Our Mayor is touting the benefits of the City of Sarasota to the retail development community at their big trade show this week in Las Vegas.
While it is nice to see the Mayor excited about Sarasota, we sure hope she and all the commissioners are open to citizen input concerning the new Pineapple Square project. Fast tracking this project in order to help one developer beat the competition may not be in the best interest of Sarasota.
What do we really know about the effect of this on our downtown and our community? We have lots of questions and we are sure that other individuals and organizations have questions. Things like the effect on other downtown businesses, traffic increases and traffic patterns, scale of the buildings, parking for workers as well as customers, does the requested TIF make sense, is it needed, does Sarasota need this much parking concentrated in one small area, will this magnify the seasonality issues we face as a resort destination?
Our commissioners need to start a process of involving the residents in the decision concerning whether to move forward with this proposal and if so, how fast. It seems like the newspaper favors the proposal (a recent editorial suggests parallel fast tracking for evaluating the PSQ proposal as well as an RFP for the State St parking lot) and we know the Mayor is gung-ho. We would have expected a more neutral response and analysis of whether the community really wants this large development and how our quality of life will change as a result of it.
We believe the recent commissioner elections made a call for change in our downtown building boom. We don’t think the change called for was a speed up of development or as the Manager of the Isaac Group put it - you haven’t seen anything yet!
How about less hype and more realistic thinking.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment