election day. She received support from key Democrats, but noted that the people on her team were Democrats, Republicans and Greens
Paul Caragiulo, the youngest of the five brothers who own Caragiulo’s restaurant on Palm Avenue, made a strong showing in his first run for office with a platform that favored public safety funding and creating jobs to keep young families here. Caragiulo, who won both small business support and the endorsement of Sarasota Herald-Tribune, is likely to be considered a very viable candidate for future city races.
What the city commission candidates have to say about the Van Wezel.
By Kim Cartlidge
Sarasota’s city commission candidates don’t care for the status quo at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall. Judging from their comments at a recent League of Women Voters forum, two newly elected commissioners will be ready to take a hard look at the Van Wezel’s budget and operations, especially if the hall posts a larger-than-anticipated deficit.
Sarasota City Commission Candidates Paul Caragiulo, Suzanne Atwell and Terry Turner spoke at a recent League of Women Voters forum. The election is April 14, and early voting begins March 30. Visit www.srqelections.com for time and location information.
The city’s general fund subsidy to the Van Wezel this fiscal year (which runs through Sept. 30) is projected at $740,000. According to executive director Mary Bensel, the hall is on target to meet its projections. Bensel points out that the subsidy was $1.1 million last fiscal year, and that most of this year’s big shows have been profitable. But the candidates, psychotherapist and administrator Suzanne Atwell (www.suzanneatwell.com), restaurant owner Paul Caragiulo (www.voteforpaulc.com) and Terry Turner (www.terryturner2009.com), a retired senior level manager and controller for financial institutions, are less enthusiastic about the current management and business model for the hall.
“The Van Wezel is hemorrhaging,” said Atwell at the forum. “I don’t think we can retain the subsidy. I would favor privatizing it.”
Paul Caragiulo said, “It wouldn’t be any less a cultural treasure if the city acted as landlord. This is a great venue to raise money for someone in the private sector.”
Terry Turner said that performing arts halls throughout the country operate on small deficits, and seemed to lean in favor of keeping under the city umbrella. “I’m more concerned about the deterioration of programming and the number of shows that are offered,” Turner said.
Michael Shelton, former board member of the Van Wezel Foundation, has been around this block before. Shelton proposed a plan to create a nonprofit organization, backed by a $15 million endowment, to operate the hall two years ago, but he could not get the support of two city commissioners to bring it up. Given today’s economy and the current programming, it’s now economically infeasible, he says. “Two years ago I had the ability to raise the money to do this,” Shelton says. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s too late.”
Shelton doesn’t think the Van Wezel will be around by the time the economy rebounds. “How many employees could have kept their jobs if the city hadn’t put $1.1 million into the hall?” he says. “It’s unconscionable that they’re [city commissioners] willing to stick their heads in the sand.”
But Bensel says none of the candidates have even met with her. “It’s not the number of shows you do,” she says. “It’s whether the shows make money or not and whether they sell tickets.” She ticked off numerous performances that have been profitable this year, many of which played to more than 90 percent capacity, such as Rain-The Beatles Experience (100 percent), Moving Out (96 percent), Johnny Mathis and Natalie Cole (100 percent) and Jesus ChristSuperstar, which played to 103 percent capacity this week after the production moved the orchestra backstage and opened up orchestra seats. Family and world programming, however, have been unprofitable.
“We’ve had what I think in this economy has been a fabulous season,” Bensel says, noting that it’s only six months into the fiscal year. She’s working on two big shows for summer that she hopes to announce soon. But given the bare-bones budget climate, the commission—and the taxpayers—may find it difficult to justify such a large ongoing subsidy for programs that many residents can no longer afford.
A few weeks ago, one could hear the first strains of a requiem for Sarasota’s elected mayor initiative. As the opposition broadened and became more vocal, the prospects of its passage seemed dismal. But a surge of business community support and a grassroots electronic campaign could turn it around in the final days before the vote.
The charter amendment proposal, which goes before voters on March 10, would expand the city commission to seven, creating two more at-large seats. It would provide for a mayor elected by popular vote every four years, rather than by the five commissioners to a one-year, rotating position.
Here’s the City Clerk’s easy-to-follow fact sheet with all the details:
The Sarasota City Commission passed a 4-1 resolution against it. Sixteen former mayors went on record as opposing it. Leaders of the Newtown community, who fought hard in the mid-1980s for minority representation on the commission through the creation of three single-member districts, have threatened to battle it in the courts.
Formerly outspoken proponents of an elected mayor, who took a beating seven years ago when they campaigned for a strong mayor with expanded powers, sat this one out, perhaps to quell an encore of personal accusations that the proposed policy change is a thinly disguised attempt of narrow developer/business interests to take over the city. It didn’t work, and “no boss mayor” signs sprouted up in yards anyway.
It seemed that the pessimism and cynicism had reached a crescendo when Mayor Lou Ann Palmer dominated a Downtown Partnership meeting luncheon as she spoke in opposition to the initiative—even as she stated that she does support an elected mayor. This proposal has “too much baggage,” she said. Partnership members stood up to ask Palmer, if this proposal—a third attempt—should fail, what form of elected mayor would she support? She responded “Let’s get this one out of the way and then let’s sit down and talk.”
Phil Chmieleski
But among Elected Mayor Now proponents, says Downtown Partnership chair and supporter Phil Chmieleski, “Everybody I’m talking to is feeling a wave of momentum and confidence. The fund raising is going well.” The group was heartened by the results of a poll conducted several weeks ago by the Fallon Group. The poll showed that 81 percent of voters support an elected mayor and 57 percent would vote for a charter amendment change.
Business associations that had taken a neutral stance are now going public with their support. COBA, the Council of Business Associations, released its position in favor of the initiative on Monday afternoon. COBA is comprised of The Argus Foundation, the Downtown Partnership, the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, the Gulf Coast Builders Exchange, Gulf Coast Mortgage Bankers, the North Port Contractors Association, the Sarasota Association of Realtors, Sarasota Building Industry Association, the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce and the Venice Area Board of Realtors.
The COBA position states, “This change will provide a mayor who can galvanize public consensus, develop and be held accountable for a vision, provide consistent leadership and be a highly visible representative for Sarasota—at home, in the state capitol and in Washington, D.C.” Only three cities in Florida do not elect their mayors by popular vote.
The Argus Foundation has weighed in with its own position, stating, “At-large candidates, despite being elected by all citizens, offer no greater ability to carry out an agenda that reflects the vision of all Sarasotans, as they have no more influence at the commission table than do district elected leaders. Currently there are five agendas at the table, with a plethora of priorities, and no well articulated community direction … A popularly elected mayor would also be a legitimate voice of the community. In the past Sarasota has lost untold opportunities of influence and tax dollars by not having an elected mayor who could be an active participant in the U.S. Conference of Mayors.”
The Elected Mayor Now leadership is communicating with voters via Facebook, electronic postcard and e-mail. This viral video, which was created by downtown realtor Matt Orr, was sent out with Friday’s “This Week in Sarasota” e-newsletter: http://www.thisweekinsarasota.com/videos/extra.php. Orr interviews people on the street who are (sadly) unaware of Sarasota’s mayor-manager form of government and how it works.
Many residents, says Chmieleski, still don’t know that Sarasota voters don’t elect their mayor. “We want to reach those people. We want them to feel concern that the commission elects the mayor rather than the people. It comes down to we live in a democracy and we should claim that right.”
Early voting for two at-large City Commission seats and the elected mayor charter amendment began Feb. 23, but only 1,088 people had voted as of the morning of March 3. That doesn't bode well for turnout, says City Clerk Billy Robinson, who is hoping for 20 percent. Even at 20 percent, the commission races and elected mayor initiative would be decided by 6,600 of Sarasota's 33,000 registered voters. If no commission candidate receives a majority of the votes on March 10, the top three will face off in a runoff April 14.
At those numbers, each city vote carries a good deal of weight. So there's really no reason, and no excuse, not to vote. You can do so at the Supervisor of Elections office at 2001 Adams Lane Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Early voting ends March 8. Visit www.srqelections.com or call 861-8600 for more information.
How the City Commission candidates would have voted.
By Kim Cartlidge
Have you bumped into a Sarasota City Commission candidate recently? With elections just two weeks away, the nine candidates battling for two at-large seats are out in full force, campaigning at public forums, neighborhood meetings and door-to-door. Local commissioners are by nature closest to their constituencies and have the least to spend to create television ads or slick media campaigns, so they’re highly accessible right now. Still, with nine on the stump and most of them seeking public office for the first time, it can be difficult to assess how they would vote at the dais with the pressure on.
I contacted all nine candidates to ask how they would have voted last week on the Palm Avenue lot development, in which the city commission decided to forgo any public/private partnership and an emerging conference center proposal and build an $11 million public parking garage while construction costs are down. The commission, sitting as the Community Redevelopment Advisory Board, was offered four options from staff for the long-vacant lot behind Sarasota News and Books on Palm, including taking a wait-and-see approach for six months or selling the land outright. Given competing priorities of the city’s diminished revenues and the need for economic stimuli to boost downtown businesses, public interest in the vote was high.
Here’s what the candidates had to say:
Ken Shelin (www.keepken.com), the incumbent, cast the lone vote in favor of pursuing a conference center for the site. “We have three under-utilized parking garages within a block and a half of Palm Avenue, and we’re now building a fourth one. It’s going to be an underutilized garage and it’s also going to be unsafe, because there will be vacant land next to it.”
Suzanne Atwell (www.suzanneatwell.com): “I think it was a missed opportunity. This would have been an economic stimulus for the area. I know it was a practical decision, but I think we settled. You have to look at the big picture and distinguish what’s going to be a return on investment.”
Rick Farmer (www.farmerforsarasota.com): “I think I would have voted to wait for six months. That was one of the options. We have to be prudent with our money. I’m concerned about the budget crisis we’re going through. I travel to conventions for the computer business and conventions are down right now. The city could create an environment that would attract a conference project.”
Robin Harrington (www.robinharrington2009.com): “I would have voted ‘no’ on the conference center. I would have voted with the commission. It was a $22 million garage and now it’s an $11 million parking garage. The developer offered a guarantee of no deficit but he never offered a proposal of return. I was concerned about traffic, and there was no real traffic study to go with it.”
Terry Turner (www.terryturner2009.com) had not read the proposal, but responded: “I favor a conference center somewhere downtown. I’m not convinced that was the best location. My preferred location would be Fruitville and Central. I probably would have voted with the commission. I do think we need a conference center, but I’m generally opposed to public-private partnerships because the public gets the disadvantage.”
Jay Berman (www.bermancampaign.com) wrote via e-mail, “I plan on being a commissioner who looks forward to building economic opportunities, protecting our unique environment and building upon our communities. I don't think I will be condemning past commissions for their past decisions.”
Paul Caragiulo responded by e-mail (www.voteforpaulc.com): “I would have repaved the lot and held out for a better multi-use project that would provide a better return for taxpayers.”
Pete Theisen (www.elect-pete-theisen.com): “I preferred the wait and look at other options choice—and I have a choice in mind other than those presented. I would like to build an elevated rail system for Sarasota, which would open up quite a few jobs and might reduce the need for parking.”
Ray McKinon didn’t respond or return calls.
City elections are March 10, and if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the three top vote-getters will face a run-off on April 14.
On Monday night, eight candidates for Sarasota City Commission, who were lined up at two long tables at the Sarasota Garden Club, were asked to name the three most salient reasons why voters should choose them. They had been passing a microphone for more than an hour, answering complex, loaded questions in a minute or less. Pete Theisen stood up wearing his thick, black-rimmed glasses and suspenders and enthusiastically proclaimed, “I’m different! Try me.”
He did it for comedic effect, and he got a good laugh. Theisen had spent most of his allotted time good-naturedly advocating a mass rail system for downtown Sarasota, regardless of what question he was asked. Most of the candidates, only two of whom have ever run for office, had a tougher time distinguishing themselves as they answered questions about traffic concurrency, the city’s mooring field deal and the Palm Avenue convention center proposal.
Nine candidates will jockey for two of the five Sarasota City Commission seats over the next several weeks. Most are still developing their sea legs as campaigners. Yet the candidates who win will preside during a building bust. They’ll make major decisions about Ed Smith Stadium, the Palm Avenue project, U.S. 41 connectivity to downtown, the North Trail corridor, financing Newtown redevelopment, and revisiting downtown’s arrested developments (such as Sarasota Bayside), should they be altered, to ensure they revitalize the core and create new jobs.
It’s serious business. Commission decisions will impact the livelihoods of residents, workers and businesses during a time when Sarasota’s economic identity is being redefined. Perhaps that’s why one observer said she would have preferred to see a little more gravitas, more homework being done on the part of newer candidates, so they can demonstrate how they engage in a decision-making process based on facts.
The candidates have just left the starting gate, so their philosophies should become clearer in the next few weeks, and we’ll work to color in their portraits on this blog. We did learn last night that all eight present are against increasing density in the downtown core. “It didn’t work,” said incumbent Ken Shelin. All the candidates present except Shelin oppose the elected mayor proposal that will also be on the March 10 ballot. None directly advocated slower growth, but a few, such as Robin Harrington and Rick Farmer, stated their philosophical opposition to “developer giveaways.”
As of last week, the top fund raiser was Terry Turner (www.terryturner2009.com), who has raised $16,905 and picked up the endorsements of county commissioners Joe Barbetta and Jon Thaxton as well as business and neighborhood leaders. Turner is a former financial controller of Eastman Kodak, former First Union Bank VP and former member of the Sarasota County Planning Commission. Suzanne Atwell (www.suzanneatwell.com), a mental health counselor and development director of the American Association of Community Colleges, who also ran four years ago, had raised $12,100. Incumbent Ken Shelin (www.keepken.com), who has created a detailed economic recovery platform for the city, had raised $11,447.
The other candidates had raised $2,500 or less. Jay Berman (www.bermancampaign.com) is a native of Sarasota with a background in wealth management. Paul Caragiulo (www.voteforpaulc.com) is the youngest of five Caragiulo brothers known for the eponymous restaurant on Palm Avenue. Rick Farmer (www.farmerforsarasota.com) is a computer network engineer and computer instructor. Robin Harrington (www.robinharrington2009.com) is a former Longboat Key Club tennis pro and current real estate broker. Pete Theisen (www.elect-pete-theisen.com) is a retired acupuncturist and rail system advocate. Ray McKinon has been a no-show to two forums so far.
Elections will be held March 10, and the runoff for the top three candidates, should none get more than 50 percent of the vote, would be held on April 14.
On a less serious note, Mayor Lou Ann Palmer, the commissioner who is leaving an open at-large seat, will be the subject of a Roast and Toast on Monday, Feb. 16, at 5:30 p.m. under the PAL Sailor Circus tent. Tickets are $100 and proceeds benefit the circus and rotary. Visit http://www.rotarysarasotakeys.org/ for information.
A Florida college student aspires to become a stand-up comic—but her Muslim family objects. A small-town mayor in New York commits an act of civil disobedience when he begins marrying same-sex couples outside the village hall. A family in Baghdad endures the impacts of war on their everyday lives. In Guatemala, a filmmaker documents the rise of a civil rights movement to protect women from violence.
This weekend’s 10 anniversary Though Women’s Eyes film festival features narrative presented through the lens of women filmmakers. Some are light and quirky, such as a documentary about a small-town beauty pageant, and others thought-provoking, such as the stories of pioneering female judges in South Africa.
The two-day festival kicks off Friday morning at Hollywood 20 to benefit the local chapter of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. The proceeds will benefit UNIFEM’s Safe Cities program and campaign to end violence against women in Latin America.
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
Artistic director and Sarasota-based filmmaker Diane Mason selected the 16 films from 200 submittals. The feature film about the life of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott (http://alcottfilm.com/) will make its Southeastern U.S. premiere here on Friday night.
“I loved it because it’s beautifully filmed and scripted,” says Mason. “It’s a documentary, but they used actors to play the parts.” The Emmy-award winning director, Nancy Porter, and producer Harriet Reisen will discuss the film after its viewing.
The story of the mayor of New Paltz, N.Y.,who faced state charges for marrying same sex couples “is told as a fairy tale, so it’s not quite so in your face, but it’s a fun film to watch,” Mason says.
Tough Crowd
Saturday’s shorts program, which is almost sold out, includes Tough Crowd, a funny film about a Muslim college student who wants to be a comedian. The short was produced by FSU Film School graduate student Iman Zawahry. Artistic director Mason’s Election Day 2008 report from her National Geographic expedition in Antarctica, titled Penguins for Change, is also lighthearted, while making the point that “what’s happening in the U.S. does impact this completely desolate part of the world,” she says.
Courting Justice
Courting Justice presents a candid look into the lives of South African women who serve on the bench during this transformative period from apartheid to democracy. The film’s creator and producer, Dr. Ruth Cowan, will attend and answer questions after the showing. Cowan is also a notable developing world scholar and founder of Pro Mujer, a micro-finance program to lend funds to poor women in South America.
The festival presents wide-ranging viewpoints with U.S. and international perspectives, and “a glimpse into women’s lives around the world,” says Mason. “I look for a well-told story and that feeling that you’re there.”
The Wellness Community’s new digs in Lakewood Ranch take shape.
By Kim Cartlidge
Sarasota-Bradenton has seen the rise of some stunning new buildings with noteworthy architecture in the past couple of years. But I can’t think of an architecturally significant building with more heart than the Wellness Community now rising amid the palmettos in Lakewood Ranch
The heart is the passion and dedication of the designers, architects, students, survivors, caregivers, advocates and donors—so many of whose lives have been impacted by cancer--who raised the bar and conceived of the ultimate healing center.
Johnette Isham of Isham and Associates at the new Wellness Community site in Lakewood Ranch. Construction is expected to be complete by early 2010.
Johnette Isham is one of them. She was so taken with the project and its potential to make a difference, not only in the lives of those who walk through its doors, but in the field of psycho-social services for cancer patients, that she left her long-term position as vice president of academic affairs at Ringling College to oversee the process
“There are only a few times in your life when you can truly make a big difference,” says Isham. “I made the decision to bungee jump from a secure place.”
In 2006, the Wellness Center had asked Ringling College interior design students to help update and redecorate its Clark Road facility. Isham, design professor Jill Eleazer and six Ringling students delved into learning how design in a healthcare setting can impact the well-being of patients. The students enthusiastically conducted focus groups with Wellness Center participants while Isham convened community partners in an asset-based visioning process.
Participants expressed their desire to feel connection to nature, and to have spaces for reflection, meditation and artistic expression as well as soothing places to engage in Wellness’ support groups. The facility was designed from the inside-out, incorporating the desires and frustrations of people living with cancer as well as cutting-edge evidence-based design research. The redecoration became an $8 million campaign to build a center that has already been recognized as an international model and a prototype for Wellness Centers worldwide.
A rendering of the new Wellness Community campus.
With $6 million raised, the organization broke ground on the new center late last year. The facility will have an expanded yoga studio, a tai chi lawn, meditative gardens, a teaching kitchen, and an expressive art studio. The LEED-designed buildings will be surrounded by gardens, fountains and a nature trail, and will incorporate natural construction materials such as stone, cork and bamboo. When it opens in 2010, the Wellness Community will be able to expand its free services to thousands more people n Florida’s West Coast.
The community partners are numerous, from arts organizations that have committed to perform at the center to businesses that initially donated their services and are now implementing the final project, including Carlson Studio Architecture, Wilson Miller Engineering, Stewart Engineering, Willis A. Smith Construction, DWY Landscape Architects and TRO Jung|Brannen.
This set of buildings honors not only the lives lost and courageous battles that have been fought to defeat cancer, but it honors the heart of our community as well. To learn more, visit www.helpusbuildhope.com.
Sarasota’s State Senator Nancy Detert is going into the budget crisis with some bold ideas.
By Kim Cartlidge
I’m thankful this holiday season not to be in the shoes of a Florida legislator. While we’re enjoying our holiday break, I imagine many will mull over their eggnog how they’re going to cut $2.3 billion from the state budget when they return for a special session in January.
State Sen. Nancy Detert
As of Friday, our freshman senator Nancy Detert had heard that the session would be pushed back to the week of January 12, but the grim revenue and budget updates should arrive just after New Year’s. “I’m thinking out of the box,” she says.
We have read that the Sarasota County school district plans reduce next year’s budget by $40 million. But there is speculation that the district may be called to the table sooner to cut $6 to $10 million from operations this year. That’s in addition to the $6 million that was cut in November.
As chair of the senate’s education committee, one of the ideas Detert floated in Tallahassee meetings last week was to declare a financial emergency to allow school districts 100 percent spending flexibility. That would enable school districts to draw from their capital funds to meet operating expenses.
“That would be an excellent thing for the district,” says the Sarasota Schools Deputy CFO Al Weidner.
But Detert is ready to get even more radical. She’s also proposing soaking up excess housing inventories by tapping into the Florida Affordable Housing Trust Fund to help credit-worthy families purchase foreclosed homes. The details are evolving, but the plan will be one of her top priorities in 2009, she says
“I do not feel we can cut our way out of this crisis. We’ll have to put money into an economic stimulus package,” she says.
The legislature is also looking into raising revenues by expanding gambling, reviewing sales tax exemptions and our tax-free Internet purchases, and raising the cigarette tax. But Detert is not banking on much growth from the revenue side.
Instead, she’s taking a hard look at trust funds, duplication of services and expensive voter mandates. The Florida Panther license plate trust fund, for example, stands at $2 million.
Likewise, voters may be asked to revisit constitutional mandates, such as the class size amendment, which they had approved by referendum. Districts may need more flexibility implementing it during the fiscal crisis, says Detert
Detert’s no political newcomer, but she sounds like an iconoclast, ready to takeon the sacred cows and spending rules we created when the dollars were flowing. She sounds like a legislator we need for these times
“For people to ask for the status quo – those days are over. We need a whole new way of thinking,” Detert says. “It’s going to call for political courage and innovation. I’m hoping necessity is the mother of invention.”
