The City of Sarasota held its annual statutory special meeting on November 7, 2025, at 12:01 PM, chaired by outgoing Mayor Liz Alpert. The meeting featured a State of the City address, the election of a new Mayor and Vice Mayor, and farewell and welcome remarks from commissioners and staff. The meeting adjourned at 12:55 PM.
All right, good. I guess good afternoon now, everyone. It is twelve oh one uh PM on Friday, November seventh, twenty twenty-five, and this is our uh annual statutory meeting. So it's a big meeting where we give the state of the city and choose a new mayor and vice mayor. So I will let's get to it. I will call on the city auditor and clerk to do the invit invocation. Thank you, please stand up. Heavenly Father, we affirm our faith in thee. We seek your divine strength, wisdom, and guidance in the deliberations that affect the lives of each of the citizens of our community. In the name we pray, amen. Oh, any changes to the order then. No. Oh no. All right. Um here we go. I mean, I think overall we can say the city's in pretty good shape, and we've done some cool things, so let's go go through it. Um we have um a couple of years ago, we changed the uh allowable density to encourage affordable housing in the bay front and down count downtown core and urban edge. And um increase the density by four times, but not increase the size of the units. Um that has really been helping us create more affordable housing. I think we have um I think there's a slide here too that shows that we have about a thousand uh units right now in it uh underway on the books. And we're also, which doesn't count the attainable housing project that we are hoping to create across from City Hall. We've already bought the property for the project, and we're hoping to partner with an affordable housing contractor or developer to be able to bring that to fruition. While doing all of these things, we've also been fiscally responsible. Um our annual budget this year was 2 million, you know, a little over 2 million lower than last year's budget, even though we had to increase the millage slightly, the increase was uh due to needing to build back up our reserves from the hurricanes last year. Um the hurricanes, as you can imagine, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, caused a lot of damage in the city. We're still working on the cleanup, but just the debris collection and the immediate um cleanup. We depleted our our reserves about 80%. So the millage rate, the additional amount is to go towards building that up. Our director of economic development is working with the community up there, and I believe with uh Commissioner Batti to create economic activity in in the MLK corridor, and I think they're making really uh good strides towards doing that. Um our uh legacy business program encourages businesses to stay in our community uh long term, and of course uh we encourage and you know, encourages with the trolley service downtown to the Barrier Islands so that tourists on the Barrier Islands can come into our downtown. Uh people from the mainland can go out to St. Armand's and Leto Key. So it's a mutually beneficial you know, really service for all of our residents and visitors. We've been actively working in historic preservation. I think sometimes we get you know, I guess the bad rap that we don't consider that, but uh actually we have been conserving or preserving the structures out at or I guess along the the bay, I guess we're would call them the um the corridor that's going to be with the municipal auditorium and this is the Chidsee Library up on the right that just was restored, and if you haven't seen it, you should you should go and take a tour of it. It's they've really done a phenomenal job. We're looking forward to the Muremar building on Palm Avenue being renovated and I don't think it's on this slide, but I just wanted to remember I just wanted to mention that the McAlpin house uh that everybody was worried about has found a new location, so that's gonna be moved, and so we're really happy, happy about that. Public art is uh you know alive and well, and we're working on a calls for walls project. Um and as you can see, we already have some murals painted on walls around around the city, and if you're an artist out there and you're interested in doing that, you know, please uh get in touch with the city. Um the public art contributions also include um contributions by developers when they do a new project. Um they're required to either contribute to the public art fund or do their own piece of art, and you can see the one on the right is at Astor and Lynx and their parking garage. And of course, we can't forget our art in the roundabouts. Um the one on the right is Polly at 14th Street and US 41, which is really a stunning, if you haven't driven past that yet, it's really a stunning sculpture. And we're making good use of we're making good use of our uh city hall walls and um our current cultural exhibit is petticoat painters. And our current cultural exhibit is petticoat painters. We just got a new collection from them that are hanging on the walls. So on your way out, if you didn't take a look at them on your way in, you know, take a look at all of the paintings out there before we had the collection by the Florida Highwayman. So we're changing that out regularly. So if you if you haven't, you know, stop by periodically and see what kind of artwork we have on display here at City Hall. Just this slide is just to illustrate the number of projects going on in the city and how much our development services, how hard they have to work.