Email about dangers of Hand Road proposal to Sarasota County Commissioners

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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 here, and here. Apparently there has been no due diligence to even locate a relevant binding site plan filed by Sarasota Baptist years ago.

3. The proponents of filling this open space with homes ignore all of these issues. Instead of coming to our community to hear our concerns, Sarasota Baptist and David Weekley homes have ignored us. Needless to say, they have not offered to mitigate dangers -- e.g. install signage, traffic calming, etc. Nothing whatsoever.

Our concerns include 
  • a. The safety of our children, who walk or ride with their parents on Hand Road to Lakeview School each day, and the students of Oak Park, most of whom are bussed to school.
  • b. Instead of exploring alternative routes, such as proposing to make Falcon Place or another road provide an exit to Proctor Road, they simply opt to have two entrances / exits on Hand Road, one quite near the blind curve.
  • c. No traffic study has been done. The county sees 80 homes as too few to require a study - but local knowledge of Hand Road's challenges - and the fact that it is the sole exit from Lake Sarasota to the South, making it a key evacuation route - would make anyone with an understanding of traffic realize that a traffic study is needed in due diligence to determine danger. (For more detail on this, see attachments with correspondence with the developer's agent, Bo Medred: Attachment 1   Attachment 2.)
As this writer makes clear, this proposal lacks the data needed for anyone in authority to be able to render an informed decision.

At the Planning Commission hearing, two members familiar with Hand Road and its blind curve voted against this proposal in its current form. In the PC discussion, the question of safety was not addressed by anyone else. This is not diligence, it is the myopia of industry insiders who apparently are too lazy to do their job.

SE 1875/ RZ 23-19 should never have been presented in its current form. It fails to address the safety issues mentioned above, and others - such as storms and flooding, failing roads, among others.

This proposal is far from even being a finished product. It must be either denied, or returned for major changes to configuration, and for a traffic study.

Respectfully,

Tom Matrullo

Lake Sarasota 34241

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