Can an area mass transit system eventually cut the high costs of getting around?
By Kim Cartlidge
In these cost-cutting, budget-crunching times, most of us are scouting for ways to save money on household expenses. But there’s one line item that affords little flexibility, and so we grit our teeth and pay out—as much as 30 percent of household income for some families.
The line item is transportation, and working households on Florida’s Central West Coast fork over a higher percentage of annual income for mobility than most metropolitan area residents in the nation.
When gas prices rose, we carpooled and cut back on auto trips. But walking, biking, or hopping a bus to work just weren’t an option for most of us. In Sarasota-Manatee, the suburban sprawl and emphasis on the automobile has left us with an alternative transportation network that’s inefficient and inconvenient for daily commuters who don’t live near the workplace.
And as North Port or Bradenton commuters already know, working families often find that the affordable housing is a farther drive from the office. Yet for every dollar a working family saves on housing, it spends 77 cents more on transportation, according to the Center for Housing Policy.
Bob Clifford
Last week, I interviewed Bob Clifford, executive director of The Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority. TBARTA is responsible for planning and constructing a mass transportation system that will connect seven Tampa Bay counties. It sounds great, but one of my first questions was, what’s the cost?
He was as straightforward as he could be about a system that’s in the planning stages. An efficient rapid bus and light rail system would cost in the billions, not the millions, he said. It would be built out at different rates and over multiple jurisdictions over 40 years. Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, who is already taking the lead for her city, is already campaigning to place a penny sales tax for light rail on the ballot in Tampa by 2010.
Iorio, Clifford and business people on board with TBARTA emphasize that we’re already paying a high price for not having efficient mass transit. Tampa Bay is one of the few large metropolitan areas in the country to lack such a system. In addition to the high household cost, it’s about economic development, quality of life, and who we want to be, Clifford says.
A 40-year, multi-modal, conceptual transportation plan is a lot to wrap your arms around. So the TBARTA board visited three cities with successful systems that, like Tampa Bay, are more spread out and suburban in nature—Dallas, Charlotte and Denver.
What the board found was that the areas surrounding light rail systems were thriving in comparison to areas without mass transit. Jobs and businesses were created, and people wanted to live closer to transportation hubs. It became clear that without such a system, Central West Florida will rapidly fall behind.
It will require a regional vision and leveraged funding from local, state and federal governments and the private sector, Clifford says. But for now, what’s required is a plan, a structure and partnerships to be in place for when the governments can begin spending again.
In January, TBARTA will release a master plan that foresees a future Tampa Bay with a mass transit system that connects people, businesses and cities along Florida’s West Coast. It may seem far-off and futuristic, but it seems that we won’t be competitive without it.
See more facts about the costs and benefits of regional public transportation at www.tbarta.com
The Sarasota Downtown Partnership's new exec director tunes in.
By Kim Cartlidge
Debra Torres joined the Sarasota Downtown Partnership as its new executive director two weeks ago, and her first days were a whirlwind of behind the-scenes-meetings with downtown players. “The important thing to do when you start any new job is listen, listen, listen. It’s about hearing from everybody,” Torres says.
Debra Torres
She’ll be visible for what is expected to be an active and critical year for the partnership. “We’ll be laser-focused on economic development and creating jobs,” says incoming 2009 chair Phil Chmieleski, who’s also executive vice president of Prudential Palms Realty. Nobody wants to see boarded-up storefronts, he says, and the partnership will work with elected officials and other groups to ensure that downtown survives and thrives in the downturn. The sense of urgency has brought about renewed unanimity: The 5-0 Sarasota City Commission vote last week to approve the Proscenium project was unprecedented in recent times, Chmieleski says.
But in a downtown where stakeholders are sometimes more vehemently focused on their disagreements than their points of agreement, Torres wants to bring more voices and more perspectives to the table. That includes neighborhood groups, who are “vital,” she says, and with whom she’s at quite at ease in her communication. As former public housing director for HUD in the states of Oklahoma and Illinois, and as a community development consultant, she’s become a skilled facilitator.
Chmieleski says Torres was a very high-caliber candidate on paper, but she also stood out because of “her charisma, her leadership, her people skills.”
For the past five years, Torres has traveled the country as a consultant, most recently working to revitalize the Section 8 Rental Voucher program for Miami-Dade County. “My business was successful, but what was lacking was I rarely did work in my own community. I want to get to know my community and grow some roots,” she says. Torres moved to Sarasota about 10 months ago, when her husband, Wilberto Torres, accepted the position as facilities manager for the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport.
Torres is helping to develop the strategic plan for 2009, which includes strengthening the partnership’s voice and presence as a first stop for people seeking information about downtown issues and active involvement in decisions affecting the city’s core. Projects like the city’s Palm Avenue mixed-use/parking project could have tremendous positive impact on downtown as a whole. “More than anywhere I’ve been, downtown Sarasota still has opportunities for things to happen,” Torres says. “Not all cities have that.”
Tuesday night was the culmination of the election of a lifetime, and not just because it was a realignment. Sarasotans were involved and engaged as never before, sporting T-shirts and bumper stickers, waving signs and knocking on doors, turning out en masse to see both presidential candidates here and voting early in record numbers.
And how they partied on election night, especially at the Democratic Party celebration at Marina Jack. There were television screens in every room and on the decks as volunteers and supporters packed in to watch returns. When ABC-7 returns showed Obama leading in Sarasota, City Commissioner Fredd Atkins was jubilant, shouting “Yes! Yes! Yes!” while Dr. Washington Hill, who had spent the day knocking on doors in Newtown, was reflective.
Fredd Atkins and Dr. Washington Hill
“It’s a great day, a day that will make America better,” Hill said. “I’ve been impressed by the diversity of crowds for Obama.”
As Obama made history, so did Carolyn Mason, who was elected to the Sarasota County Commission despite raising less money and winning fewer endorsements than frontrunner Jono Miller. Mason’s life story began in segregated Sarasota, and now she has become the first African-American to be elected to the county commission. Here, Mason makes a call from the Supervisor’s office after finding out she is in the lead.
Carolyn Mason
The Supervisor’s office was teeming with precinct clerks, poll watchers and observers, the canvassing board and even Boy Scout troops 103 and 895 as they helped unload polling material from cars that pulled up to front doors. Despite warnings that our election system was too untested to enable us to have a smooth election, we did it, as did most of Florida, with only minor problems reported. Kathy Dent was beaming with excitement. “It’s been the most incredible election of my lifetime,” she said.
Kathy Dent and family
The Hyatt Regency Sarasota ballroom was packed with Vern Buchanan supporters when he took the podium to make his victory speech. “What a difference two years makes,” an elated Buchanan said. “Last year we won by 369 votes. I don’t know what the total count is, but I think it’s going to be higher than 369 votes.” He laid out an aggressive platform for his next two years, but he got the loudest cheer when he stated that it was time to make English the official language of the U.S., which appeared to be a real hot button issue with this crowd.
Vern Buchanan
Back at the Democrats’ party, the local results were not what the party leadership had hoped for, as the Democrats made few gains. But newly re-elected Tax Collector Barbara Ford-Coates, who was for decades the only Democrat to hold local office in Sarasota, reminded the crowd that in her early days, they couldn’t even get a picnic of Democrats together here. “We’re just getting started,” she said. “If they don’t win tonight, we’ll be back.”
Rita Ferrandino and Barbara Ford-Coates
Oh, what a night, made possible by all the campaign volunteers and the voters, but mostly by the candidates. Win or lose, they put their hearts and minds out there before us, and gave Sarasota the election of a lifetime.
A Sarasota-area political pundit says our state is too close to call.
By Kim Cartlidge
Dr. Susan MacManus lives and breathes electoral polls and data, but one week before official voting day, she won’t call the presidential election for Florida. The candidates are in a dead heat, she says. MacManus has analyzed recent daily polls that show Barack Obama ahead of John McCain in the state, and she’s found their margin of error renders the slight leads statistically insignificant.
“We’re in a giant poker game in Florida,” MacManus said at a League of Women Voters luncheon on Monday. “Those younger independents are very swayed by who comes to town. The last candidate here may well be the one who gets the votes.
In 2004, both George Bush and John Kerry held Tampa rallies two days before the election. Here in Sarasota, both presidential candidates will have visited within two weeks before the election, and their running mates and surrogates have crisscrossed the state almost daily.
“Will we see McCain and Obama in Florida one more time? You bet,” she predicted, as news was breaking of an Obama visit to Sarasota this Thursday.
Voters distrust the national media, but tend to trust the coverage of their local television anchors, MacManus said. The national campaigns understand this, and will call to schedule local interviews, offering reporters five minutes of access to presidential candidates for exclusives on the evening news.
One woman at the luncheon asked how Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would impact the Florida vote. “Palin is a plus for McCain in Florida because he needs suburban and rural women just as Obama needs the young vote,” MacManus said. Another asked about Joe the Plumber. “Joe the Plumber works better in Florida than in other places,” MacManus responded. “Florida is an anti-tax state. We’ve never defeated a tax relief amendment. We have a high number of small businesses.”
As the election strategy shifts to voter turnout, Obama will have the greater challenge getting first-time voters who support him to the polls, she noted. However, due to the Obama campaign’s registration efforts, there are now more registered voters under the age of 35 than voters older than 65 in the state. Women comprise 54 percent of registered voters in Florida, but they are not a cohesive voting group, she said.
Some women feel the campaign has set them back. “What is disgusting about this election is the vulgar treatment women candidates have received. I am very offended as a woman,” MacManus said. Women over 50 are especially upset, MacManus said, because for some, it has been like reliving the era when they were first breaking into the professions. “It reminds them of that feeling and that they haven’t made a lick of progress,” she said.
Referring to the recent flap over Palin’s wardrobe expense as an example, MacManus said, “If you’re going to talk about clothing expense for one candidate, have spreadsheets for all the candidates.”
Voting advocacy groups that are sounding alarm bells, warning that voting systems are unreliable and making public their plans to station lawyers at the polling places may well have the unintended effect of discouraging turnout, MacManus said. “That is not helpful getting first time voters to the polling place. An expanded electorate is good for democracy,” she said. “Scaring people is not.”
If you were out this weekend at all, you saw them donning campaign t-shirts and buttons, energetically waving signs and marching down Main Street Saturday morning. McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden supporters tried to out-chant each other at the downtown farmers market, and lively political debates could be overhead at the outdoor café tables. The town is pumped up with election fever, which is only heightened by the fact that we’re located just across the Skyway Bridge from a swing region, the I-4 corridor, of a major swing state. John McCain himself visited our humble Robarts Arena Thursday. The campaign handed out 6,000 tickets to fill the venue, but another 6,000 supporters downloaded tickets online. The line began forming at 11 for McCain’s 6 p.m. appearance, and stretched several blocks to Tuttle Avenue.
The folks that didn’t get a seat inside staged an impromptu rally of their own outside. They were happy just to be with like-minded people, several said. “It’s almost surprising how popular John McCain is,” says GOP Chair Eric Robinson. “You think, ‘I’m not alone’. When you read the papers, you think everyone supports Obama.”
A few had accessorized with plungers, in a nod to Joe the Plumber, but it was the handmade signs that drew the most attention outside.
This fellow, Amoss Jerome, said people look at him and assume he is an Obama supporter. So he made his own T-shirt.
At the campaign gear booths, this t-shirt was one of the top sellers of the day.
I had to photograph this sweet woman, who stood along Fruitville with other counter-demonstrators, and who said with a smile she’d been flipped off or given the thumbs down by drivers only a few times.
Yes, Sarasota is raging with its own brand of election fever, and thank goodness we’re in the home stretch.
Taking to the streets over a busy political weekend.
By Kim Cartlidge
The perfect fall weather this weekend drew residents and visitors alike downtown to peruse the arts and crafts fair on Main Street, mingle at the farmer’s market, and, given the season, express their political views. The Women for Obama-Biden Bridge walk drew a much larger crowd than expected—5,000 according to organizers’ counts—who crossed the Ringling Bridge on foot, waving signs and interacting with auto travelers along the way.
Here are aerial photos of the march, taken from a helicopter by photographer Detlev von Kessel.
The Women for Obama-Biden Ringling Bridge walk spanned the bridge Sunday.
And at Five Points Park on Saturday, teens not old enough to vote presented a modern dance to encourage citizens to vote on their behalf during this critical election. It was a collaborative effort between the Booker High School Visual and Performing Arts program and the young Moving Ethos Dance Company, which has performed in cities around Florida and at the Asolo. “This election is a big one. Just because they can’t go to the polls doesn’t mean they aren’t affected by it,” says Moving Ethos co-founder Courtney Smith.
Booker VPA Dancers encourage spectators at Five Points Park to vote.
The modern performance incorporates gestures presidential candidates use during the debates, attack politics and a vision of participation and unity. The group will perform this Saturday, Oct. 25, at Westfield Southgate and on Saturday, Nov. 1, at St. Armands Circle. E-mail movingethos@hotmail.com for more information.
Janet Guttridge, a retired journalist, and Cynthia Craig, a massage therapist, are political neophytes, Guttridge says. But two weeks ago, their conversation about the presidential campaign hatched an idea that has generated more support than either expected. It’s also introduced Guttridge to the founder of the international Obama Bridge Project and connected her to Obama-Biden supporters across the country.
Janet Guttridge and Cynthia Craig
The two are organizing the Sarasota Women for Obama-Biden rally across the Ringling Bridge on Oct. 19. The event wasn’t even in the works until about a week ago, and they’ve just received their permits and hammered out the logistics. Already, they have heard from 200 women, and a few men, who have committed to show up. One woman, who Craig met in line at a post office, handed out 300 flyers and came back for more. “Wherever we turn, we run into somebody who wants to help,” Guttridge says. “It’s as though there was this untapped feeling that people didn’t have a way to express.”
It’s a 2.5 mile walk and Sarasota’s first political event to span the Ringling Bridge. One woman who lives in a condo near the bridge has invited friends to a brunch before they walk downstairs to wave signs. The Vets for Obama and a group of Hillary Women for Obama also plan to participate.
The bridge metaphor of unity has resonated with Obama supporters abroad, who have taken their photos on bridges to send to the Obama Bridge Project. As Guttridge was researching the idea, she learned of the project and contacted its founder, Meredith Wheeler, an expatriate living in France. Wheeler conceived of the project to encourage the 6 million Americans living abroad to register and vote, Guttridge says. The project had spanned five continents and 36 countries when this “Yes We Span” video was produced:
Guttridge has since learned of bridge rallies in Hawaii and Sebastian, Fla., and she is in contact with organizers planning a rally in Columbus, Ohio.
Guttridge and Craig hope not only to show support for the Obama-Biden ticket, but to highlight differences between the two candidates’ platforms. “We are concerned about the women’s issues. I think that’s why so many women want to take part in this. There’s a huge difference between the parties,” Guttridge says.
It's crunch time to register voters for the November elections.
By Kim Cartlidge
Sarasota Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent is preparing for a little Midnight Madness.
It lasts into the wee hours, and she and her gang have always done it a few weeks before election time.
I can sense the wheels turning in the minds of conspiracy theorists, but it has nothing to do with voting machine voodoo.
I’m glad she has the time, given that a reported 500 to 1,000 registrations are flooding her office each day. One would think we’re going to register tens of thousands of new voters before the election.
But we’re not. Although the Obama campaign has turned in the most, an estimated 5,000 according to staff estimates, we’ve added only 2,525 new voters so far this month and 1,743 in August.
Most of the registrations are information changes. But everyone who sends in a change gets a new card. When I was in Dent’s office today, I saw the stack of 1,000 new voter cards that were printed this morning from yesterday’s work.
And even though the Obama campaign is turning in the most registrations, Democrats are slightly outnumbered by a third group—those that don’t register under either major party.
In the months of August and September, Sarasota gained 1,590 newly registered Democrats, 1,087 Republicans, and 1,591 in the third category.
And who knows which way that group, who haven’t been regular voters to begin with, will cast their ballots? Or if they will have trouble voting on the optical scan machines? In 2004, Sarasota County had the highest turnout in the state, at nearly 82 percent, and Dent predicts an 85 percent turnout on Nov. 4.
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Dent has hired four temp workers to process the new registrations and the walk-in changes and updates. (“The only place in town that’s hiring,” quipped one registrant.) Although the service groups and campaigns have been promoting registration since before the primaries, traffic has only picked up over the last month.
Procrastination? “We all do it,” says voter service coordinator Traci Wolfe. That’s why Dent is keeping all three offices open until midnight on Oct. 6, the very final day to register in order to vote this November. If you’ve any friends or acquaintances who haven’t registered to vote, now is the time to pull them out from under their rocks and help them get registered. You can make a party of it, because Dent’s office will be open for the Midnight Madness.
Visit www.srqelections.com for registration information. The Sarasota office at 2001Adams Lane can be reached at 861-8600, the North Port office at 13640 Tamiami Trail at 423-9540 and the Venice office at 4000 Tamiami Trail S. at 861-3760.
A quiet county commission race gets a little more vocal.
By Kim Cartlidge
Maybe Carolyn Mason, an African-American working grandmother and candidate for local office, should compare herself to a pit bull. Perhaps environmentalist Jono Miller should suddenly advocate drilling for oil in the Gulf.
Compared to recent election headlines, Sarasota’s race for an open county commission seat is attracting little more than a ho-hum. It may remain quiet, without personal attacks or headline-grabbing scandals, because all three candidates are refreshingly focused on the issues, their community experience and their philosophies.
Jono Miller
Jono Miller, head of environmental studies at New College of Florida (currently on leave), is known as Sarasota’s go-to advocate for environmental policy. He was a leading proponent of the environmentally sensitive lands acquisition program, by which Sarasotans voted to tax themselves to purchase properties for conservation. But he’s also tackled affordable housing and voting systems as an appointee to numerous boards over the past 30 years. He’s a smart-growth advocate and a Democrat, yet Miller has raised the most money in this election, much of it from the business and legal communities. His Web site is www.jono08.com, and his blog is at www.Jono08.blogspot.com.
Carolyn Mason
Carolyn Mason is a former Sarasota mayor and commissioner, a lifelong resident who was born into segregated Sarasota in Overtown (now the Rosemary district). She’s a Democrat-turned GOP who has ties to the governor’s office through the Newtown Front Porch Revitalization committee. She has promoted herself as a consensus builder, although consensus has often eluded Newtown in its redevelopment efforts. “It’s a work in progress,” Mason says. An issue that haunts Mason, she says, is the division between North and South County, and she would work to bring those governments together. Mason is currently employed by Habitat for Humanity, and her Web site is: www.carolynjmason.org
John Mullarkey
John Mullarkey is the transplant running as an independent, a mortgage broker and contractor who devours newspapers and cites how other communities have solved some of the same problems Sarasota faces. He served in the Navy and managed an auto business in New York City before moving to Sarasota in 2002. By virtue of the depth of community experience of both of his opponents, he is the long shot. Mullarkey rails against the growth in local government spending and staff. The stadium proposal and increased funding for public transportation, Mullarkey says, don’t pass the test of providing good return on investment for the taxpayers. His Web site is www.mullarkey08.com.
The candidates agree that boosting the economy and creating jobs are the top priorities this election. Mullarkey says all the county needs to do is call up companies such as Nike, Intel and IBM and ask them to come and build here. “It’s that simple. If they’d build a factory east of I-75, I’d drive the bulldozer,” he says. Miller would build upon Sarasota’s reputation for sustainability to grow high-tech, green industry and jobs. Mason would work more closely with the Suncoast Workforce Development Board, “look at the feasibility of some tax incentives, and maybe streamline the building permit process,” she says.
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Yet none of these candidates can get behind the Red Sox stadium proposal. The county would spend less and give tourism more of a boost by opening Midnight Pass, Mullarkey says. Miller says, “I would really like to support the baseball stadium, but it’s getting harder and harder. We need to have appraisals, and they need to justify the expense. I think it should be a more transparent process.” Mason’s question is, “Why has nobody gone back to the people? Why are we ignoring the fact that we had a referendum and it was voted down? It’s incumbent on the city and county to ask the people what they think.”
It may have been a quiet race, but they’re not so quiet after all.
The Democratic vice-presidential candidate attracts a crowd.
By Kim Cartlidge
Vice Presidential Nominee Joe Biden’s campaign stop in Sarasota looked and sounded like the political rallies we’ve been watching on television all summer. But for Sarasota, it was monumental. On short notice, it drew a packed full house of lively, enthusiastic and diverse Democratic supporters in this historically red county.
It was also the first presidential campaign rally of the season, since Floridians were shut out of access to Democratic candidates during the primaries. So these Obama-Biden supporters were ready to make some noise
The Obama campaign staff got a call late Friday that Senator Biden would visit Sarasota to speak the following Wednesday. They had to find a venue, distribute tickets and organize security over a holiday weekend. Media and campaign supporters learned by e-mail on Labor Day afternoon that free tickets would be available at 9 a.m. the following day. The tickets were gone within a few hours and the 2,000 more people who called or dropped by for tickets and had to be turned away, chairman Rita Ferrandino said
You don’t often see long lines in Sarasota, especially on a September afternoon in the sun, but the Sen. Biden crowd stood patiently outside of Booker High School, many of them smiling and joking with each other, as all 1,700 or so went through security scans and bag checks. They ranged from retirees who had listened to Sen. Biden’s Fort Myers speech on the radio that morning to high school students who won’t be eligible to vote this election.
A dressed-to-the-nines Obama supporter.
The Booker High School gymnasium was transformed with blue curtains, banners, folding chairs, stage lights and risers for the camera crews in the back. Volunteers wearing campaign t-shirts were posted in twos and threes indoors and out, while young, well-dressed campaign staffers purposefully directed the crowd and the media.
