Our next scheduled meeting is this Thursday, June 14, 7 pm in Room 106, in the meeting rooms at the rear of Sarasota Alliance Church, 7221 Bee Ridge Rd.
Lake Sarasota is at the lowest water level it's been in quite some time. (Note: the water pumped into the canals has nothing to do with the depletion -- we just need rain.) Rougly 56 years ago, when it was Sunshine Springs and Gardens, the lake looked like this: And here's a view of the canal and resort that was built to attract buyers here in the mid 1950's: The video moves back and forth between Cypress Gardens and Sunshine Springs and Gardens . About 4:01 minutes in, you see our lake, and at about 4:15, the concrete grandstand that still can be seen at the lake, but here it's bright white, as is the sand that rings the lake: If you know anyone with more footage or photos or other recollections of the early days of Lake Sarasota, please get in touch with us at LakeSarasota@gmail.com . Thanks to Winter resident Beany for pointing us to the canal photo and the video.
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 use...
To the Board of Sarasota County Commissioners: From: Tom Matrullo Re: SE 1875/ RZ 23-19 Date: Nov. 16, 2023 Commissioner: 1. The community of Lake Sarasota has roughly 1,600 homes. Yet when a poorly conceived proposal to wedge 80+ homes onto a narrow road, at a tight blind curve, where two schools tie up traffic each day both in the morning and afternoon, very few residents were notified about the Neighborhood Workshop. I live on the street that leads to this proposed disaster - if built, I would see it from my home - yet I was not informed of two workshops held by Bo Medred months ago. A handful of residents actually attended. So the first point is, the County planning code should drop the 750-foot rule and replace it with a competent planner's sense of what homes, roads, and areas will be directly impacted by a proposed project. 2. The major problems with Hand Road pre-exist this intensifying proposal, SE 1875/ RZ 23-19. They are laid out...
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