Sarasota Livin'

Watching the Sarasota City Commission (SCC) meeting last night it seems we could really use some work developing a shared vision for downtown...

The City Manager and Mayor made it clear that a foundation of the current plan was for the City to provide centralized parking in strategic locations - there is a parking study soon to be complete that should help further identify these locations.

We have the "new" downtown master plan (several years old) - We have a special City Commission meeting coming up this week to process the rezoning associated with that master plan - I am unsure of what other "duties" (beyond parking) the City has as part of that plan.

Park East, Rosemary District and Gillespie Park are all being rezoned as part of the new Downtown Plan.

SCC has another special meeting next week to discuss the EAR updates for the City Comprehensive Plan - this will "adjust" the current plan for the whole City.

The Burns Court property owners are going to develop a vision for their part of downtown (as Laurel Park has already done).

We have lots of construction going on today and many exciting (or scary depending on your point of view) projects on the drawing boards of developers.

We have the Downtown Partnership working to discuss a vision for downtown ...

We have a cultural master plan (somewhere)

We have a master plan for Payne Park (no money...)

We have several groups working on "affordable / attainable / workforce" housing.

We have SCOPE working on several important planning projects.

We have Sarasota County and the local MPO ....

It just seems we have lots of plans and people thinking about planning / vision and maybe that is a good thing (or even a great thing). I think we should somehow be sharing these plans more. It would be good to be able to have a single website that these organizations and us individuals could share each others work-- I for one can't go to more meetings than I do now but I like staying up late reading / thinking about it (very geeky/scary ...)