Sen. Joe Biden speaks to the crowd at Booker High School.
The doors opened at 3 p.m., but Sen. Biden did not speak until after 5. His message was focused on the dinner table conversations and the concerns he hears from middle class Americans, who he says are losing sight of the American dream because of health care costs, rising college tuition and job losses. In 29 years in office, Biden said, he has “never seen a time when so many people have been knocked down and the government has done so little. In fact, they put obstacles in their way.”
But he received his most thunderous applause after his response to a question that reflected a different dinner table conversation, but a common one in our affluent community. A woman stood up and told Senator Biden that her friends who make more than $250,000 a year are worried about the Obama campaign’s tax proposal, which would raise their income and Social Security taxes. What can she say to those friends, she asked.
"Tell them it’s time to be patriotic," Biden responded. The crowd rose to its feet and cheered.
Even after spending hours in their seats, people stuck around for a chance to shake Senator Biden’s hand. Because so often in Sarasota, candidates visit with everyday voters only when they’re on their way to the big donors who live among us, I asked a staffer where Biden was going after the rally. “Virginia Beach,” he replied. He was catching a plane after the event.
This time, the voters themselves were the destination. George Bush won by a comfortable margin in Sarasota County the past two elections, but this election year, Sarasota truly is in play.
Sarasota County Republican Party Chair Eric Robinson is brimming with confidence about local GOP candidates. Their name recognition, experience and ability to draw donors put them at an advantage despite hard-fought primaries and intensified Democratic opposition, he says. That’s why there hasn’t been a need for Republicans to go negative—yet.
Eric Robinson introduces Gov. Charlie Crist.
“We’re holding people back,” he says, referring to state party officials and candidates who are ready to take the gloves off. But with some Democrats filing elections commission complaints and running negative ads already, he asks, “How long can I keep them at bay?”
He’s especially incensed that the Christine Jennings congressional campaign has capitalized on the lawsuits filed by former employees of Congressman Vern Buchanan’s auto dealerships over alleged fraudulent business practices, and their allegations of campaign finance violations. When Jennings failed to pay payroll taxes for her campaign staff for more than a year, “nobody made political hay out of it,” Robinson says.
SarasotaCountyRepublican Party Executive Committee Treasurer Tom Solomon, Chairman Eric Robinson, Vice-Chairman Bob Waechter, and Secretary R. Peter Rice.
Robinson had the results of a poll of Sarasota County voters conducted by Tarrance Group of Virginia this month on his desk. When asked, “How important is it to you that a candidate run a positive campaign?” on a scale of 1 to 10, 88.5 percent of respondents said it’s extremely important or very important.
Thirty-two percent said Jennings was running a more negative campaign, as opposed to 8 percent who responded that the Buchanan campaign is more negative.
The hottest races this year, aside from the Buchanan-Jennings race, are the open state senate seat race between Republican Nancy Detert and Democratic newcomer Morgan Bentley, and the state representative rematch between Republican Laura Benson and incumbent Keith Fitzgerald.
The state party has been sifting through attorney Morgan Bentley’s previous cases for negatives, but “Detert has such name ID,” Robinson says. “I have no desire to drag him through the mud. I think Detert can beat him on the issues.” Candidates with the highest name recognition are less likely to resort to negative campaigning, Robinson says.
But in the rematch between former school board member Laura Benson and New College Professor Keith Fitzgerald, who is completing his first term, Robinson can’t resist taking a few digs, saying, “Fitzgerald is weak and vulnerable. He didn’t pass a single bill in his entire time in office. He’s long-winded in committee meetings and hasn’t been able to attract the state backing he had hoped.”
“That’s just flat out not true,” responds Fitzgerald. “That’s typical low road stuff. I wouldn’t have the endorsement of the Florida Chamber and the AFL-CIO and everybody in between if they didn’t think I was a major player in Tallahassee. I’m very happy to run on my record."
Can we hope that campaign will focus on issues as well?
Judging from last week’s low voter turnout for the primary, we’ve been focused on keeping our jobs, businesses and houses, avoiding hurricanes and squeezing in our summer staycations—anything but the local races. During the summer, most primary candidates ran somewhat civil, friendly campaigns. But with nine weeks to go until November 4, it’s clear that on the ground level, the battle is well underway.
Our local hospitals are feeling the financial pinch.
By Kim Cartlidge
Sarasota and Manatee hospitals are treating growing numbers of uninsured patients. They’re being squeezed by decreasing Medicare reimbursements. And they’re facing competition from specialty clinics and hospitals that don’t offer high-liability, low-profit emergency room services.
By the time four hospital CEOS had rendered a dreary economic landscape at last week’s Tiger Bay meeting, I was ready to offer each a $100 aspirin.
Robert Meade
Sarasota Memorial Hospital's Gwen MacKenzie, Manatee Memorial's Moody Chisholm, Doctors Hospital's Robert Meade and Venice Regional Medical Center's Melody Trimble are competitors. But like a divided family that bands together when faced with an outside threat, they spoke with one voice at the dais--mostly.
Over the past couple of years, substantially greater numbers of uninsured patients have put a strain on the entire system. Sarasota Memorial writes off $90 million a year, and Manatee Memorial, $54 million. Doctors Hospital spends 21 cents of every dollar on uncompensated care, up from 12 percent last year.
They are required by federal law to stabilize and treat any patient who presents at the emergency room regardless of their ability to pay. Venice Regional Medical Center has taken to paying for some uninsured patients’ prescriptions, so an acute problem won’t become a chronic one that leads to more ER visits, says Trimble.
This year, Gov. Crist promoted eliminating the state’s certificate of need process, by which new hospitals are authorized to open, in order to stimulate competition. But specialty hospitals would drain away the procedures and patients that are profitable, says Meade. Doctors Hospital, for example, offsets some of its uncompensated care through its high volume of orthopedic cases.
Their operating margins, the difference between the cost of treating patients and reimbursements, are lower than ever. Doctors Hospital’s margin is 1.5 percent, which leaves little money left over to reinvest in updating equipment and facilities.
A Florida Hospital Association data brief for 2006 reported that one-third of acute care hospitals in Florida were losing money. Their average operating margin that year was .08 percent. Florida hospitals operate below national margins even after all their other sources of income, including investments, are added.
Close to 75 percent of hospital patients in our area are covered by Medicare, which is higher than the national average. “That large Medicare population is typically low reimbursement,” says Meade.
A growing doctor shortage here—Manatee County is short 100 primary care physicians, says Chisholm—is attributed in part to the fact our area is on the lowest end of the scale for Medicare reimbursement.
In Sarasota, we’re pretty demanding health care consumers. We expect accessible, convenient, high-quality care—and we’re vocal watchdogs of our only tax-supported hospital, Sarasota Memorial.
We’ve benefitted from intense competition among the hospitals. Our local hospitals remain competitors, but with four relatively new administrators, “There is more of a renewed sense of collaboration,” says Meade. “A lot of our competition wasn’t sitting at that table.”
Americans don’t trust politicians, but a candidate fair last week showed me a lot to like about our local candidates.
By Kim Cartlidge
What compels a person to throw his or her hat in the ring during an economic downturn, when every elected official faces budget slashing sure to provoke somebody’s ire? I thought about that at a League of Women Voters candidate fair last week featuring more than 20 local office seekers.
It’s a crowded season this year, with incumbents who had previously been reelected without contest defending their records, and with smart newcomers challenging the status quo.
It’s a hotly contested state Senate race, but opponents Nancy Detert, Michael Grant and Morgan Bentley are still smiling.
Yet they greeted each other warmly last week, joking that they have memorized each others’ speeches. They buzzed about that day’s Tiger Bay performances by State Senate competitors Nancy Detert, Michael Grant and Morgan Bentley, and Republicans admitted that Democrat Bentley had charmed the audience and kept comedic pace with Nancy Detert’s wisecracking candor
We should hold elections in winter, quipped Circuit Judge Candidate Connie Mederos-Jacobs as she reached for a paper fan that bore her image. And it would be easier to avoid the August heat, to stay inside and follow the sound bites in the news. But without face-to-face encounters with candidates, we miss out on the spirit behind it all--their humanity, their optimism, and the highly developed sense of civic duty or simple desire to give back that compels them to run.
Circuit judge Gilbert Smith asks for votes.
If I hadn’t faced the August heat, I would not have learned that four-time Congressional candidate Jan Schneider has been defending public housing clients pro bono, or that County Commission candidate Richard Redding helped establish Newtown’s public library. I would not have witnessed Democratic candidates glowing with excitement over their party’s resurgence—22 candidates in all—this season, or learned that a number of long-term Republicans are upset over their party leadership’s unseemly meddling in the primaries, pitting one Republican against another and circumventing the spirit of the open primary law with write-in candidates.
Local elected officials are traditionally the most trusted of all politicians. A Pew Research Center study released in May reported that while Americans’ opinion of federal government is at a low point, 63 percent of us still hold a favorable view of local government, and 59 are favorable toward state government.
The candidates understand the hazards of running for office, of the background investigations conducted by opposition, the loss of privacy, the untraceable political action committees that can conduct last-minute smear campaigns, the financial risk of investing their savings, and the potential loss of livelihood. Despite the risks, we’ve an abundance of everyday citizens—patrol officers and retired entrepreneurs, teachers, lawyers and activists—putting forth their ideas and experience and asking for your vote.
Early voting for the August 26 primaries begins today. A few races--for school board, county commission and circuit judge--will be decided by August 27. It’s time for the rest of us to honor their endeavor by casting our ballots. If you’ve still got a bit of homework to do, the League of Women Voters has posted a helpful guide to candidates on their website, www.lwv-sarasota.fl.org and on the Supervisor of Elections website, www.srqelections.com.
With several resignations in the air, what's going on at the Arts Council?
By Kim Cartlidge
Martine Collier, the upbeat, energetic executive director of Sarasota County’s Arts Council, abruptly resigned nearly two weeks ago. Early last week, she underwent jaw surgery that, although successful, renders her unable to speak during her recovery. Members of the board, out of sympathy, outrage or loyalty—one could only speculate—remain tight-lipped as well. Meanwhile, the Arts Council’s communications director, Nicole Sherbert Brown, left her position Thursday to move with her family to Texas.
Martine Collier
I did speak to Jean Trammell, chairman of the Arts Council board, today about what happened. Collier announced her resignation at the end of the July 16 board meeting. “She did not tell anyone ahead of time,” Trammell says. “We excused her from the room and we sat and discussed for a few moments that nobody saw this coming.” They also agreed to promptly begin a new search.
Any conflicts or dissension between the board and Collier, Trammell says, were no more divisive or intense than one would expect from a nonprofit organization in transition. “A lot of the board members really respected her and appreciated her approach. She was very businesslike,” says Trammell.
But meanwhile, three board members, including vice president Sophia LaRusso, Jeff Moredock and John Fischer, have resigned this month. The popular annual Arts Day event, a showcase of performing groups in the middle of downtown, was also canceled for 2009.
“We’ve been undergoing a transition and have reviewed every project and program, holding it up to our new mission statement” as well as the board’s fiscal responsibility, Trammell says. “Arts Day was one of the first projects held up to that measure.” In an organization with a $661,000 budget, Arts Day lost more than $30,000 this year.
The new direction of the Arts Council will include stronger advocacy efforts. “Now with so many attacks on arts and arts education, we have to pick that up,” Trammell says. “We also want to strengthen bridges between the arts community and business even more. The new Web site will give everybody access to what everybody is doing in one place and provide links to organizations.”
One point of contention in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s reader posts following the resignation story was the $89,000 Community Foundation grant the Arts Council obtained to upgrade its Web site. Having searched it myself, I find the current Web site miserably out-of-date, an insufficient and inadequate reflection of a community where the arts are a vital, diverse industry. The grant money will be spread over several years, Trammell says, and fund both development and a staff person to maintain it. Local arts organizations will have passwords and eventually take charge of updating their information.
Collier did give six weeks’ notice, and once she recovers, she’ll be focused on wrapping up Tourist Development Council grant work, but she still won’t be able to speak.
Trammell says that even before the board had formed its search committee, the resumes began flowing in. She doesn’t expect to undertake a national search for a new executive director. “We’re going to keep it localized. In the current economy, there are readily talented people in the area looking for work.”
The new Arts Council mission was adopted April 9, 2008
The mission of the Sarasota County Arts Council is to enhance the connection between our community and regional arts and culture.
How: We do this by strengthening cooperation among business, community and elected leaders, audiences and the public.
Values: The Arts Council actively pursues its mission through the values of Collaboration, Inclusiveness, and Service.
Why smart cultural groups are courting a younger generation.
By Kim Cartlidge
I interviewed the CEO of the Florida West Coast Symphony last week about exciting, evolutionary, even scandalous changes (blue jeans, clapping between movements, and even—gasp--cartoons!) planned for their new season. Kudos to Joseph McKenna and his organization for understanding that younger generations aren’t going to reach a magic age when they look themselves in the mirror and decide it’s time to act like their parents, dial their rotary phones to purchase season tickets, and schedule their evenings out 10 months in advance.
Judging from the conspicuous lack of younger people—meaning younger than 60ish—among local arts audiences, Sarasota’s arts organizations have missed the train. The boomer generation, which broke tradition to forge its own path in so many ways, is now demanding that traditional arts organizations adapt as well
Quality performances abound, but 10 years from now, who will be watching? It’s a riddle arts organizations across the country are trying to solve.
And local organizations haven’t all buried their heads in the sand. They’re battling it out at the board level, the stalwart, older patrons versus entrepreneurial boomers who are accustomed to looking at the bottom line and measuring results. Patricia Courtois knows it well. Her firm, Clarke/Eric Mower and Associaties is the go-to company for those who want to capture boomer market. As a board member of both the Arts Council and the Community Foundation of Sarasota, she fields calls from arts and non-profits alike that know they have to change.
“There is definitely a distinct difference between the long loyal donors and the boomers who question the status quo,” says Courtois, “We’re seeing a tipping point where we will not survive and be fiscally sound. We talk about cocooning the mature audience because we want to pay respect to what they have done in the community, but here’s a huge clash between the boomers and the matures.
Generational conflict “is a real trend that we have to be able to deal with and work through. It’s very painful. It’s a deep, soul-searching, stressful change. It’s not for the faint of heart,” Courtois says
If your favorite organization is undergoing growing pains, it’s probably on the right track. The greatest generation, those who created Sarasota’s finest institutions, won’t be able to fill the seats and the coffers forever, and Sarasota’s organizations have to be prepared. But younger folks have to step up, too, by demonstrating their support. Times are tight everywhere, but that’s exactly why purchasing a ticket to a local performance is an act of civic engagement. Our older generations felt a moral duty to support the arts community by showing up; it’s a worthwhile tradition we should strive to retain.
Plummeting real estate values are drying up small businesses’ access to funding.
By Kim Cartlidge
In Sarasota, too many of our locally owned small businesses have closed doors, and even more are teetering on the edge, hoping to survive until the economy picks ups again. Vanessa Baugh, owner of Vanessa Fine Jewelry, is taking their case all the way to Washington, D.C. In late April, she testified before the House Small Business Committee’s Subcommittee on Finance and Tax, which includes ranking member Sarasota Rep. Vern Buchanan, about the small business credit crunch.
Rep. Vern Buchanan and Vanessa Baugh converse during a break in Washington, D.C.
In addition to managing her own store in Lakewood Ranch, Baugh is chairman of the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce Small Business Council. She’s also recently been invited to serve on the U.S. Chamber Small Business Committee in D.C.
Small business owners can’t get loans or lines or credit without collateral; and for many, the only collateral a bank will accept is real estate—the equity in their homes or office buildings. “It’s almost a subject that no one wants to talk about, but it’s the norm for small business,” says Baugh. Plunging real estate values have left entrepreneurs with little access to bank credit to survive the economic downturn or to expand and fuel vital economic growth.
At a Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance meeting last week, worried small business owners talked about tapping into their retirement funds. Some are borrowing against their 401ks, but those with older IRA accounts can’t access their retirement savings without paying stiff penalties.
“In past years, you didn’t hear people talk about that unless they were starting up a small business. Nowadays, you hear about people trying to get retirement money for cash flow,” says Baugh.
In her testimony, Baugh advocated holding the line on tax increases and enacting more incentives for business expansion and job creation. She asked for tax incentives for banks to expedite small business loans. Baugh also addressed health insurance rates, the federal procurement process and liability reform to curb unfair lawsuits.
“I was very impressed with (Subcommittee Chair) Congresswoman Melissa Bean and Congressman Buchanan. I really felt they understood what small business is going through,” says Baugh. Last week, they invited Bradenton CPA Byron Shinn of Shinn and Company, P.A. to testify about tax law changes, including IRA account access, that could help business owners survive. The hearings are posted on YouTube under “Credit Crunch and Small Business.” Baugh’s testimony is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhwrtQsQpaw&feature=related and Rep. Bean’s and Buchanan’s opening statements are at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vm5aQGfOQw.
Baugh and other members of the Chamber’s Small Business Council will meet with Buchanan again in September. She’s seeking feedback, stories and reform ideas from more local small business owners before her next trip to Washington; they can contact Baugh at vandon@aol.com. “If we can get enough people involved, maybe we can get some legislation passed and get some things changed,” she says.
This November’s proposed vote on slashing property taxes could drastically change the state.
By Kim Cartlidge
Florida’s voters will decide whether or not to vote themselves a 25 percent property tax cut in November. Already, proposed constitutional Amendment 5, also known as the McKay or “tax swap” amendment, has local educators worried.
Manatee School Superintendent Roger Dearing has said that the amendment could put school districts in a perilous position. Sarasota’s School Board Chair Kathy Kleinlein says if the amendment passes, “Every district will be in an untenable situation. People aren’t going to see the savings they think they are going to see.”
School Board chair Kathy Kleinlein has expressed deep concern about the effect Amendment 5 could have on school funding.
Placed on the ballot by the powerful Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, and championed by former Senate president John McKay, Amendment 5 would prohibit the Florida legislature from requiring school districts to levy required local effort property taxes, the local tax that goes into the state pool and is redistributed among districts. The legislature would have to replace the $9 billion in education funds with other revenues.
Just how that money would be replaced was left somewhat open-ended to give the legislature flexibility. Local district officials, battered by this year’s $900 million in education cuts and feeling betrayed by Governor Charlie Crist’s promise to hold harmless school districts as he campaigned for Amendment 1’s property tax relief in January, aren’t of a mind to cross their fingers and hope for the best from state officials.
The commission has recommended replacing the funds with a one percent increase in the 6 percent state sales tax, the repeal of sales tax exemptions (while protecting exemptions for food, prescriptions, charitable and religious institutions, sales of real property, and more), and other revenues as created by the legislature. Florida State Senator Mike Haridopolos has stated that if passed, the amendment could result in the biggest tax increase in Florida’s history. Already educators, industries opposed to a potential services tax and advocacy groups are drawing the battle lines, raising funds to oppose it.
Former Senator McKay has long advocated creating a more stable tax base in Florida. The amendment would also lower the cap on annual property assessments (other than homesteaded properties) from 10 to 5 percent. He and proponents will argue that the reform will help stimulate the economy and create more stability for school districts. But they’ll do so just as dismal sales tax collections are causing greater-than-anticipated budget woes across the state.
Amendment 5 could have greater impact than any other vote in Florida this year, but it will be a values call for voters. It’s not one to take lightly or to scan in the voting booth. Before voters select “yes” for tax relief, they’ll have to rely on their own wisdom to decide if Amendment 5 will help or harm their pocketbooks, their schools and Florida’s economy.
A Chinese doctor in Sarasota hears heartbreaking news from home.
By Kim Cartlidge
Dr. Ron Wang of Sarasota phones home to check on his 80-year-old mother and sister in China, and the calls are heartbreaking. Wang was born in Bazhong in the Sichuan Province, the area devastated by the earthquake on May 12.
China’s earthquake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale, left a staggering 55,000 dead and more than 5 million homeless and unable to rebuild on unstable terrain. The Chinese government has made an international appeal for tents for the homeless.
When Wang heard news of the earthquake, “My first reaction was helplessness and sadness, and I was terrified about the possible consequences,” he says. It took hours to get through to family in China, who sent text messages to each other to report that they were not injured.
Wang’s sister is vice chairman of the Bazhong Industry and Commerce Federation in their hometown, which is located about 180 miles from the epicenter. She is organizing rescue and support for tens of thousands who are without shelter. She tells Wang that road damages have left the counties partially isolated and business has come to a standstill.
The aftershocks, one of which occurred as Wang was speaking to his sister, have left many sleepless and too nervous even to eat, she reports. “My mother and sister are terrified of aftershocks, some of which have measured 6 on the Richter scale. Their spirits are tired,” he says.
Wang’s alma mater, Bazhong High School, was also damaged, and students who are preparing for China’s National College Entrance Exams have no place to study.
His 26-year-old nephew is one of tens of thousands volunteering in Dujianyan, where the world-renowned Dujianyan Irrigation System, one of the earliest in the world, is located.
Dr. Wang moved to Sarasota in 1995 after completing his PhD in neuroscience at Iowa State. He lives here with his wife, a Chinese doctor, and two sons, and works as a telecom and medical systems consultant. He is also vice president of the Gulfcoast Chinese American Association in Sarasota, a non-profit educational and charitable organization founded here in 2005. Its membership includes Chinese American families, families with children from China and members of the US-China Peoples Friendship Association.
The Gulfcoast Chinese American Association is raising funds to send directly to earthquake victims though China’s Red Cross. “China’s Red Cross is the best shot we have to have this money distributed. It’s not as tightly controlled by the government as it was a few years ago,” says Wang, noting that the government is making a public an account of how the funds are spent. “China’s media has responded positively and the government has as well,” Wang says. “The response is the best in the history of China.”
