Sarasota Baptist's planned development: Careless? Indifferent? Dangerous?
Update: On Nov. 28, 2023, despite the absence of any traffic study. the Board of Sarasota County Commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the Sarasota Baptist windfall proposal for 87 unaffordable homes on Hand Road. Six people from the community offered several reasons that a rational judge would consider to be compelling, but not this Board. This commission reads the Comp Plan not as a set of strategies to prevent poor planning, but rather as a mandate to mindlessly approve growth. From the follow-up story in the Sarasota News Leader : The new homes will increase car trips from 66 to 847 daily on crippled Hand Road. Commissioner Mark Smith noted Transportation staff had provided a chart in the report on the application showing that the daily number of trips on Hand Road linked to the existing zoning, Open Use Estate, was 66. That figure was attributed to data found in the 11th edition of the Institute of Traffic Engineers (ITE) manual, which the Transportation staff uses as its prima