Volunteers for the Gulfcoast Chinese American Association help raise funds for earthquake victims in China.
Wang himself is sending camp tents to his mother and sister and money to his former high school. The GCAA will set up collection boxes around town this week for those who want to donate cash, gift cards or items to be auctioned to raise funds.
Sarasotans interested in joining the effort and contributing aid to the victims can visit www.gulfcoastchineseamerican.org for updates or to learn about locations of collection boxes. In addition, they can reach the GCAA at 941-966-0890 or send checks to 1109 Millpond Court, Osprey, FL 34229. Businesses willing to host a collection box or hang a poster can contact Wang at tigerinw@yahoo.com.
Florida’s economic woes are shrinking local arts budgets.
By Kim Cartlidge
Martine Collier, executive director of the Sarasota County Arts Council, is so upbeat that she even sees a silver lining in drastic state cuts in arts funding. The reductions are forcing Sarasota’s arts and non-profit organizations to put serious effort into partnerships and collaboration, she says.
But after a little more questioning, Collier admits tracking arts funding this past legislative session was exhausting, a roller coaster ride, especially just after Easter weekend when advocates learned of a discussion to eliminate Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs altogether.
Had the division been eliminated, there would have been no state agency to distribute NEA grants, matching funds for capital and endowment campaigns, or operational funds. “That’s just shooting yourself in the foot,” Collier says. “Fortunately, it didn’t fly.”
It didn’t fly because the Florida Cultural Alliance and its members, including Sarasota’s Arts Council, launched an intense lobbying effort, bombarding legislators with opposition. As it ended, the division remained, but with a line item budget reduction to $6 million in state funds for the next fiscal year. That’s down from $32.6 million in 2006-7 and $12.5 million in 2007-08.
If Florida’s leadership is serious about its intent diversify the economy and improve the quality of education, the state should support arts funding says Sherron Long, president of the Florida Cultural Alliance. Long could muster little positive to say about the outcome of the session. “It was a challenging year for everybody,” she said.
“It’s important that the state realize that we are part of the solution of economic diversification, especially in this creative economy,” Long said, noting that dynamic arts programs boost tourism, revitalize communities and improve student achievement. “Any vibrant community is going to have cultural amenities.”
According to a 2004 study, Sarasota’s arts are a $123 million industry with 3,000 full-time jobs. Arts organizations spend $68.6 million and generate an additional $54 million in audience spending. “Arts and culture is an enormous economic engine,” says Collier. “Every dollar invested brings back $7.”
The state’s cultural facilities grant program is one of several that received zero funding this year. In Sarasota, that will result in a loss of funding to arts groups including the Asolo, Ringling Museum, Florida West Coast Symphony and Florida Studio Theatre. But the full impact won’t be clear until next season.
“It was so volatile and changing over the past month,” says Collier. “We all knew funding was going to be cut dramatically. I think people are just now getting their arms around what’s happened, so I haven’t seen people making the hard choices about this.”
The lesson for Sarasota’s arts lovers is one that administrators and long-term advocates like Collier already know. “I totally recommend that no organization ever count on government funding,” she says.
P.S. The Florida Cultural Alliance lobbied on behalf of arts funding for Sarasota’s cultural institutions, yet the group doesn’t have strong member representation here in Sarasota. To join the alliance and receive updates about the status of arts legislation and funding, visit flca.net.
My mother and mother-in-law have taught me a lot—including how to live with loss.
By Kim Cartlidge
On Mother’s Day weekend 2007, my father left home after 44 years of marriage. He’d met someone, he said, fallen in love, and the marriage was over. My parents, who grew up in the same rural town in Minnesota, met in kindergarten. They teased and cajoled like schoolmates into their 60s, and appeared destined to be partners for life. My father remarried in January 2008, and remains maddeningly oblivious to the shock that still reverberates—he even took me to task for not skipping down the garden path to meet his new bride.
My mother is visiting this week, and I haven’t told her yet how proud I am that she’s lived through her abandonment and loss this year, her first of living alone and defining herself without reflection from my father’s eyes.
Two years ago this month, my father-in-law died after a long illness, leaving behind his heartbroken widow and confidante of 55 years. They met just after World War II in Sarasota on the Players Theatre stage. He was an artist, a sculptor, professor and mentor to a multitude of New College students throughout the years. She was his helpmate in all matters, from executing stained glass designs to keeping books to feeding the budding artists and lost souls who sought their open doors for comfort, enlightenment and unconditional acceptance. I understood it well, having first passed through those doors as a bit of a lost soul myself.
My mother-in-law has lived with us since October, confronting health problems, including a mastectomy in December, with courage and stoicism born during the hardship of the Great Depression and World War II. It seems unfair that she also faces loneliness, a trial of the heart.
On Mother’s Day, we picture mothers with arms wrapped around their babies, or arms opened wide when grown children return with new extended family. We envision mothers who champion good causes on behalf of their families and communities. Always, the image plays of mothers with busy hands, in a flurry of doing, caring and nurturing. Rarely do we imagine suffering.
But when those hands slow down and arms grow weak, our mothers do something else for us that isn’t about doing at all. They pass through life crises of loss and abandonment and aging. And in their living, in waking up every day, in breathing and looking into the mirror and not giving in to despair but still showing interest in those around them, they’re demonstrating that one day we, too, will suffer life-altering loss. And we will survive.
Sometimes my mother and my mother-in-law apologize that they can’t do more for me to ease the relentless pressure of managing my own family, household, work and volunteer obligations. We mothers tend to be list makers and taskmasters who measure value in each accomplishment. This week, I want to convey to both their worth to me in opening their hearts to each sunrise, in smiling and channeling encouragement with a glance, and in facing loss with dignity and grace.
They’ve taught me what to do. Now they’re showing me how to be.
Even in wealthy Sarasota, too many students fall behind. Teachers and leaders want to change that.
By Kim Cartlidge
Even in an era of deep budget cuts in education, children with tremendous potential who lack community or family support show up in classrooms every day. Last Friday, more than 200 Sarasota school district and civic leaders rolled up their sleeves and spent most of the day challenging themselves to understand what makes these students tick and how to reach them.
Friday also marked the 25-year anniversary of the release of the landmark “A Nation at Risk” report that revealed flaws in the American educational system and guided major reforms of the past two decades. But as Edward Fiske, author of the Fiske Guide to Colleges, wrote in a New York Times guest editorial Friday, the United States still has a disproportionate number of low-performing students, too many of whom never graduate.
The Sarasota district, for all of its wealth, community support, and large numbers of high-achieving students, is not immune from this problem. Last week, I asked Superintendent Lori White what she perceives as her greatest long-term challenge. She didn’t hesitate.
“My passion is student achievement,” she said, noting that the district has not made enough progress across all socioeconomic and cultural groups. “When I see the graduation rate for some of our students, it breaks my heart.”
The participants in Friday’s symposium examined how to bridge the cultural divide between these students and classroom expectations. They noted, with both Lori White and Gary Norris present, that the most challenging classrooms are often staffed with the least experienced teachers.
Assistant Superintendent Hal Nelson organized the symposium. “School districts fail in well-intended efforts because they fail to recognize critical cultural and social issues,” he said. “We’re at a stage of building a model that is fully community collaborative and based on best practices, expert opinion and current literature, and to hard-wire it into the district achievement plan.”
Both Belinda Williams, psychologist and editor of Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices, and Dr. Ronald Ferguson, Harvard economist and author of Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap, presented findings ranging from how black teenage males perceive getting good grades to what types of teachers best communicate high expectations.
The attendance was capped at 200, and the response was overwhelming, Nelson said. Some of the participants don’t know where they’ll be teaching next year, or how district cuts will affect their schools. Despite those challenges, they put they put aside personal concerns to focus on their own roles in improving student progress. Their openness to change and refusal to be deterred by economic clouds bodes well for the students who will need them the most.
Political analyst Susan McManus on this year’s bumpy road to the White House.
By Kim Cartlidge
Forget everything we thought we knew about politics this presidential election, Dr. Susan MacManus, USF professor and one of Florida’s most-quoted political analysts, said Friday.
Dr. Susan MacManus
MacManus spoke at the League of Women Voters of Sarasota County’s annual meeting about how conventional political wisdom is being challenged in this unconventional campaign.
“Campaigns evolve,” she said. “That’s what makes it so dangerous for some one like me to say I know who is going to win in November. I used to say the person who is going to win will be the one with the most votes,” MacManus said, but now people like to shoot back, “but you’re from Florida.”
The generally neutral professor expressed low regard for the national Democratic leadership’s management of Florida’s delegate dilemma.
“There’s no leadership in the party. This is really eating into people’s ideas about the
Democratic party and making every vote count,” MacManus said. “Florida is again in the eye of the storm. We’re the starting point and we’ll be the end point.”
MacManus’ Top Surprises this Political Season.
The length of the campaign. We’ve generally known who our nominees would be by the end of Super Tuesday. “Instead, we have the longest presidential campaign in history in terms of intensity, and the first billion-dollar election,” MacManus says.
The source of most contentious competition. The Obama-Clinton race outcome may be decided in the courts, MacManus says. “After June, we’ll see a legitimate lawsuit filed” over Florida’s primary vote delegates, she predicts, possibly a minority voter claiming disenfranchisement under the Voting Rights Act.
The draw of the debates. “Who would have imagined that the debates would have drawn more viewers than regular television shows?” asked MacManus.
The high-touch nature of the campaign. Early primary states Iowa and New Hampshire have been known as the last bastions of retail or shoe leather politics, where people can greet candidates face to face. However, “the length of the campaign has resulted in a huge number being able to go to events and see candidates,” MacManus says.
Primary voter turnout. Traditionally, primary turnout is low, but “we have had record turnout in our primaries,” says MacManus.
The role of religion. “Religion has played a role in a very different way,” and in a discriminatory way,” says MacManus “If you’re a Mormon, you’re crucified,” while Obama was accused of being a radical Muslim, and Huckabee was tagged in most media stories as the Baptist preacher.
The targeted group. “Who would have expected to read that the targeted group this election cycle is not women, not blacks, but white males?” says MacManus.
As a Distinguished Professor at USF, MacManus studies generational voting patterns, which are also in a shake-up this election. Obama’s candidacy has aroused such enthusiasm among youth that some say it could produce what Reagan’s candidacy achieved for the Republicans—a realignment election that locks in partisan change.
When it all plays out, MacManus won’t be observing from an ivory tower. She’ll attend both party conventions this summer as a political analyst for WFLA.
MacManus appears on “Decision 2008: The Road to the White House” every other Sunday morning at 9:30 on WFLA Channel 8. The next show will air on May 4.
In mainly Republican Sarasota County, Democrats are beginning to have a fighting chance.
By Kim Cartlidge
For years, election nights for Sarasota County’s Democrats were somber, stay-at-home affairs. There weren’t backs to slap or hands to shake because so few Democrats ran for office. Republican incumbents were reelected without opposition or in Republican-only primaries before the open primary law took effect. The Libertarian Party, with its lively, off-the-wall candidates, generated more opposition and debate in local races.
The pendulum is swinging, says Sarasota Democratic Party Chair Rita Ferrandino. During the presidential election of 2004, local Democrats fielded Jan Schneider for Congress, long-term incumbent Barbara Ford-Coates for tax collector and Frank Peterman for the four-county, gerrymandered state district 55. Ford-Coates and Peterman won as George Bush was reelected.
Rita Ferrandino
Over the past two years, Sarasota’s electorate kicked out incumbents on both the Venice and Sarasota City commissions and replaced them with Democrats. Even though city races are non-partisan, both councils have Democratic majorities now.
This year, Democratic candidates have filed in 14 races, providing the first true, two-party contest in decades. “We are kicking butt. Our strength is we’re fielding a set of candidates that are highly skilled and qualified to not only win the election but to excel in the job, and that is how you create systemic change,” says Ferrandino.
Registered Republicans comprise the majority in Sarasota County and in most of the state legislative districts. But a strong Democratic turnout combined with the independent vote could sway local races and alter the landscape, even in long-term, Republican-held offices.
The state Democratic Party has taken notice. “Sarasota is the golden child at the moment because we have the ability to go from red to blue. We can pick up state seats,” says Ferrandino.
Florida’s Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman concurs, adding, “Florida is thirsty for change, and that's why people are electing Democrats in every corner of the state, including Sarasota. It's absolutely one of the most important areas to Democrats in the 2008 election.” State party reps landed in town this week to woo potential candidates for the open Florida Senate seat.
Sarasota’s Republicans now have Democratic opponents for all the Florida House Seats, Public Defender, Sheriff, Supervisor of Elections, County Commission, the City of North Port, and Charter Review Board. Ferrandino expects candidates to file for Florida Senate and Property Appraiser soon.
But Eric Robinson, chair of the Republican Party, says the Dems are fielding shadow candidates who haven’t raised enough money or support to win. “I think it’s wonderful. It’s part of the Democratic process and it helps Republicans because it closes the primaries. If you think about it, it closes out the Democrats from having input in who their elected officials will be.”
Ferrandino says most have just filed this month, and that fundraising has only begun. She’s counting on Democrats and Independents who desire change. But in the end, it’s the quality of the candidates that will determine the Democrats’ success. “If you have good candidates, there’s a much higher probability they will vote,” she says.
Sarasota’s Democratic candidates will be out in full force, meeting and greeting the public at Oscar Scherer’s Earth Day celebration this Sunday, April 20 from 10-3. For more information about party events and candidates, visit sarastoadems.org and rpos.org.
A new foundation aims to revitalize Sarasota’s parks.
By Kim Cartlidge
When I pulled up to the Payne Park auditorium to attend the inaugural community meeting of the Sarasota Parks Foundation, I expected to see a few dozen well-intentioned park lovers. I had no idea I would find so many heavy hitters who already support the organization. It all began only four months ago with a young person’s plea at a public meeting.
Sarasota's Payne Park.
Dr. Lawrence Miller, economic development coordinator for the city’s planning and redevelopment department, grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx. “Mentors would come forward and keep us out of trouble,” says Miller. “I went to Robert Taylor Park [in Newtown] for a community meeting and kids were pleading for programs that would keep them off the street. It went to my heart. I knew the connection between economic development and the parks. The park is a symbol of what the community stands for. If it’s well done and attractive, there’s an active and alive community,” Miller said.
Miller contacted Brenda Patten, former county attorney, who drew in General Rolland Heiser, former head of the New College Foundation, and enlisted guidance from David Rivel, executive director New York City’s CityParks Foundation.
Today’s board members are: Tim Clarke, DeWanda Smith-Soeder, Diana Grandy, Larry Fineberg, Jeff Maultsby, Casey Colburn, Mark Famiglio, Roxanne Joffe, Millie Small and Robert Johnson. Rolland Heiser is chair, Lawrence Miller is president and Brenda Patten is secretary and treasurer. Michael Saunders, Ian Black, Phil Delaney, Jeff Lawenda, Dennis McGillicuddy, Graci McGillicuddy and Randy Benderson serve on the advisory council.
Heiser compared the effort to his involvement in the first Offshore Grand Prix. “If we do this right, we’ll have 49 parks that will be first rate and a credit to the community.’
They had invited Rivel to present the history of New York’s CityParks Foundation and the scope of its activities. The 29-year foundation was originally a fiscal sponsor for a private donation to New York City’s park system. It has grown into a $10 million program and the city’s largest provider of arts performances, drawing more than 340,000 attendees to more than 1,100 performances a year. CityParks also works with more than 4,000 support groups, ranging from dog walking associations to sports leagues, and 65,000 volunteers. CityParks derives 90 percent of its revenue from private funding, which is evenly divided among corporations, foundations and individuals.
“When times are tough, there’s a real temptation to get private citizens to fund government functions, but it’s a slippery slope. You really have to have a sense that you’re an independent entity,” advised Rivel.
Rivel’s caveat to the group was to clearly delineate the mission from the start. Especially in an era of budget cuts, a parks foundation might be asked to fill government funding gaps.
The Sarasota Parks Foundation has incorporated and filed for 501(c)3 status. The first priority parks are Robert Taylor, Payne Park and Mary Dean Park at 15th and Central Avenue. Payne Park, said Miller, could become Sarasota’s Central Park and the heart of the city with more community support.
Could Payne Park become Sarasota's Central Park?
For more information about the Sarasota Parks Foundation, call Dr. Lawrence Miller at 373-7764.
Three retired statesmen offer insight into partisan politics and Florida’s taxes.
By Kim Cartlidge
Former Senators Bob Graham and Connie Mack and former House Rep Dan Miller weighed in on political issues and the current climate in Washington at a Tiger Bay meeting last week. The three long-term Congressmen, well-regarded statesmen in this area, drew a packed crowd.
From top to bottom: Sen. Bob Graham, Sen. Connie Mack, Rep. Dan Miller
Their prescription for a polarized Congress had more to do with human nature than political philosophy. Graham and Mack, who had a close working relationship in the Senate even though they sat on opposite sides of the aisle, said elected officials should cultivate personal relationships. “There’s an awful lot of insularity in Congress,” said Graham, joking that Reagan airport is dangerous on a Thursday afternoon due to members of Congress trampling through the terminals to get home for the weekend. People used to stay in D.C. over the weekend to socialize and work out their political differences, said Graham.
When Mack was in office, he attended a weekly, bipartisan prayer breakfast, where members of Congress would speak about their life challenges. “It’s very difficult to rail against this person you’ve just been dealing with,” Mack said. Rancor and confrontation in politics are part of human nature, he added, but knowing and understanding each other help deal with it. Trent Lott and Tom Daschle had very open communication, Mack said, although it may not have appeared so to outsiders.
Dan Miller said that the parties have become more homogenous over the years as blocs such as the Rockefeller Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats have diminished. But the presidential primary results have proven that voters respond to candidates who say they will work across party lines. “The most partisan people have dropped out,” Miller said.
School Board member Shirley Brown asked their opinions of the proposed Florida constitutional amendment shifting some education funding from property tax to a sales tax increase and other revenue streams. “The (Florida Taxation and Budget Reform) Committee has improvidently put on the ballot what should be left up to the legislature,” said Graham. “Once you lock it up in the constitution, you’re locked down for a while.”
Legislating by referendum is a way of undermining the republic, said Mack. After the meeting, he added that Florida’s property tax system is fundamentally unfair. “I’m open to taking the burden off property taxes and onto sales tax,” he said. “The issue’s going to be whether people are comfortable that the legislature will address education funding. They have to assume on faith that it’s going to happen.”
Brown had also recommended watching the new HBO miniseries based on historian David McCullough’s book John Adams, to which Graham offered a surprise plug. His second daughter, Cissy, is married to David McCullough’s second son, Bill, and their three children are nearing the expensive college years. “I have a commercial interest,” he joked. “Tell them to buy the book.”
Tiger Bay will host a forum of Sarasota County Sheriff’s candidates on Thursday, April 3 at 11:30. Email sarasotatigerbay@comcast.net for more information. Dan Miller is working with a group that plans to found a Manatee County Tiger Bay club soon.
Architecture lovers and outraged parents collide over the high school's future.
By Kim Cartlidge
While I was having dinner last week with other parents of school-aged children, the conversation took a familiar turn to substandard conditions at Riverview High. Anyone aghast that the school board could abandon renowned architect Paul Rudolph’s modernist high school in favor of new buildings could get an earful from staff and families who spend their days there.
That day, a plumbing issue had caused water to flow through a bathroom ceiling, closing it off to students. A chorus of complaints that followed about students sloshing through flooded hallways and suffering mold and allergens reached its crescendo with tales about rats.
I called Riverview Principal Linda Nook the following day. We discussed the recent news that the school board granted the Revive Riverview group a three-month extension to seek funding for an adaptive reuse of the Rudolph building as a music quadrangle. I asked about the condition of the building. Yes, Nook said, the custodial staff does squeegee the main hallway after a hard rain. Plumbing problems are not common she said, but it’s a 50-year-old building and there are rats, although the stories are exaggerated.
“Is it true,” I asked, “that a rat fell through a ceiling tile during a class?”
“That did happen,” she said.
In May of 2006, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Riverview’s accrediting body, cited the school for two deficiencies: “conditions create unsafe and unhealthy school environment,” and “facilities negatively impact effective delivery of instruction,” and put Riverview on advised status. Nook worked hard to remove this undesirable distinction, one not shared by any high schools in the area, by proving that a new facility was ready to break ground soon.
It was at about the same time that a group of prominent local architects rallied to save Rudolph’s building, inserting another layer into what was already the “the biggest, most expensive and complex construction project in the history of the district” says Nook, in part due to the compact site and its adjacency to Phillippi Creek.
While Revive Rudolph’s Riverview and its distinguished architectural team have spoken of what the building was, what it represented and what it could be, the end users of the building don’t have the vision. They can’t get past what it is.
The new high school is scheduled to open fall of 2009. I could see this visionary solution gaining steam and momentum once the staff and students are settled into new facilities. But any move to delay that opening would unleash the outrage of families whose patience has already been stretched beyond reasonable limits. The Revive group has worked to allay those concerns. “This in no way impedes the progress of a new high school,” says Mollie Cardamone, chair of the Revive Rudolph’s Riverview committee.
Could the building stand long enough for Save Rudolph’s Riverview to build its base? The building is sound, says Cardamone, and School Board Chair Kathy Kleinlein reminds me that the staff and students will reside there through summer of 2009.
“Their plan creates all kinds of effects, with the stormwater, parking, the soccer fields. We’re not going to pay for new architectural drawings,” says Kleinlein. Still, she’s more positive than some of her peers on the board. “If the new plan fits with the campus, I have no objection to it. It just comes down to dollars.”
New York Architect Diane Lewis has revised her plan for a music quadrangle, and the first Revive Rudolph’s Riverview fundraiser will be held in April. Visit www.sarasotaarchitecturalfoundation.org
Before the region can attract innovative companies, we have some issues to address.
By Kim Cartlidge
State lawmakers and the governor opened session last week announcing that we’re at an economic crossroads—Florida must cultivate a research and technology economy in order to thrive beyond its reliance on real estate, tourism and population growth.
As exciting as it sounds to hear lawmakers talk of encouraging an innovation economy, I’m not sure Florida ever lacked innovative business people in the first place. They are choking on the same expenses—taxes, insurance, housing costs for employees and healthcare—that residents rail about. But they don’t have the benefit of Save Our Homes, and neither Florida’s lawmakers nor Amendment I have offered substantive relief.
I caught up with Nancy Engel, executive director of the Economic Development Council for the Manatee Chamber, and Kathy Baylis, president of the Sarasota County Economic Development Council, late last week as they were driving to a Tampa Bay Partnership meeting together. Both have worked in the trenches for years. Both spend the majority of their time on business retention--supporting existing companies that want to grow, or these days, just survive.
Kathy Baylis
“What I’m hearing from businesses, and I hate to use the words ‘perfect storm,’ but property taxes, commercial insurance, the cost of healthcare, affordable housing and trouble recruiting employees have all just come together. Overall operating costs are out of kilter with what they were before, causing companies to leave,” said Engel. “We have not dealt with the issues we have now—tax relief, insurance and health care.”
A Bradenton manufacturer that chose to expand to North Carolina provided Engel this cost comparison last summer:
Manufacturing space
North Carolina $20 to $25 per square foot
Florida $70 per square foot
Taxes
North Carolina $26,000 per year on 140,000 square feet that can be paid in installments
Florida $96,000 per year on 74,000 square feet that must be paid in a lump sum
Utilities
North Carolina $.067 per KWH
Florida $.096 per KWH
The company saves $35,000 per year in annual utility costs by locating in North Carolina.
Baylis added, “We both support diversity—that’s what economic development is all about. But if we don’t deal with the foundation issues, even those innovative companies are going to struggle.”
So even if Florida offered a buffet of tax incentives, grants and educational initiatives for alternative energy, research and technology companies, would they come? If the cost of doing business continues to cloud Florida’s economic climate, what would keep them here?
The Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission (floridatbrc.org), the body appointed to review the state’s financial structure, could be key for businesses this year.
The commission will have reviewed 51 reform ideas by May 2, including a constitutional proposal sponsored by former Senator John McKay to replace school property tax revenues with sales tax by repealing some exemptions. Reforms such as this, Engel says, could offer some immediate relief. But it would be up to legislators to champion and pass the Florida TBRC recommendations into law, or for voters to approve them if they are placed on the ballot in November.
It’s by no means foolish for the state to induce innovative industries with financial incentives. But without attention to business climate fundamentals, it could well become folly.
America’s most famous political scientist elicited gales of laughter from his Sarasota audience last week with spirited election commentary and Daily Show-style graphics. Dr. Larry Sabato also extended a serious message about raising the bar of civility this election year.
Dr. Larry Sabato
Sabato predicted most of the presidential campaign will be substantive, offering a clear choice on key issues such as Iraq and the economy. However, Internet rumors and attacks will continue to undermine civility. “The citizenry can do a lot to discourage diatribes,” Sabato said. “Terrible rumors are spread by Internet, telephone and person to person, but they are aided and abetted by us, the voters because we don’t check them out.”
Sabato frequently appears on television, and he said he’s shared green rooms with plenty of pundits. In an interview after his talk, he compared bad political punditry to pornography. “You know it when you see it. The more ideological the pundit is, the less likely I am to pay attention. They’re so predictable and they’re more interested in haranguing you than informing you,” he said.
Sabato sticks with traditional media sources and realpolitics.com for his news. He also recommends nonpartisan websites such as Politifact.org for checking out the truth of candidate claims or Internet rumors.
He’s an advocate of civic education beginning as early as kindergarten, and offers free, state-standardized curriculum to teachers through the University of Virginia Center for Politics, where he is based. Hundred of thousands of students have voted in mock elections through the classroom-based Youth Leadership Initiative.
The Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice, Collins Center for Public Policy and USF Institute for Public Policy and Leadership hosted Sabato’s talk and book signing at the Ritz-Carlton on February 27 as part of its Civility in Democracy series.
Sabato is credited with being one of the most accurate political forecasters around. Only a fool or a liar would try to predict the outcome of the presidential election this early, he said, but he is willing to forecast that both the U.S. House and Senate will gain Democratic seats this year and retain a modest majority. The new president will still have to work both sides of the aisles to accomplish his or her agenda.
The most likely McCain-Obama race could end the “virtually static” red state-blue state voting outcomes of the past two elections. Each candidate could win nine to ten states over to his party, Sabato said.
For more prognostication and the list of dozens of books Sabato has written about the political process, including his latest, “A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country,” visit LarrySabato.com.
Sarasota Memorial looks for profits to offset the costs of caring for the uninsured.
By Kim Cartlidge
Sarasota Memorial is the only taxpayer-supported hospital between Tampa and Fort Myers, and its tax revenues subsidize only about half the cost of treating uninsured patients. As our presidential candidates debate long-term solutions for the uninsured in the political realm, Sarasota Memorial is covering their backs on a daily basis.
The hospital collected $56 million in property tax revenues last year. Yet the total cost of safety-net programs was $109 million, a huge chunk of its $433 million in operating revenues.
Here’s the breakdown of that $109 million for 2007:
$60.9 million in bad debt, unpaid hospital bills,
$28.5 million for traditional charity care (poverty level, non-Medicaid patients),
$14.7 million to cover Medicaid losses, subsidize community clinics and doctor care for uninsured patients, and other community programs and, a
$5.2 million payment into a state indigent care fund.
Because of Amendment 1 and the statewide property tax rollback, CEO Gwen MacKenzie is projecting a $3.5 million decrease in tax revenue this year.
People who are poor or uninsured usually wait for care until a crisis hits. They can’t afford doctor visits, or they feel stigmatized when they don’t have an insurance card to present, says MacKenzie. And when they do get sick, they tend to show up at the emergency room, where costs are higher than a doctor’s office. The hospital has instituted programs to stop the bleeding from frequent emergency room visits for manageable conditions.
Sarasota Memorial’s Charter Plan insurance program offers coverage through companies with fewer than 20 employees that aren’t eligible for traditional insurance. About 1,000 people are now covered, says MacKenzie. SMH also has a pilot program with the county health department to identify “frequent fliers,” such as diabetics, who may need prescription assistance or a social worker to help manage their health conditions. More than 200 doctors volunteer their skills in the hospital’s community medical clinic to provide surgeries and treatments to the indigent or uninsured.
Inpatient care just isn’t profitable, especially obstetrics, high-level neonatal intensive care and crisis psychiatric units. But the hospital has a mission to provide these services, even as for-profit hospitals shut them down. The moneymakers today in health care are outpatient clinics that provide quick surgeries and high-level imaging, like CT scans.
SMH isn’t reducing its level of care or asking for more tax money. Instead, it’s trying to increase its income by opening more outpatient clinics, at a current rate of about two per year. SHM even has one planned in Manatee, which has caused resentment at Manatee Memorial. But the hospital system isn’t banking its profits or sending them out to stockholders; it’s pouring them back in to serving a wider spectrum of people who need medical treatment, says MacKenzie. If Sarasota Memorial is to fulfill its mission to continue provide unprofitable and safety net care, it’s also going to have to compete vigorously in a for-profit market, she maintains.
Experts share grim predictions and long-term hope at a panel on the region’s next five years.
By Kim Cartlidge
Is it any surprise that a panel discussion last week on our five-year economic outlook turned contentious? The discussion, sponsored by USF’s Institute for Public Policy and Leadership and Sarasota and Biz 41 magazines, was more evidence that Sarasota’s real estate market downtown is creating not ripples, but waves of anxiety among local business owners. When Deerfield Beach real estate consultant and economist Jack McCabe asked the room how many people knew some one who had recently lost their job, had a home foreclosed or had left the area because it had become unaffordable, most people in the room raised hands on several counts.
The panelists were McCabe, demographer Brad Edmondson, state senator Mike Bennett, Citizens for Sensible Growth Director Bill Earl, Sarasota County Administrator Jim Ley and Pat Neal, former senator and long-term developer from Manatee County. You wouldn’t expect consensus among this group even in the sunniest of times.
The most controversial speaker was McCabe, who predicts Sarasota-Bradenton’s real estate market will continue to drop until 2010 and then remain flat before rising again. His prediction is based on the current backlog of unsold condos and homes and the “vulture” buyers who are waiting, he says, for prices to drop further before they swoop in and buy units in bulk from banks. Those lower prices “will be the new gold standard” for appraisals, McCabe predicted.
According to McCabe, Sarasota-Manatee now has a 40-month supply of homes and condos. This is based on the 16,264 units currently listed on the MLS and the January sales of 402 units in the two counties. As of January 31, Sarasota had 5,079 single-family homes and 3,353 condos listed for sale. Manatee County had 5,361 homes and 2,471 condos listed. The two counties combined sold 272 homes and 130 condominiums in January of this year.
Pat Neal appeared to be seething beneath his smile. Neal emphasized that the market will adapt quickly, offering new product and new business models because “unlike government, people who have their own capital can change things.”
After acknowledging an oversupply of blame as well—the speculators, flippers, spec builders, lenders and appraisers, government officials too quick to amend the comp plan, and consumers who sought to make a quick buck--the panelists did find areas of agreement.
Sarasota’s demographic gold is baby boomers in their 60s who will retire here over the next 20 years in larger numbers than we’ve ever seen, said Edmondson. Nobody disputed that. All agreed that over the long-term, the market will recover and prosper.
But how will we grow? Already, you can hear the murmurings of the post-bust public discourse. The process of altering land-use plans, the tax structure and the way we support our existing jobs and attract new industry are under scrutiny.
If Sarasota-Bradenton is in danger of a big chill, it’s not from the current market downtown, Pat Neal warned. It’s the possibility that we’ll continue to be a one-industry town, and that dependence on growth and development will turn us into an enclave for the ultra-wealthy and their service providers--Longboat Key without the diversity of the other communities. That discussion has long engaged the community’s leaders, but they won’t be able to move it forward without more voices, more participation, and more people willing to shoulder the burden instead of placing the blame.
More than 100 local candidates and their supporters—where did they all come from?—went to college one night last week to learn how to run a campaign. Not all of them were running, but they all got an earful from our local experts—the supervisors of elections, news and editorial writers, and Bradenton political consultant Tom Nolan.
If you’ve ever entertained the idea of running or know someone who has, here are the nuts and bolts of How To Run For Office and Avoid Trouble, according to the experts and to me.
1 – Before you begin campaigning, open a campaign account at your bank. Don’t even think about accepting any donations before you do, or you’ll be in trouble with a capital “E” for Elections Commission violation.
2 – You have to sign an affidavit saying you’ve read and understand Chapter 106 of the Florida Statutes, the bible of campaign rules. I got the impression that lots of people skim it or try to read it at stoplights as they are driving to the elections office. That can cause trouble later on.
3 – Once you open your campaign account, go home, set down your keys, and call the nearest political consultant to schedule your first poll. That’s according to Tom Nolan. He didn’t use that exact phrasing, but his Powerpoint did flash the words, “you must take voter polls” every few seconds.
4 – Take political polls with a grain of salt. They’re only a snapshot in time. Make use of information from the monthly SCOPE indicators (scopexcel.org), annual city and county citizen surveys (scgov.net), and your own knowledge of issues. If you’re involved and engaged in the community, your own instincts just might be superior. That’s from me.
5 – Have a diverse, kitchen-table committee of people you can trust to make decisions when you can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s from Tom Nolan, and it makes good sense.
6- Talk to the people at the top of the political food chain. Are they the wealthiest? No. The most powerful? Nope, again. They’re the people who regularly and predictably turn out to vote, and can be as little as 25 percent of the eligible population.
7 – A candidate must never with malice make a false statement about an opposing candidate. It’s illegal. Huh? “Yes, folks,” says Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, “there are laws out there,” and this one is on the books.
There you have it. To qualify, you can pay a small percentage of the salary of the office you seek, or gather signed petitions from one percent of the registered population. If you’re thinking of running, it’s time to get started because the first qualifying deadlines are at the end of next month. (srqelections.com)
New director Mary Bensel has high hopes for the Van Wezel.
By Kim Cartlidge
It’s a tough year to be a new director of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall. Performance hall ticket sales are down around the state. The hall’s subsidy from the City of Sarasota could be as high as $2 million this season, just as voters have sent a clear mandate that they want local governments to cut spending. When Mary Bensel took the helm in the middle of the 2007-2008 season, several key positions, including CFO and marketing director, had gone unfilled for months. Meanwhile, she had to book the 2008-2009 season, and she’s not entirely happy with the bookings she inherited.
Mary Bensel
Bensel moved from Maryland in December and plunged right into the day-to-day management of the Van Wezel. When I interviewed her after a month on the job, she’d had little time to take stock, meet her counterparts in Sarasota, even to unpack boxes in her new home.
Still, Bensel was upbeat. Her new marketing director started last month. Bensel had just returned from a Broadway booking show in New York City, the APAP Conference, where she talked up major touring show agents to try to bring a big name Sarasota. This process takes years of networking with agents, watching what’s happening with shows such as Moving Out, Chicago, or Phantom, and, in Sarasota’s case, waiting until the show is affordable.
The Van Wezel’s 1,700-seat capacity puts Sarasota at a disadvantage. Major touring show producers are seeking about 2,300 seats to be profitable. Sarasota competes with larger halls in Tampa and Clearwater, which producers consider one market. Most shows initially require a run of several weeks, but with organizations like the Florida West Coast Symphony also performing in the hall during season, there’s not a large window of open nights. Major shows are financially risky, easily costing $500,000 before realizing a profit.
Bensel has a track record of success and the business savvy to know she’s got to get the hall out of the red. The Van Wezel may book fewer shows next year or operate seasonally. Each show will have a targeted marketing campaign. Beginning next season, she’ll push to build subscription audiences for plays, children’s programming, orchestra concerts and more.
This week, Bensel added a February 7 matinee performance of I love a Piano because the two evening performances were sold out. Tickets for two other new bookings, the Beach Boys (March 30) and the Moody Blues (March 29) are on sale now.
But Bensel is hearing from her patrons that they want to see more Broadway shows, and over the long term, that’s what she’d like to deliver. As one of about 750 Tony Award voters and a big fan of Barbra Streisand, Angela Lansbury, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters and Nathan Lane, she says Broadway is where her heart is. “I would love to see what people keep asking me for,” she says. “There’s nothing like the experience that happens in a live theater.”
Nothing good will develop in Newtown until crime is under control. Now, at last, that may happen.
By Kim Cartlidge
If there ever were a place in need of a superhero, it’s Newtown. It’s Sarasota’s most impoverished neighborhood, yet commercial revitalization efforts have amounted to more talk than results. Redevelopment plans have been developed and approved. The city has expanded the CRA district to funnel tax dollars there. Retailers have expressed interest in developing the former Wal-Mart site, and the neighborhood wants to open a farmer’s market soon. But Sarasota City Manager Robert Bartolotta says some developers and business people have told him they won’t consider investing in Newtown right now. It’s all about the crime.
Index crimes—murder, rape, the big ones—were up five percent last year, says Sarasota Police Captain Lucius Bonner, and there’s a perception that it’s getting worse. High-profile incidents like a shooting last year have residents worried. Drug dealers are making sales in the commercial corridor on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Despite frequent arrests, criminals are too quickly returned to the streets. “You can’t arrest your way out of the situation,” says Bonner. “You’ve got to address social issues as well. It’s got to be a collective involvement.”
City officials are listening. The Sarasota City Commission has ranked Newtown redevelopment as its top priority for this year. In March, the city will launch a public safety initiative in districts 1, 2 and 3 with the most intense effort concentrated on visibly reducing crime in Newtown. “We’re going to make it a safe place to live and work and walk,” Bartolotta says.
The new effort, tentatively called Operation New2, “is in its incipient stages,” says Police Chief Peter Abbott. “We want to deal everybody in before we decide what to do.”
Police Chief Peter Abbott
What’s different about this initiative, says Captain Bonner, is the city’s outreach to involve all of Newtown’s neighborhoods, such as Amaryllis Park, associations like SURE and the NAACP, city departments, such as code enforcement, and organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Ringling College.
Bartolotta is committed to sustain the effort. “We’re not just going in for the weekend,” he says. “People are going to see a marked difference, but it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Bartolotta and the Sarasota Police Department have identified dozens of potential partner organizations, which are invited to a community forum on February 11. The city is not looking for superpowers so much as citizens and groups willing to tackle crime together, and a Justice League of residents who know they deserve better.
War, the economy and the debt they’ll inherit are driving young voters to the polls.
By Kim Cartlidge
I spent the weekend among hundreds of well-informed, well-read high school students who are following the presidential election closely. Yes, they are out there, despite a perception that young people don’t care enough about politics to vote. Turnout rates among the nation’s youngest voters have in fact risen since 2000; 47 percent of 18-24 year-olds voted for president in 2004.
These 700 students from 12 states were suited up to compete at the 2008 Crestian speech and debate tournament at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale. Crestian is known for its tough, high-caliber competition, especially in the policy debate events. I attended as a parent judge, but as I looked around at the faces of kids who will soon be eligible to cast a ballot for the first time, I could not help but ask a few about their thoughts and opinions.
I wasn’t surprised when the students I spoke to told me they are very excited to vote this year. However, their top voting issues and pluralistic newsgathering habits were a surprise. John of North Carolina is most concerned about long-term economic stability. He looks at what the candidates are saying, but also reads the Washington Post, LA Times, Christian Science Monitor and the Economist, most likely online. “I’m never one to believe one news source,” he said.
I asked Arjun of North Carolina how he thinks most young people are getting their election news. He responded that they watch CNN, but also YouTube, where all the candidates have their own pages. His biggest issue is healthcare and the 47 million Americans who are without health insurance.
Jesse of Florida said the war in Iraq is most important to her. “I think we should have a rational timetable to get out in a reasonable amount of time,” she said.
Amit of North Carolina said, “foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how we deal with the international community but also economic issues, our major national debt, housing, economic stimulus packages and healthcare. It’s a misconception that politics don’t affect young people.”
Allistair of Florida said, “Health care and social security are very important because they are most going to be affecting our generation.
Christina of Florida said her top issues were the war and Social Security. “I think we should pull out soon.”
Economic issues and the war with Iraq were the concerns of the youngest voters in 2004, as well, and current Facebook and MySpace election polls show that’s still true. But I would have expected them to be tuned in to the job market or educational opportunities rather than Social Security or health insurance. While I’ve heard senior voters lament about the debt we are placing on our children, I did not know young voters were paying attention.
Since the 1970s, young voters have not been vocal enough or comprised a large enough voting bloc to engender much political attention. Now, they are tuned in to what’s at stake and voting in greater numbers. These bright, engaged kids who are debating policy now will bear a tremendous economic burden as adults. It’s imperative that they speak out, and that we and the politicians listen.
A new lecture series hopes to clean up local campaigns.
By Kim Cartlidge
The ink had barely dried on the printed programs, and most speakers had yet to sign on the dotted line when the Civility in Democracy: Election 2008 series kicked off on January 11 at the new USF campus. Bob Graham, a popular former governor and U.S. Senator who co-chaired the post-September 11 intelligence inquiry, attracted a crowd of more than 200 on relatively short notice. The series has developed so rapidly since mid-December, and so organically, according to Teri Hansen of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, that even organizers are a little awed by its momentum.
Graham was most certainly a draw, but so was the theme. Civility will be big story this year as citizens brace themselves for another election cycle. I contend that the good citizens of Sarasota--weary of contentious local elections, disappointed by bickering legislators who could not deliver tax relief let alone tax reform, and dreading the negative ads from unidentified organizations that will soon appear on television and in their mailboxes—would welcome a little civility, especially in the political realm.
Over the years, I’ve often listened to voters complain about mudslinging and negative advertising. Candidates will nod in agreement and then argue self-defense, blaming their opponents for firing the first shot. Their political consultants will shake their heads whisper an aside, “But negative advertising is effective. It always works.”
Negative campaigns work when they discourage any voter who’s not a sure bet for their candidate from participating. They succeed when voters tune out, stay home, or go to the polls and then don’t vote. Sarasota’s historic undervote in the 2006 Buchanan-Jennings Congressional election was blamed on flawed voting machines. Yet ample evidence suggests voter disgust was at an all-time high.
Graham’s prescription was a combination of campaign reform, civic education and an engaged, rather than passive, citizenship. He touted more television airtime for candidates. He seemed encouraged by the efforts of primary-source information websites like Politifact.com. A partnership of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, Politifact checks the accuracy of candidates’ statements and defuses inflammatory claims on its Truth-O-Meter. As Graham noted, when everyone works from the same set of facts, civility, bipartisan agreement and even progress become possible.
The Civility in Democracy Series will host Journalist Carl Hiaasen, Professor Larry Sabato and a Candidate College for local candidates in February and March. The series is a project of the USF Institute for Public Policy and Leadership (sarasota.usf.edu/ippl), the Collins Center for Public Policy (collinscenter.org) and the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice (gulfcoastcf.org).
Does that Season of Sculpture car piece cause bad driving?
By Kim Hackett
The Sarasota Season of Sculpture’s Dance (referred to by locals as the piled-up cars at Gulfstream and U.S. 41) is a case of art imitating life imitating art. And since art is open to interpretation, maybe artist Dustin Shuler was commenting on our dicey intersection, the site of 29 accidents so far this year.
While out-of-towners are contemplating whether it’s some kind of freak accident and rubbernecking to see the giant tooth across the street at Bayfront Park while trying to figure out how to get to Longboat Key, they’re plowing into one another at a higher rate than usual. A few days after the pile-up (the artistic one) Drayton Saunders, an executive with Michael Saunders and Co. witnessed a real one, as he has at that intersection many times before. “When people come around, they slow down and people behind them rear end them,” Saunders says. It was the second accident that day, unusual for an area that typically has about three a month.
Could our Season of Sculpture be a traffic hazard, with senior citizens and out-of-towners getting distracted when they need to figure out how to navigate a confusing area? The Sarasota Police don’t think so.
“It’s not a concern,” says spokesman Sgt. Jay Frank. He pointed out that 29 accidents in a year wasn’t a big deal compared to Beneva and Fruitville, where there are that many in a month.
Still, I know the area well and found myself whipping around the corner in my red convertible and nearly slamming into the guy in front of me at the sight of those cars (I won’t mention the number of speeding tickets I’ve gotten since purchasing my pre-midlife crisis BMW.) “I’m down there every day and I don’t see it as a problem,” says Brenda Terris, executive director of Season of Sculpture. She says she received a lot of complaints from residents in the nearby towers about “junk cars” as the display went up, but safety hasn’t been an issue. “I’m worried about the graffiti.”
OK, so maybe it’s me. Maybe I’d better take that safe driving course the nice policeman recommended to me a few weeks ago.
And on that note, dear reader, I bid you adieu. I’m heading back to the hard news side of the aisle at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where I worked for three years before taking a breather. I’ll be covering Venice, where I live, and doing some TV reporting for SNN.
Thank you for sharing your opinions on my CityBeat blog and putting up with all my nosy questions. Feel free to drop me a line or chew me out at kimhackett@comcast.net. And thanks again, Pam and Jeff. It’s been a real pleasure writing for you.
What happened to term limits on our county commissioners?
By Kim Hackett
From Tuesday’s clean sweep of three long-time Venice city commissioners to last spring’s Sarasota city elections, voters are saying “out with the bums.”
But why stop there? We’ve got three incumbents on the Sarasota County Commission who shouldn’t even be there beyond 2008 if we actually listened to voters.
It may surprise you to learn that in 1998, county voters, by an overwhelming 68 percent, approved a two-term limit on commissioners. That means Nora Patterson shouldn’t be serving (she would have been ineligible in 2006) and Jon Thaxton, Paul Mercier and Shannon Staub couldn’t run again in 2008.
So what happened?
A few years passed before the term limits issue would have come into play; we all forgot about it; and then in 2004 there was a lawsuit; term limits were ruled unconstitutional at the Circuit Court level. Sarasota County officials opted not to appeal the ruling and for good reason. Who wants to push an issue that would require relinquishing all that power?
We’ve got term limits for state representatives and the governor but not county commissioners. Does that make any sense?
Straight out of a John D. MacDonald novel, the person fighting the legality of term limits was another public official—Frank Moore, who still sits on the county’s Charter Review Board.
Moore claimed that a 2002 court ruling on term limits in Pinellas County was applicable to Sarasota, and he wanted to give voters the opportunity to remove that unconstitutional language from the charter. You know, clean up the charter a bit. But his fellow charter board members voted against him. So Moore sued.
In 2005, 12th Circuit Judge Deno Economou agreed with Moore.
Not so surprisingly, the county commissioners opted not to appeal the judge's ruling.
So term limits remain on the county charter as “unenforceable.” And who knows, now that the building industry is mad as hell, they may be motivated to revisit the issue. Or the slow-growthers may continue their crusade. That language is just sitting there in our charter like an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.
What ever happened to public outrage? It’s as if the water supply has been tainted with Xanax—the modern-day Valium. The only ones on the opposite side of the reaction spectrum are the Sarasota police, who shoot unarmed men and arrest kids for riding their bikes through a closed park. But that’s another story altogether.
At the top of my “where is the outrage” list, along with the costly Iraq war, is the tepid response outside the African-American community to the nooses popping up all over the country.
In our back yard of Punta Gorda, a redneck named Michael Whiteaker had a noose displayed next to a Confederate flag for three years and everybody ignored it. To make matters worse, the noose was in plain view of a nearby park. When the story hit the media, you’d think the white community would be outraged enough to march in front of the man’s home, or that public officials would have a mouthful of harsh words. Instead, we get this from Punta Gorda Mayor Larry Friedman: “Virtually everyone within the city would be happier” if Whiteaker removed the noose, he told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Huh? That’s it?
And then in the same article, there was this from a man in charge of a nearby homeless shelter, who you’d think would have more compassion: “It doesn't bother anybody in the neighborhood,” Joseph Byron Machuca, manager at the nearby Bread of Life Mission, said of the noose. “He's just a redneck. Redneck people get to express themselves. This is America.”
It took the courage of John Floyd, a city worker and African-American elder statesman, who removed the “Colored” signs from municipal bathrooms in the 1970s, to talk the redneck and his noose down. Floyd walked into the bar where Whiteaker worked, ignoring the taunts and racial slurs, to talk some sense into the man. What courage.
Our local noose episode didn’t surprise Trevor Harvey, Sarasota County NAACP president. “It says to the entire community ‘take the blinders off, racism still exists,’” Harvey told me in an interview last week. “He said it was a joke. If you know enough about history and what African-Americans went through, then you know there are certain things you don’t joke about.”
This latest ugliness comes out of the same polluted pond that’s brought anti-Mexican sentiments to the fore. It sounds better to call it “tough on immigration,” but mass e-mails I’ve received and comments I’ve heard are racism pure and simple.
Next week, we have an opportunity to talk about some of these issues at the Sarasota Reading Festival. (http://www.sarasotareadingfestival.com/).They’re bringing in Lou Dobbs, the vitriolic CNN host who’s always ranting against Mexican immigrants.
Far more interesting to me is Hank Klibanoff, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution managing editor and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. He’ll be on a panel discussing the media’s role in democracy along with Alexis Simendinger, White House correspondent for the National Journal; and Herald-Tribune executive editor Mike Connelly. Hope to chat with you there.
Catching up with Sarasota’s most famous politician.
By Kim Hackett
Katherine Harris has been out of the limelight since losing her bid for the U.S. Senate in 2006. When I heard about the HBO movie Recount in production in Jacksonville and Tallahassee, I wondered what she’s been up to and if she’s had any input in the movie.
Tall, willowy blonde Laura Dern plays the role of Harris, who was Florida’s secretary of state and co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign; Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klain, Vice President Al Gore's former chief of staff who headed the Democratic candidate's legal efforts in Florida following the 2000 election. Denis Leary, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Ed Begley Jr. and Bob Balaban also star in the movie to be released on HBO in the spring.
“I don’t have to talk to the press anymore,” Harris told me on the phone last week from her Longboat Key home.
“So what do you think about Dern playing you?” I asked. “She always plays complex characters so I can’t imagine her portrayal will be one-dimensional.”
“I don’t see it,” Harris said. “She’s blonde and tall. There’s dialogue that didn’t happen. They are making things up that never happened.”
We talked about the press and late night TV hosts skewering Harris. She took Sarasota Magazine to task for some of its coverage. Then we talked about the 2000 election.
Harris said she wasn’t the slightest bit partisan in her handling of the recount.
“What did happen is that it was a close race,” said Harris. “They were asking me to do things that were illegal and I wouldn’t do it. I had to kick them out of my office.”
Everyone knew there were political pressures on Harris, but this was the first time I heard Harris admit that she was pressured by Republicans to illegally influence the outcome. I wanted to know more. But “it’ll all be in the book,” she said.
Harris wouldn’t say another word about “the book” other than she was working on it.
“So what else are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m busy building a house on the mainland,” Harris said. She said she was happy, enjoying more time with her husband. She also said she’d have an announcement at the beginning of the year about something she’s working on with “global” implications, but wouldn’t elaborate.
With a promise to let me sit down and talk with her at the beginning of the year, she politely said goodbye.
Stay tuned. I predict Harris won’t be in the shadows for too much longer.
The time is right for a new Sarasota Commission on the Status of Women.
By Kim Hackett
I’m glad to report a rebirth. The Sarasota Commission on the Status of Women (SCSW), disbanded by the County Commissioners a few years ago, has regrouped.
This is not a “ladies who lunch” group. Made up of leaders in law enforcement, government, education, NOW, and some of the most dynamic women in the community, the Sarasota commission first started in 1987 as the county’s eyes and ears for local women.
The SCSW’s efforts brought more ob/gyns to the local health department, raised awareness on the pervasiveness of domestic violence and created a women’s information network, connecting groups as varied as the Girl Scouts and the Junior League.
President John Kennedy came up with the Commission concept in 1961, and there are now about 270 commissions, most operating under state or local government.
Some commissions have opted to become independent, and some have dissolved. “Politicians don’t want to hear about problems in the community because then they have to do something about them,” says Gini Hyman, chair of both the former SCSW and its reincarnation.
In the same way that the Van Wezel doesn’t fit the mold of a city department, the SCSW didn’t fit the mold of a county advisory board. We (I was on both the old and now the new) were a little too loud and a little too ambitious. After we got “permission” from the county commissioners to pursue having a national convention here, the commissioners balked over something as silly as setting up a checking account. There was a lot more going on, of course, but that was the beginning of the end. The SCSW had to cancel the convention, which would have brought hundreds of prominent women here. A few months later, at the members’ urging, the county commissioners dissolved the group.
For three years, the collective “woman’s voice” has been silenced.
In retrospect, it was a good thing. With the county paying the commission’s miniscule bills, there were too many political ties and considerations that hampered its effectiveness.
But as of Aug.28, the Women’s Commission is back, as its own 501c4.
My motivation in joining the commission—both old and new—was to get to know this group of smart, active women, which includes Carol Newnam, former president of the Florida American Association of University Women; Jen Cohen, Venice/North Port NOW president and candidate for Sarasota County Commission; and Evelyn Moya, a local attorney and former president of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers.
Evelyn Moya, attorney and co-editor of The Docket.
Jane Blanchard, Sarasota NOW president.
At our first meeting the other night, I realized how much is impacting women that I didn’t know about. For example, did you know that a large number of the girls at Cyesis – Sarasota County’s school for pregnant teens – are impregnated by married men? Did you know that Sarasota County doesn’t have its own juvenile detention center, so teens accused of crimes have to be processed in Bradenton? Did you know that domestic violence is a serious, and mostly silent, problem among North Port’s Eastern European community? You’ll hear more about these issues as the new SCSW gets organized and finds its voice.
The $54 million question—and the number keeps bobbing—is whether the Cincinnati Reds will compromise or take their ball home.
Things change, as real estate investors know only too well.
To fund the mostly new Ed Smith stadium requires four pots of money—one each from the state, the city, the county and the Reds.
The state’s $7.9 million is sitting there (not really, but I’ll spare you the nuance of government budgeting). If it’s not used for Ed Smith, it goes away. City voters have a say on their $16 million pot in a November referendum, which if they pass will raise their property taxes. As for the county commissioners, one of two will have to switch their vote on using $21.6 million in tourism taxes. The Reds say they’ll pay $10 mil plus cost overruns.
Everyone was for the stadium two years ago when coffers were flush with real estate money. Then the real estate bubble popped, the state ordered county property tax cuts and Sarasota County Commissioners started wielding a knife on libraries, parks and bus service. Commissioners Jon Thaxton and Nora Patterson changed their minds. One of them has to change it again for the deal to go forward.
“We spent the last two months cutting libraries,” Thaxton told me on the phone. “People are just not in the mood for new taxes.”
Whether the Reds stay or leave doesn’t impact most of our lives. It’s just the point of cutting libraries and bus service while subsidizing millionaire ballplayers that just doesn’t set right with people. And that’s what I told the Reds’ executives when they were making the media rounds last week.
The Reds' Dick Williams, director of baseball business operations, John
Allen, chief operating officer, and Jeff Maultsby, director of Florida
operations.
“If we go away, the pots of money go away,” Dick Williams, Cincinnati Reds director of baseball business operations, told me last week.
Well, that about sold me on the stadium. If those pots of money are fixed and can’t be shifted to fund parks, libraries and beaches, then there’s no point whining about it. If Sarasota voters want the stadium bad enough to raise their own taxes, it doesn’t bother me in Venice.
“That’s not even remotely correct,” Patterson told me.
She says she just found out a few months ago that $1.2 million annually for the beaches comes from the General Fund. Tourist tax money—which is what will go towards the stadium—could be used for beaches, freeing up general funds for libraries and parks.
Patterson says that if we use some of the tourist tax funds earmarked for the stadium to instead maintain our beaches, she’d change her vote in favor of the stadium. If you do the math over the years of the bond the county would have to post for future tourist tax funds, that means the Reds would have to budget for about a $30 million stadium rather than a $54 million one, or pony up the difference.
“I told them (the Reds) in my office ‘slice this back,’” and let us take out the money for the beaches, Patterson said. “But they decided to go for the gold.”
Commissioner Jon Thaxton has a magic number he’d support, too, but wouldn’t say what it is.
Should the Reds take their ball and go, “we’ll figure it out,” says Patterson, who said she’d support the county contributing to Ed Smith’s maintenance. “The community will get very good use of that facility.”
What were the Democrats thinking in that mainly Spanish debate on Univision?
By Kim Hackett
With Hillary, Obama and the rest of the Democratic hopefuls in Miami for what may be their only appearance in our state before the January primary, I thought it would be a good time to start tuning in to the presidential cacophony.
There was one small problem, though. No comprendo Espanol muy bien.
And if you didn’t understand that, then chances are you had the same frustration I did trying to follow what the candidates were saying.
Sunday’s Univision-sponsored debate was moderated in Spanish in front of a live Miami audience. And although the candidates answered in English, the TV translators spoke right over them so you couldn’t hear what they had to say. There were no English broadcasts. I spent about 10 minutes trying to find an English version of the debate on TV, missing the end of the U.S. Open for no good reason.
Four years of high school Spanish and this handy phrase book still
didn't help me understand the issues at Sunday's Democratic debate in
Miami.
I scanned my XFM radio and picked up what I thought was the debate on C-Span radio, so we did the stony-vision thing for awhile. Problem was that when Hillary Clinton was speaking on the radio, Bill Richardson was moving his lips on TV. It was kind of funny until I realized the radio debate was from a week or so ago. Apparently there was a way to get English closed captioning, but only reporters at the debate seemed to be privy to that information.
Either Karl Rove is operating behind the scenes or the Democrats are on a mission to lose Florida.
How else do you explain their blunders to not count Florida’s delegates and then to prohibit the candidates from appearing in a state that’s crucial to them getting in the White House; now the debate debacle.
It’s laudable to have one debate in Spanish, but why alienate everyone else, especially when we Floridians would like to hear what the Dems have to say about the financial meltdown that started here? It would have been nice to hear them talk about issues important to Floridians, things like illegal immigration, for example.
But for the presidential candidates showing up in Florida only once and speaking in a way that average Americans can’t understand, literally, is only going to add fuel to the fire of xenophobes who see Democrats as soft on immigration policy.
What makes this all so incomprehensible is that with every campaign crawling with handlers that choreograph everything from the candidates’ hairstyles to the dais backdrop, someone didn’t have the sense to make sure the candidates’ words were comprehensible to all Americans.
The Democrats need to apologize, give us back our delegates and come back to talk to us, or don’t expect us to show up at the polls.
The county commission’s indecision on a new stadium could be a home run for the Reds.
By Kim Hackett
With the political equivalent of “go ask your father,” the Sarasota County Commission put off a final decision on funding a $45 million Cincinnati Reds training stadium until Sarasota voters decide whether they’ll pay their share in a Nov. 6 referendum.
It’s a lame decision that opens the door to some heavy lobbying by the Reds.
County commissioners Jon Thaxton and Nora Patterson have already made it known they’re not in favor of forking over $22 million in bed taxes, especially when they have to cut library, parks and bus services. But no one – not the Sarasota City Commissioners who passed the buck by asking for a referendum and now the county commissioners who passed it back to the city—wants the repercussions of saying no or yes.
The more people involved in a non-decision, the more variations of finger pointing to deflect blame if something goes wrong. It’s the way politics work these days. If the commissioners truly put off a decision to get a barometer of public support, it’s a misguided strategy.
Consider that the county has 370,000 residents with about 54,000 living in Sarasota. Of the 54,000 city residents, only 7,000 voted in the March city commission elections.
For the Reds to get their revamped Ed Smith, all they have to do is convince a few thousand city residents to vote in favor of the proposal. The Reds have enough time to go door-to-door and hand out signed baseballs or host a few parties in the right zip codes, and they’re heading to home plate.
If the city referendum passes, the Reds will return to “mom” and say: “You better not have made me go through all this for nothing.” And really, that’s not fair to the Reds; either the support is there on the commission or it’s not.
I’m sure there will be some heavy lobbying of Thaxton and Patterson.
In the coming months, I’d keep an eye on “mom’s” e-mail and phone logs to see how the pros turn not-quite-no into a yes.
Pineapple Square’s future may be a matter of church and city.
Pineapple Square may be hanging on a weak vine, or just weathering the latest storm, depending on who you’re talking to.
A complicated three-way agreement between developer Isaac Group Holdings, the city of Sarasota and the First United Methodist Church may be in jeopardy, city officials say; and if the parties can’t come to terms by the end of September, that may be the end of the project that was supposed to bring 40 retailers and restaurants, 525 parking spaces and 276 luxury condos downtown.
“The citycanpull out if the church doesn’t sign an agreement,” says Sarasota City Attorney Robert Fournier. “We have the contractual right.”
Pineapple Square has so many moving, overlapping, conditional parts, it’s been hard for city officials, much less the public, to follow.
So here goes the explanation of how we ended up here: Pineapple Square has three phases. The first phase involves remodeling the properties (about a dozen) Isaac owns on Main Street and on Lemon Ave. That’s going on now; so far, Sur La Table and Brooks Brothers are supposed to move into those redeveloped properties.
The second and third phases involve two new towers spread on three parcels of land—a parking lot the city sold to Isaac for $1 million, a triangular building Isaac owns on Pineapple Ave, and the First United Methodist Church parking lot, which Isaac planned to lease for 105 years rather than buy.
Isaac and the church haven’t signed a ground lease on this critical piece of land, which is to house a city parking lot. And because the city is paying Isaac $7.6 million to build its parking garage on church land, “the city needs to have a direct agreement with the church,” Fournier says.
Drafts have been flying back and forth between the city and the church. The main sticking point is what happens if the developer fails or sells the project. The city wants assurances it’ll still get its parking lot, especially since millions of taxpayer money is on the line.
The church says it wants to move forward, too.
“We think it’s a good project,” says Pastor Art McClellan. “It’s always something else—a succession of something elses. We thought we’d be breaking ground in July 2006.”
McClellan deferred talk about the contract to a member of the church’s negotiating team, who I hadn’t been able to reach yet.
So in a last-ditch “good faith effort,” Fournier is urging city commissioners on Tuesday to approve a newly drafted church-city agreement with a Sept. 25 deadline. “I have reason to believe the church may not approve it,” Fournier says.
“If the church declines to enter into an agreement, the responsibility for the deal failing rests with the church,” Fournier says.
John Simon, the CEO of Pineapple Square Properties, doesn’t have the same take on the situation as the city.
“It’s a minor document,” says Simon. “What will ultimately happen is that church and the city will sign on it. The lack of signature will not damage this project.”
Whew. Makes you dizzy.
It wouldn’t be surprising if one of the members of the triad is having second thoughts about the Pineapple Square deal, considering the state of the real estate market. That’s just blogger speculation.
Bra-burning, Hillary's chances, and other thoughts from Women’s Equity Day Celebration.
Saturday’s annual Women’s Equity Day Celebration luncheon at the Bradenton Municipal Auditorium was part feminist church-revival mixed with political elbow- rubbing. It is one of those events that feels the same every year – exhibits, grilled chicken and speakers who cling to the podium too long.
Lunch bunch: Nancy Feehan, an attorney and up-and-comer in the
Democratic Party, and Carol Newnam, past Florida president of the
American Association of University Women.
For local candidates, the event commemorating women’s right to vote is as mandatory as the Iowa caucuses; notable as much for who isn’t there as who is there.
Dave Gustafson, who hopes to become the next Sarasota County sheriff,
was among the candidates at the luncheon.
And this year, Christine Jennings’ absence was duly noted.
The interpretation: She’s toast.
Vern Buchanan and the power of incumbency would be difficult for Jennings to overcome, anyway, said some of her Democratic cohorts, but voters aren’t likely to let her off the hook for hypocritically lambasting her opponents while she was failing to pay withholding taxes for campaign staffers.
The wild card is how the national Democrats handle all of this now that they’ve made Jennings a cause celebre for voting reform. Last time around, they took sides in the Democratic primary and snubbed Jan Schneider.
If not Jennings, then who?
Vern Buchanan wasn’t at the luncheon, but his press secretary, Sally Tibbetts, was there as was State Rep. Keith Fitzgerald, who is expecting a torrent of Republican money to oppose him in next year’s election.
“I hate to do it, but I may have to take special-interest money,” he told a small group of us.
I sat with Sonia Pressman Fuentes, the co-founder of NOW, who recently moved to Sarasota full time, and across from Jan Schneider, who took me to task for an earlier blog saying that she was making candidate noises.
“I never said I was running,” Schneider scolded me, adding that if she did, she’d probably run as an independent.
For someone too young to burn a bra and march in the 1970s, the Equity luncheon is as much a history lesson as a social event. But just as you think “We’ve come a long way baby” from the right to vote to a viable female candidate for president, some national figure says something stupid.
Here’s this from feminist author Mary Gordon in a New York Times magazine Q&A with Deborah Solomon:
Q: Are you a Hillary Clinton supporter?
A: I think no woman is electable in America, and particularly not Hillary, because she is married to this guy whom everyone is libidinally attached to. I think there is unconscious sexual jealousy of her among women.
Takes you back—way back to Eisenhower and pearls in the kitchen.
A Goldman Sachs’ economist even called us the “canary in the cage” that threatens to drag Florida into a recession. (Gee, that really hurts; can’t they go pick on Naples with its 84-percent drop in condo sales?) Then came Sarasota Sheriff Bill Balkwill’s decision to step down, creating an incumbent-free race for only the second time since Truman was in office.
Maybe the competition will actually get the candidates looking at ways to cut the bloated sheriff’s budget.
And on the non-profit front, where we should be reading feel-good stories, it’s bad enough that the YMCA’s foray into foster care resulted in abused kids getting lost and one of the worst records in the state, but now executive director Carl Weinrich has gotten the Y into the real-estate business in a complicated deal with attorney David Band and his partners.
Whatever happened to gifting out right to a charity?
Instead, the YMCA finds itself the owner of a contaminated piece of real estate and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune sniffing around asking a lot of good questions.
It goes to show you that we shouldn’t start writing the print media’s obituary yet, even though news came last week that the SHT is cutting Florida West and scattering the comics and Marjorie North through the rest of the paper to save money. This on top of staff cutbacks announced a few weeks ago. You have to read Mr. Chatterbox’s hilarious take on the situation.
Newspapers in general are hastening their own death by saying everyone is going to the Web and then directing us there at every turn of the page. Note to my former colleagues: Start making the case why we should buy the paper and then euthanize Harry the Heron, the character that populates the kids’ news page; he’s not grabbing young readers, which is where newspapers need to focus once they get out of crisis mode.
Moving along to City Hall, our new city manager Robert Bartolotta doesn’t even get a chance to warm his seat before he’s got to deal with the abrupt resignation of Van Wezel interim director John Wesley White. Next up, the Cincinnati Red’s stadium referendum; that is, of course, if the Reds get past the county commissioners who decide this month whether to pony-up the bed tax for a $45 million rejuvenated Ed Smith.
Whewww.
I could go on about Downtown Partnership Director Tony Souza jumping ship to Habitat for Humanity, and another Michael Saunders executive defection, but I think we have enough to chew on.
What are your thoughts about this week in the news? And don’t be shy. Remember, we don’t publish your real name or e-mail address.
John Wesley White quits what he calls a dysfunctional Van Wezel.
By Kim Hackett
We all knew Van Wezel Interim Director John Wesley White was leaving sooner or later. But sooner came a week after new city manager Robert Bartolotta came on board and before he found White’s replacement.
White is not losing any sleep over it. In a lengthy interview the day before he resigned (look for the October issue of Sarasota Magazine), I asked him if he wanted the job.
“No way,” said White, who once had Sarasota County Administrator Jim Ley’s job.
The Van Wezel has been mired in controversy for more than a year now, since it came to light that director John Wilkes, who was subsequently fired, was billing the city for free Broadway tickets, using employees for personal business and, overall, not taking care of the business side of entertainment. One of his employees was arrested and charged with a felony for bid tampering.
With White's resignation, the Hall is again without a leader.
Even a consultant’s report concluded the hall had “lax management controls and an overall lack of fiscal discipline."
But the advisory board and Van Wezel Foundation loved Wilkes, nonetheless.
They pushed for City Manager Mike McNees’ ouster for firing Wilkes and then demanded the city rehire Wilkes.
Over there on the water, the Van Wezel has become its own fiefdom, with the advisory board and Foundation calling the shots, as White soon found out.
“I didn’t realize the extent of dysfunction,” White told me last week. He described handshake deals over whose jewelry was sold in the lobby and said volunteer ushers were paid unreported cash for selling performance merchandise, an IRS violation. Comp tickets were “political kitty.”
“I wasn’t brought in to just turn on the lights,” said White, who caught flack from the advisory board and Foundation for cutting the number of performances and educational programs to get the budget in line.
The clincher came when White discovered a $35,000 donor check made out to the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall had been instead deposited into the Foundation kitty. White reported it to the city and all hell broke loose, with the Foundation calling for his head.
“I don’t think there was any criminal intent,” White says, adding that “it’s never been fully looked into.”
In any deteriorating relationship, unless you’re one of the parties, so much of what goes on amounts to he-said, she-said. White came in to right the ship and admits maybe he wasn’t as politically tuned in as he needed to be.
But this much is clear; as long as there is city ownership of the Van Wezel (and the city should look into whether there’s a better way to go) cronyism and loosey-goosey operations can’t be tolerated.
While it was awfully nice for the Foundation to cover the $35,000 to find a new director, the city should have opted to pay for the search itself so there’s no doubt in the new director’s mind just who the boss is.
The 2008 District 13 Congressional race is starting early—and ugly.
By Kim Hackett
The starting gun has officially been fired for the 2008 Congressional election this week, even though the General Accounting Office is still looking into the anomalies of the last one.
And as always in District 13, it looks like it’s shaping up to be a helluva battle. You’ll remember that $11 million was spent on the last election–more than any other district in the country. That didn't help with the accounting, which seems to be a common problem in our district, whether it's votes or taxes.
On Monday I received the first official Republican missile, directed at Christine Jennings for not paying payroll taxes on her campaign workers. (Actually, it was two missiles from different Republican operatives who wanted to make sure I didn't miss the news.) In a press release from a long-winded article from The Hill, the red party lambasted Jennings for paying $23,000 in campaign employee payroll taxes years after they were due. The story came to light only after Jennings corrected the situation, so it's a yawner of a campaign issue.
It is ironic, though, considering Jennings lambasted both Jan Schneider and Vern Buchanan for their own tax problems.
Schneider’s trial balloon for a fourth run at the seat came in a press release last week on VoteJan.com stationery, blasting Jennings for saying she wasn’t sure she would have supported the Democrats' Iraq withdrawal proposal.
Schneider says she was “appalled” by Jennings' position. Jennings has since reversed herself after actually reading the proposal, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported, and now says she would have voted with the Dems after all.
In the political equivalent of "an enemy of my enemy is a friend," I hear there’s been some talking between Schneider and the Buchanan camp, which reached out and patted her on the back for her Jennings comments. (Schneider must be on the fence about running–the Friends of Jan site hasn’t been updated since July 2006.)
This time around, the Democratic Party wants a united front behind Christine Jennings, and insiders say they’re miffed with Schneider, who says she'll decide in the fall. Brace yourselves: It's going to be a long, ugly race.
Downtown’s coolest coffee shop struggles to stay open.
By Kim Hackett
Everyone losing sleep over the real estate meltdown should head to Metro Coffee and Wine on Osprey for a cup of java to get through the day. That’s what owner Betsy Nelson is praying everyone will do—literally.
Business has been so dire, she and about 15 friends and customers held a spiritual circle last week to pray for a miracle so she can stay keep her doors open.
“I need to believe it,” says Nelson. “My motto printed on my cups is ‘This is Your Place.’ It’s about community.”
I could blog every day about a business feeling the pinch, but Metro is a special kind of place.
Nelson, a former psychotherapist from Philly, opened it two years ago as part of a dream of a multi-cultural gathering place.
“When I first came to Sarasota 20 years ago, I’d go weeks without seeing people of color,” says Nelson. She wanted to create a place where everyone would feel welcome. The café idea “was a seed in me that matured.”
Betsy Nelson of Metro Coffee and Wine
With big comfy couches, tables and a mix of exotic coffee, sandwiches, pastries, and wine, Metro became a place where you’d see movers and shakers inking multi-million dollar real-state deals, sitting next to gay couples and the city’s young Turks.
At night, people would drink wine on the deck, often accompanied by their dogs (Nelson helped push the dog-dining law).
“We’d churn $120 million in real estate meetings,” Nelson says of the boom days.
But there aren’t so many deals getting inked there lately. Neighborhood people aren’t buying as many $3 lattes.
“This whole year has been a challenge,” says Nelson. “It wasn’t much of a season and when real estate turned down it affected everywhere.”
Nelson didn’t want to say how bad thing are, and I didn’t really want to push her.
We started chatting about her latest java find—Esmeralda Especiale —an unusual strain of Ethiopian bean that’s so expensive, it goes for $6 a cup.
“We could only get 24 ounces of it, it’s so rare.”
Venice could take a lesson from Governor Crist’s environmental activism.
By Kim Hackett
Gov. Charlie Crist put Florida in the national spotlight with his global warming conference last week. What a refreshing change from Jeb Bush, who didn’t meet an environmental regulation he didn’t want to quash.
This morning Crist appeared on the CBS Morning Show with Gov Schwarzenegger, urging Americans to embrace a green revolution.
“There’s gold in green,”Crist said. “There are so many entrepreneurial opportunities.”
I thought about Crist’s words as I took a walk on Caspersen Beach this morning, where Venice city officials want to build on 451 acres of city-owned land (they even considered a replica of the Roman Coliseum). The last thing the Island of Venice can handle is more pollution and congestion, not to mention destroying wildlife habitat.
Politicians with vacant public land remind me of my nine-year-old with a few coins in his pocket; they’re just itching to spend it lest it burn a hole.
We watched it happen again in Sarasota a few months ago when commissioners selected an Illinois company to build parking, a hotel, condos and shops on a 2.25 acre tract on Palm Avenue.
But where’s the public good in all these projects? We get the same-old, same-old mixed-use developments that bring us more of the same-old service-sector jobs no one can afford to live on.
With a three-percent unemployment rate, our existing hotels, restaurants and boutiques have been screaming for employees. Does it make any sense to subsidize more of the same with public land?
How about something visionary such as a high-tech Hermitage House for that Venice land? The Hermitage is an artists’ retreat on Manasota Beach where our nation’s top writers, painters and playwrights are selected to come and find inspiration in the sunshine.
You can’t even calculate the contributions we’ve made to the arts by having something like the Hermitage in our community.
Which does undeveloped land in Venice need more? Another high rise or a low-scale, high-culture project like Manasota Key's Hermitage?
If we had a technical equivalent, focusing on solar power and green technology, think what might be accomplished. We could invite the world’s brightest minds to come here and innovate.
Crist has brought us out of the environmental dark ages; now it’s time to think creatively to make “gold out of the green.”
We’ve got a lot of brilliant people in Sarasota. We’d love to hear some of your ideas. Remember, you don’t have to use your real name, so feel free to be outlandish.
Just as we’re finally getting greener, budget cuts are threatening Sarasota’s famous model for sustainable living.
By Kim Hackett
Note to our state politicos: Nice try, fellas, with the property tax cuts, but you can have my measly $200 bucks back; just tell the locals to leave our libraries, pools and the Florida House alone.
There’s nothing that’s trickling down from Tallahassee that’s going to solve the problem of how damn expensive it’s become to live here.
And now that we’re seeing the difference between what the People’s Governor has hyped and what’s been delivered, who wants to chance giving up Save Our Homes?
So we’re back where we started but with less of the stuff that makes life enjoyable here.
There’s so much to lament about the proposed county budget cuts but I’m going to focus on the Florida House because it’s been so under the radar screen.
In case you missed it, the Florida House—the learning house that practically invented the green building movement here14 years ago and brought folks from all over to Sarasota to learn how to build a sustainable living and learning center—closed a few weeks ago.
Maybe it will reopen in a new location and maybe not. It depends on what the county decides on Wednesday.
The Florida House has been leasing space from the school district on the Sarasota County Technical Institute campus on Beneva Road, with the county covering operating expenses. People have come from as far away as Cairo, Egypt, to learn how to build their own Florida houses; it’s been the model for about 100 others.
About two months ago, the district told Florida House it needed to move so the district could expand. (The district gave them a heads-up last year but all of a sudden it was on a fast track.) The timing couldn’t be worse with all the budget woes. The district offered an alternate site, but it’s going to cost as much as $100,000 to dismantle and move the model home. Commissioners vote on Wednesday whether to fund the move.
As for the regular $128,000 Florida House budget, commissioners have said the Florida House needs to “transition the program to community support.”
Translation: Find money elsewhere after this year.
The Florida House Foundation is trying to figure out how to raise funds to keep it going.
Let’s hope the community can support another nonprofit with all the other nonprofits feeling the pinch of the real estate meltdown.
Setting the Florida House free in this environment is so shortsighted. We’re in the middle of a drought and living in the U.S. version of global-warming Ground Zero. Finally people are starting to understand they can’t dump gallons of chemicals on their lawns and keep the AC running all day without an environmental impact.
The Florida House—a model home that many residents have duplicated—has a native yard with plants that require little water and chemicals. It has demonstrated how making small design changes, such as building transoms and overhangs, can slash power consumption. Wood flooring is made out of quick-growing bamboo and plush carpet out of recycled plastic.
Volunteers are finishing up the packing this week. If you’d like a living piece of the place, bring gardening tools and bags. For a small donation, they’re giving away plants, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., 4600 Beneva Road.
Volunteer Master Gardener Norm Carmel, Patricia Porchey, University of Florida urban horticulture extension agent, and Michele Guffanti, Master Conservationist volunteer, spent last week digging up plants they cultivated at Florida House over the years.
If you never had a chance to visit, you can still take a digital tour. If you’ve got an opinion or story about the Florida House, post it here and/or contact the commissioners.
Tax cuts may help our wallets—but not our gridlocked highways.
By Kim Hackett
Gov. Charlie Crist’s talent for getting insurers to lower rates and legislators to overhaul property taxes has made him a political darling. Crist has a 70 percent approval rating and now Republicans are tossing around his name as a possible vice-presidential candidate.
But Crist’s short-sighted decision to approve $650 million in cuts to the road budget may come back to bite him.
The Department of Transportation was already $232 million short to meet its five-year construction plan and had to put off 71 projects because of rising construction costs before this spring’s budget cuts. Now more road projects may be cancelled.
With less money for roads, more gridlock could be in our future.
What this all means was driven home to me yesterday as I schlepped my kids up to Gainesville for camp.
I’m thinking it’s a Sunday morning in the middle of scorching June when the tourists shouldn’t even be here; everyone else is either sleeping off a hangover or in church, so it should be smooth sailing on our 200-mile, I-75 northbound journey.
But north of Tampa, we come to a standstill.
My two kids, crammed between duffle bags in the back seat are screeching the “are we there yet? He’s hitting me” chorus. My Ipod is running out of juice as I’m running out of patience.
This goes on for an hour. The southbound lane looks like a vacant parking lot. Then we see a parade of ambulances, a few sheriff “crisis intervention” vans and patrol cars. A chemical spill? A terrorist attack? I’m starting to get a little panicky. We need to get off the road and on an alternate northern route.
Except, I realize there’s no viable alternate route. We’re stuck.
Traffic finally starts moving s-l-o-w-l-y. Then we see the reason for the back-up – a minivan smashed into the median guardrail of the southbound lane. A seemingly simple accident (unless of course you’re in the minivan) paralyzed traffic on both lanes of our only viable way out of the state.
What if we were evacuating because of a threatening hurricane? With the predicted hurricane season, this isn’t so hypothetical. We’ve got 1,000 new residents a day coming to our state, and we’re already woefully behind on the roads we need.
In Sarasota-Bradenton, we spend 19 hours a year and 3.4 million gallons of fuel stuck in traffic.
So does it make any sense at all to head in the other direction? It’s another short-sighted political decision that’s going to have some long-term casualties. All those people pushing Crist on the road to the White House need to keep in mind that it runs through Florida and he’s going to have to navigate it just like the rest of us.
I like dogs. I just don’t like eating next to one at a restaurant.
By Kim Hackett
The City Commissioners have a lot on their plates today, including whether to allow doggies to park their furry butts next to the rest of us while we dine outside. Judging by the deluge of mail from the anthropomorphism crowd, I’m sure the commissioners will approve of the idea.
The County Commissioners opened this can of Alpo by recently approving doggie dining in unincorporated areas. So it only follows that in swankier Sarasota, where people shell out $150 for a dog massage and $250 for doggie strollers, doggie dining would become a causecelebre.
City commissioners will be voting on the new city manager today, but I’ll bet more people show up at the meeting to push doggie dining.
Our condo market and economy can be going to hell, but nothing galvanizes people like anything related to their animals.
Now I’m a dog person. I even have fractional ownership of Sammy, an eight-year-old golden Lab who splits his time between my friend’s house, her ex’s, and my house during the summer. (My friend, an attorney, wisely insisted the dog goes with the kids in the custody agreement).
Our Sammy may be ready for doggie dining at Sarasota's swank outdoor cafes, but I'm not.
With three kids and stressful jobs, my husband and I can’t handle the demands of training and caring for a dog full-time. So we get our dog fix with Sammy.
With my dog-loving credentials established, I can now say dogs have no place in restaurants. Who wants to plunk down $50 for a meal and be subjected to one canine sniffing the behind of another? And I shudder at the thought of the next table asking for a doggie bag for a different kind of leftovers.
Now, I see no problem with a dog here or there at quickie places like Metro where you can get a cup of coffee and a Danish and choose to stay or not. But to be held hostage waiting for a meal when someone brings their dog to dine is not my idea of fun. So I’ll be staying away from places that allow dogs.
I’m sure most restaurant owners secretly want this measure to fail. They’re finally done with the smoking issue and are still in the thick of dealing with loud cell phone talkers, so dealing with doggie and anti-doggie customers is something they’d rather not have to referee.
What do you think about dogs and dining? Will it help or hurt restaurants? Will you go to places that allow dogs?
City Place at Pineapple Square starts refunding deposits.
By Kim Hackett
One of the biggest downtown developments has started refunding condominium deposits. Pineapple Square—the $200 million development on Pineapple, between Lemon Ave. and State Street—is supposed to bring 286 condos, 30 to 40 retailers and restaurants and hundreds of parking spaces downtown.
A rendering of City Place at Pineapple Square.
Pineapple Square Properties started taking reservations for the first phase of the project last year, City Place, and had hoped to sell half of the 157 condos by December 2006.
That didn’t happen.
The developer started giving buyers the option of backing out of the deal without penalty a few weeks ago, says a Michael Saunders agent representing the developer. “We’re proceeding to contract, and if people didn’t want to move forward we returned the money,” says Steve Gibson, sales representative and community consultant.
It’s not unusual for developers to return deposits if timetables haven’t been met. It’s not clear if that’s what happened.
Gibson says despite the refunds, the project is still breathing. About 18 buyers are still on board to purchase condos, with prices ranging from $530,000 to $1.3 million. Gibson declined to say how many buyers asked for their money back.
Condo buyers plunked down $25,000 deposits for the first residential phase of the Pineapple Square project—157 condos above two floors of retail and five levels of parking.
The city recently signed off on the deal to sell the State Street parking lot to Pineapple for $1 million. It was a controversial move because the land had an estimated value of $8-$11 million. Under the deal, the city is paying the developer $7.6 million to build 350 public parking spaces.
There are sure to be some unhappy real estate agents. Under the contract terms, agents get $5,000 when buyers convert their reservations into contracts. No contract, no money.
What's your prediction about what lies ahead for City Place and other new downtown condos that are on the market? Please post your comments below.
Another notable downtown business has landed on the “ash” heap of history. The Smoke My Ash store packed up its rolling papers, detox kits and $200-plus hand-blown glass bongs in March when its lease expired at 1693 Main Street.
“I’m glad to see him gone,” says Ken Stevens, The Fitting Room owner, who waged a one-man campaign to oust his neighbor. “I’d rather see the place empty.”
Stevens hung a sign in his window in protest when the store opened a few years ago: "Addicts Wanted!!! Your children can purchase crack cocaine pipes, marijuana papers and bongs next door. Heroin needles not available, yet! Wake up!"
The sign brought Stevens all kinds of media attention and a letter from the smoke shop’s attorney. So the sign came down, but not Stevens’ indignation. “I’m surprised he thought he could do business on Main Street. He wasn’t bringing any good traffic around here,” he says.
The only sign of Smoke My Ash on Main Street. The First Baptist Church declined to renew the smoke shop's lease, much to the relief of its neighbors.
I can’t say I’m sorry to see the smoke shop bite the dust. Owner Darren Ford threw me out of his shop last year when I stopped by to ask about his prickly relationship with Stevens and to chit-chat about the market for $200 bongs.
The shop’s demise also brings to an end one of the most colorful downtown landlord-tenant relationships. The First Baptist Church a few doors down bought the building more than a year ago and opted not to buy out Ford’s lease.
“It’s kind of like your family,” First Baptist Pastor William Hild explained to me last year, with a hint of Tennessee drawl. “Everyone has an Uncle Bob in the family.”
I’m sure this is one family member the congregation wasn’t sorry to see pass on.
Just who do you think was buying those pricey bongs? Can’t say I’ve ever seen one of our “downtown winos” lugging one of those around.
Do you have an opinion about the Smoke Shop’s closing its downtown doors? If so, please post your remarks below.
Of hormones, switching genders and managing Sarasota.
By Kim Hackett
While Sarasota consultants have been whittling down the list of city manager applicants, one of those on the short list, Steve/Susan Stanton, has been wearing a wig and heels, making the TV rounds saying his pending sex change won’t affect how he manages. (In case you missed it Stanton was recently fired from his job as city manager of Largo when he announced he planned to become a woman).
That got me and a few friends joking that only someone named Steve could be so cavalier about the hormonal changes that go with being a woman. Here’s someone who has had the same body chemistry month in and month out for 48 years, who hasn’t had to contend with the emotional upheaval brought on by surges and drops in estrogen, saying the massive does of hormones ahead won’t affect him at all.
Steve Stanton
Until Stanton has had to contend with a stretch of sweaty sleepless nights watching an endless loop of CNN (just mind-numbing enough to induce sleep), like other women in their 40s, he can’t claim membership in the real Sisterhood.
We women take a perverse pleasure in the thought of a man going through menopause, our menopause, not the much-hyped male version.
But proving that life doesn’t treat men and women equally, a Miami sex change specialist says Stanton won’t go through what a good chunk of Sarasota’s population is going through, on his way to midlife womanhood.
“The common response from men is they’re mellowed out,” says Dr. Harold Reed, of the Reed Center for Genital Surgery. “They’re more balanced; the estrogen is a positive thing.”
Reed outlined the process, which includes evaluation letters from two therapists, a year of hormone therapy along with “a real-life test in which the person dresses and acts like a woman 24/7 to see if it’s for them.”
There are all kinds of surgical options after that, from a tracheal shave to reduce an Adam’s apple to butt implants and of course, “some men opt to have their penis removed.”
The Full Monty, so to speak, is usually done in two stages, Reed says; and while recovery varies, the person is typically up moving around after a few days. What happens after that depends on the person and how well he or she integrates into and is accepted by society.
While Stanton goes through his Change, Sarasota is facing its most
critical phase of development, going from what Andre Duany calls a
gawky teenager to a grown-up.
There are downtown development, the Van Wezel drama, and all the personalities and politics that make this place so special. May we choose the best man, woman or someone in between for the job.
We're an arts community and there's no better way to say we're liberal and inclusive than to consider a transgendered person to run the place.
What do you think about Sarasota hiring Mr./Ms. Stanton? Please post your comments below.
The signs on the doors at Fred’s and the adjacent Tasting Room said the closing was only temporary, but the mood inside Saturday night suggested the passing of not just a chic gathering spot, but also one of Sarasota’s most celebrated restaurants and bars.
Employees exchanged hugs, posed for pictures and even offered customers a free round of drinks as the night came to an end.
Fred’s employees learned only last week that the restaurant would close May 6 “for remodeling.” Officially, Fred’s will reopen in mid-October. But with the property also up for sale, there is plenty of speculation that Fred’s is dead – at least on Osprey Avenue.
The closing raised larger questions about the commercial future of what has been one of Sarasota’s most fashionable commercial blocks. Annabelle’s Home and Kitchen, across the street, closed last week. Morton’s Gourmet Market, in the same building as Annabelle’s, is also up for sale.
All three businesses are owned by Bill and Carla Griffin. The Griffins opened cloned versions of Fred’s and Morton’s recently in Lakewood Ranch, the sprawling development east of Interstate 75. As one employee told me Saturday, the Griffins have a “big nut” invested in Lakewood Ranch.
I worked the phones last week to get the story and to find out about the fate of Morton’s, but no company executives returned my phone calls.
So I went to the source. My hubby and I headed to Fred’s about 10 p.m. Saturday, ordered our usual Beefeater martinis, extra blue-cheese olives, and gently interrogated Fred’s staff about what was really going on.
Teary-eyed Maitre’d Jay Sainer, who has been with Fred’s since it opened eight years ago, made the rounds talking to tables of former employees and loyal customers.
“Everyone’s paying their respects,” said Sainer, who had been getting condolence booty all week including an Armani shirt, bottles of wine and, of course, job offers.
Several employees were offered jobs at the Lakewood Ranch Fred’s but there were few takers.
With the possible exit of those three businesses on Osprey, it doesn’t bode well for the neighborhood. We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, post your favorite Fred’s stories!
Three big new centers plan to get going, but will they all succeed?
By Kim Hackett
The walls are getting ready to come a-tumbling down at the Quay.
Cranes and wrecking balls are on the U.S. 41 & Fruitville site to clear out the 22-year-old waterfront mall that was once supposed to transform near downtown shopping and dining. It’ll take most of the year to pull it down.
“In the early stages it was pretty popular,” says Kerry Kirschner, CEO of the Argus Foundation and on the Sarasota City Commission when the Quay went up. “But then the nightclub area devolved from a sophisticated night venue to a kid’s kind of night club.”
A few knife fights and some violence followed and shops closed up, Kirschner says. “It created fear in the older community and it hurt the restaurants.”
A similar fate befell Main Street Plaza, which also went up in the 1980s with great fanfare. Once touted as a hip shopping destination, it’s now mostly governmental offices and my favorite shortcut from the parking lot to Zoria’s.
So here we go again with Bayside and less than a mile away, Pineapple Square.
At Bayside, Irish American is planning three 18-story towers with about 600 condos and a collection of waterfront restaurants and upscale shops. Pineapple Square will have 200-plus condos and 40 restaurants and shops.
That is, of course, if they can both sell enough condos to break ground.
Even if they do, the billion-dollar question is whether the area can support Bayside, Pineapple Square and the 185-acre Benderson University Town Center, which gets my vote for the most likely to succeed. Town Center is off I-75, and the Bendersons don’t have to sell condos to make the project work. They’ve also got The Forbes Company as their partner, and they assemble upscale retailers for malls all over the country.
We’ve all been talking about this three-front war for a few months now.
But this weekend Ernie Ritz and the Greater Main Street Merchant’s Association are bringing in the retail equivalent of a four-star general to plot strategy.
Officially, this has to do with helping the small mom-and-pop merchants downtown. Retail consultant Bob Gibbs will sail on the Marina Jack II on Saturday to dine with the community and talk about how to save downtown. There’s a workshop scheduled Sunday too.
Gibbs knows his stuff, and he did the retail plan for Pineapple Square. Ritz, the association’s leader, is also on the Pineapple payroll, fixing up Main Street storefronts and doing odd-and-end jobs.
They’re both good guys, but I’m wondering if with the Pineapple connection, they’ll venture into a question that could loom large down the road. How about a strategy that addresses what happens if the Pineapple doesn’t sprout out of the ground anytime soon?
The new supermajority rule isn’t going to stop development.
By Kim Hackett
Now that we have a new “slow-down-the-growth” city commission, they’ve done the reasonable thing and changed the law so a supermajority (4 to 1, versus 3 to 2) have to sign off on changes to Sarasota’s Comprehensive Plan.
Developers are now whining that this is “anti-growth” and downtown will wither away and die if it’s not easy for them to build bigger than the plan allows. This is all anti-logic to me.
Why have a comp plan (and spend millions to develop it) if exceptions are a cakewalk?
All we’re talking about here is following the plan past commissions approved.
No one’s development rights are being taken away.
The 1350 Main building, one of the new downtown condos.
Most of the exceptions granted the last few years would have passed under this new requirement, anyway, which makes all this whining and posturing unnecessary.
The real subtext here is that the supermajority vote is the first development-related issue to come before the new commission. Our two new commissioners, Kelly Kirschner and Dick Clapp, campaigned on giving neighborhoods a place at the political table, and both were elected by landslides.
The chamber and other business groups are really worried about future so-called “anti-development” votes.
They don’t need to worry about Clapp and Kirschner; their biggest anti-development foe goes by the name MLS.
The calendar may say spring but it’s more like Cristmas in Tallahassee.
After Jeb Bush’s Grinch-like reign, “The People’s Governor” has legislators acting like kids on Christmas morning.
In this newfound bipartisan atmosphere, they’re tearing through issues like tissue paper.
The insurance lobby has been handed a lump of coal and denied exorbitant increases (we’re all at risk for a bigger bill later, but hey it’s something), the controversial STAR teacher bonus program has gotten the heave-ho in favor of principals having some say, and Crist has even demanded that schools get our pudgy kids into gym class every day.
This political atmosphere has even spilled over locally.
In Tuesday’s runoff election, we’ve got slow-growth Republican Dick Clapp who has the support of environmentalists, battling Democrat Mary Anne Servian, who has voted for big downtown developments.
Nobody seems to be reading the script.
As state lawmakers get ready to mark the 100th day of “Cristmas” with a lengthy wish list remaining, I say “settle down, fellas.”
In their bipartisan giddiness, lawmakers have been batting around a few ludicrous ideas, chief among them, abolishing the property tax system in favor of higher sales taxes.
Local governments’ tax revenues this year are lower than expected as it is, and with Floridians tapped out of their home equity, the spending spree on new furniture and plasma TVs is over. This new tax plan is just too risky.
The other idiotic idea they’re considering in the “North Pole” is to lease our highways to private companies, who can then muscle more toll money out of motorists. The lease money would supposedly enable us to build up our woefully inadequate road system. Wouldn’t it be easier for lawmakers to just muster some political will to raise tolls themselves and keep out the middleman?
It’s been fun this season to watch politicos getting dizzy with confusion over who’s the conservative and who’s the liberal. Republicans feel betrayed by “The People’s Governor” and Democrats are stunned by the gift they’ve been given in Crist. He’s even restored the rights of some felons to vote – something Republicans have long feared would benefit Democrats.
This season is not quite “It’s a Wonderful Life” but after years of nasty partisan bickering, it’s refreshing nonetheless.
Another reason to make it easier to get to downtown’s bayfront.
By Kim Hackett
The plan to connect the bayfront with downtown got a dubious boost recently when Sarasota was ranked among the most dangerous places in the country for walkers.
No other state has more pedestrian fatalities than Florida. We average 3.24 fatalities per 100,000 residents, compared to a national average of 1.65, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And in the most dangerous state, only Tampa surpasses our quaint community with a rate of 3.69 to our 3.18.
The latest study came out a couple of weeks ago but it wasn’t news to anyone who has tried to use those puny bike lanes running through Sarasota or attempted to cross U.S. 41.
The city may finally be moving in the direction of connecting the bayfront with downtown.
Even at the crosswalk on U.S. 41 heading to Marina Jack, you take a leap of faith that some hapless tourist doesn’t blow the light. Motorists aren’t even required to come to a complete stop at crosswalks when pedestrians are present; they only have to yield.
Keep that in mind the next time you go for a nighttime stroll.
For the connecting-downtown-to-the-water plan to work without wiping out a few pedestrians, the speed limit on U.S. 41 near Marina Jack would ideally drop to about 27 mph (traffic is supposed to move quicker at that speed. Don’t ask me to explain it, though).
Has anyone gotten traffic to stop by pushing one of these buttons? Push and I think the light makes you wait longer.
To lower the speed limit, officials will have to strip U.S. 41 of its state road status along the bayfront, which requires the city to come up with an alternative route. Believe it or not, the state Department of Transportation is open to the idea; officials are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the city to make up its mind.
For the first time, the city seems to be pursuing the idea.
A few years ago, city leaders bowed to the public pressure of what Duany called “four old coots and their friends” and scuttled the connectivity plan.
But on the heels of Duany’s recent visit (and his threat to never come back if we don’t make the connection), Commissioner Ken Shelin brought it up at a city commission meeting and now staff is looking into possible U.S. 41 diversions.
It’s all part of making Sarasota a walkable, pedestrian-friendly community, something we now have the national affirmation we’re not.
John Simon and I forge better communication about Pineapple Square.
I was a bit aggressive in my questioning of John Simon at the Pineapple Square groundbreaking about the project’s condo presales (see previous blog), and neither one of us was feeling too good about our interaction.
So we talked again.
And I rephrased the question.
“The community is a little rattled by the real estate slump and while I understand you not wanting to release presale numbers, I guess everyone wants to know you have legs to pull this project off,” I told him.
Simon expressed frustration with media coverage of the project and what he sees as inaccuracies that have made it more difficult for him to promote it.
“People should take solace that we’re investing $25 million this year in the first phase,” Simon says. “There will be 10 new merchants operating downtown” in redeveloped space beginning in October through the rest of the year. The $25 million will be spent fixing up buildings on Lemon and constructing a new one to house Sur La Table.
With that settled, we talked about phase two—the new buildings that will have 276 condos and 40 retailers.
“Can you afford to sit and wait out the market if need be?” I asked.
“We have patience and we have tenacity and we’re doers,” Simon said.
Can I take that as a yes?
“Yes,” Simon says. “You may see me eating Burger King every once in a while. We see it as an opportunity. We are virtually the only new condo building opening in 2009 or 2010 and we love that market condition. People confuse the market now and the market two or three years from now.”
So there you have it. Now I’ll stop pestering him.
The official groundbreaking of Pineapple Square didn’t break any new ground.
By Kim Hackett
As I watched this morning’s Pineapple Square groundbreaking ceremony among a sea of suits and sunglasses, one of my favorite quotes came to mind: “Don’t confuse motion with activity.”
No new ground was broken at the ceremony attended by Mayor Fredd Atkins, commissioners Mary Anne Servian, Danny Bilyeu and Ken Shelin (noticeably absent was Lou Ann Palmer, the only commissioner to vote against the city subsidizing the Pineapple plan).
There was no shovel turning over dirt, no real news.
On Monday, the city finalized plans to hand over a city parking lot worth about $10 million to Pineapple Square Properties (aka the Isaac Companies) but nobody talked about that. The commissioners did sign their names in cement surrounding a Pineapple Square plaque.
Cutline: City Commissioner Danny Bilyeu and Mayor Fredd Atkins write their names in cement in a Pineapple Square commemorative plaque as Commissioner Mary Anne Servian watches.
We’ve all known for several months now that Brooks Brothers and Sur La Table (a lesser known Williams and Sonoma-type kitchen store) are coming. Pastry Art is in a redeveloped building on Main Street that’s part of the Pineapple Square complex, but that’s not a new store. Sur La Table will be in a new, 5,000-square-foot, two-story strictly commercial building on Lemon and First, across from the bus station, but that’s the only new building so far.
There’s this general sense of confusion, even among journalists, about exactly what is Pineapple Square and who paid what for what, and got what in return. Somewhere along the line, I missed that the city had to cough up $7.6 million to build parking spaces on a lot it sold to the developers of Pineapple Square for $1 million, even though the land was valued at around $8 to $11 million.
Pineapple Square Properties Chairman Bill Isaac at the groundbreaking ceremony.
The media has written about these Pineapple happenings, not distinguishing Pineapple’s redevelopment of Main Street with Pineapple’s proposed twin-tower development a few blocks away that’s supposed to have 40 stores and restaurants, 276 condos and more than 1,000 parking spots.
For those two really big buildings to rise – one on a city-owned lot – condos have to be sold and commercial and retail leases have to be signed. That’s the only way the city is going to get back the hundreds of parking spaces that were once on that property.
Also absent from Monday’s city commission meeting and today’s groundbreaking is any public questioning about just how those condo sales are going. Hundreds of condos still under construction are flooding the market. Doncha think some city officials should have asked before signing on the dotted line Monday?
Simon acted like it was an affront when I brought all this up at the ceremony.
“I’m not going to answer any questions related to that,” Simon said.
So then I asked Bill Isaac, chairman of the Isaac Companies, who came up with the Pineapple Square idea. He was sporting an orange tie with gold pineapples that kind of matched all the old Main Street buildings that are now painted pineapple-yellow.
“We haven’t been in a position to do contracts,” Isaac told me. “We just brought on a new director of sales.”
How many condos need to be sold, commercial leases signed to break ground on the new buildings?
“They play off each other,” Isaac explained. “We have to demonstrate that through leases and pre-sales.”
What happens if they don’t get those leases and presales?
“We believe this project will be a success,” Isaac said before joining the groundbreaking party at Mattison’s.
When I picked up my morning paper, I felt a little sorry for Mike Langton and his 1350 Main partners.
That’s the 134-unit condo building across from Sarasota News and Books that sold out reservations in 90 minutes and caused such a fuss because of its height and the street mess that about killed businesses on Palm Avenue.
Langton and crew are trying to get the rest of their money from contract owners this week on condos ranging from about $300,000 to $1.4 million.
If buyers aren’t skittish enough, the Sarasota Herald Tribune ran a front page story about people walking away from deposits rather than close on downtown condos that might not be worth so much anymore. Apparently, a penthouse contract holder at Rivo on Ringling left a $340,000 deposit on the table.
I could just imagine Langton and his partners hoping people were too busy getting ready for their closings to read today’s paper. I talked to Langton earlier this week about rumors on the street that a third of his contract owners would probably walk.
He pooh-poohed the rumors.
“We’ve got about three or four who won’t close,” Lanston said. “People are fearful but we’re seeing a lot of traffic. People would be foolish not to close.”
As of Wednesday, 34 condos were listed in the MLS; one had sold for $737,000.
All this condo intrigue is a mixed bag for the Greater Downtown Merchants Association. While I’m sure they want condo owners to move in so they have a larger customer base, a flooded condo market may mean delays on the Quay project. And that gives the merchants more time to push a historic district that they hope will save them from the Irish guys cannibalizing all the downtown business with a 700-plus condo-retail complex.
But a surplus of condos also means that Pineapple Square may be in a waiting pattern, and many of the stores and landlords are pinning their survival to that project.
After all this speculating, we now get to watch and see how this all shakes out.
If you’re curious and have the time, you can check the Sarasota County Property Appraisers site to see how many properties change hands. It takes about three weeks for the site to reflect a closing. (You can also check to see how much your neighbor paid for his house. Those Sunshine Laws allow us all to be so nosey!)
Reflecting on the kidnapping of Manatee’s 13-year-old Clay Moore.
By Kim Hackett
We’re all breathing a sigh of relief that 13-year old Clay Moore is seemingly okay and back home with his family after last week’s kidnapping at gunpoint.
A further sigh that apparently there wasn’t any sexual abuse.
But below the surface, parents are hyperventilating.
Moore’s abduction came a day after two separate bus-stop abduction attempts in Sarasota and Pinellas counties, the killing of North Port’s Coral Rose a few months ago, and of course, Carlie Bruscia’s brutal murder in 2004.
Instead of crossing guards, it appears we need armed guards to protect our children against all these wackos.
I’ve warned my kids about good-touch, bad-touch and have installed Net Nanny on our computers, but have so far have resisted giving into the culture of fear, monitoring their every move with GPS cell phones.
Even after spending time at Brucia’s school interviewing her friends and teachers days after her body was found, I was adamant I wouldn’t alter the freedom I gave my children.
Stifling the kids’ independence poses greater risks than Stranger Danger.
But last week’s events are making me reconsider.
We live in a transient community with a lot of workers and visitors coming in and out.
How do you balance protecting your kids with all they lose by too much parental hovering? It’s more than just a philosophical question.
Last week’s abduction attempts came just as my eight-year-old mastered the combination lock.
We’re a quarter mile from the bus stop and he wanted the independence of riding his bike instead of hitching a ride with my helpful, but what I viewed as overprotective, neighbors. It took me a week and a rescue trip one day after school to get him to understand the go-right-past zero-then-left-then- right- to-the-final-number maneuver.
I waved him off early last week proud but a little anxious.
But Monday, I nixed the bike. He’s back to catching a ride with the neighbors and I’m caught wondering if that’s the right thing.
All these things ruin a child’s sense that the world is an okay place. Paradoxically, that’s what they may need to be safe these days.
No matter how many times you’ve been burned in love or politics, when you get a hint of what may be the real deal, you can’t help but hope.
I’m seeing that starry-eyed look among Democrats now under the influence of Obamamania and locally, Kirschnermania. That would be the son, Kelly Kirschner, not the dad, Kerry, the Republican, former mayor and now head of the pro-business Argus Foundation.
Both love golf and each other, but they diverge on politics.
Kelly, who is president of the Alta Vista Neighborhood Association and recently led a city hall protest over a mammoth development in his working-class neighborhood, is now taking on Republican Danny Bilyeu for his District 3 seat.
All politics aside: Kerry and Kelly Kirschner and Molly Cardamone at the fundraiser for Kelly.
Kelly reminds me of Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent, but through that easy-going exterior, his supporters see the next political superman.
“He’s so smart” and “Maybe Congress?” I heard among 75 supporters at a political fundraiser Sunday at Suzanne and Bob Atwell’s Bird Key home.
It was an afternoon of putting away differences and pulling out checkbooks.
Surrounded by his dad, mother Jane Kirschner Tuccillo, step-parents and his grandma from Texas, Kelly told the group he wanted to be an advocate for neighborhoods and Sarasota Bay.
As the conversation turned partisan, Kerry meandered over to the dining room table and started picking at the appetizers.
A little uncomfortable around all these Dems? I asked him.
“Not at all; this is supposed to be a non-partisan race,” Kerry said. “The nexus of Kelly’s campaign is to bring the community together.”
Besides, Kerry said he only has himself to blame for his son’s leftward tilt.
Kerry was a classmate of Bill Clinton’s at Georgetown. Eventually that led to his son working in the White House.
“Clinton commandeered Kelly,” Kerry said with a laugh.
As the fundraiser started breaking up, Suzanne Atwell snapped a few pictures, encouraging former adversaries to crouch together.
“I don’t know if I should be photographed with this fellow,” said former commissioner Mollie Cardamore, who was often at loggerheads with the elder Kirschner on issues like a strong-mayor form of government.
Cherchez la femmes in the city commission election.
By Kim Hackett
If the City Commission District 2 race were a movie, the title would be a toss-up between Revenge of the Chivalrous Ladies or Cat Women.
I had to think twice about going down this path because I’m a feminist who is thrilled that women are gaining power in politics. But all’s fair in love and war, and the city commission race is shaping up to be all-out war with a female twist.
Three candidates are trying to oust incumbent Mary Anne Servian. Two of those candidates, both women, have honeys who were publicly dissed and pushed out of city-related jobs.
Hmmm. Makes you wonder if there’s a message here.
First, we have Andrea Daniels running after her hubby John Matthews was fired a few months ago as director of the Downtown Farmers Market.
Then Denise Kowal, girlfriend of former city manager Mike McNees, jumps in to run against Servian, coincidentally, a few weeks after McNees is forced to resign. As you’ll recall, Servian had been a big supporter of McNees and the swing vote in helping him keep his job. But then in January, she had a very public change of heart. McNees’ pink slip was on its way when he resigned.
You gotta love the ladies for their chivalry.
In fairness, both Kowal and Daniels are successful businesswomen whose candidacy wouldn’t be questioned under normal circumstance
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