The Sarasota City Commission held a special meeting on September 21, 2026, at 5:30 PM to conduct second public hearings on six budget resolutions setting millage rates and approving budgets for the City of Sarasota, the Golden Gate Point Streetscape Special District, and the Downtown Improvement District for fiscal year 2026–2027. The meeting also included public comments on a proposed transportation chapter rewrite and capital improvement projects.
Good evening. Welcome to this uh September twenty first, twenty twenty six special city commission meeting. I would like to call the meeting to order and ask that you silence your phones, please. Uh first we will have the invocation by City Auditor and Clerk Griggs, followed by the Vice Mayor will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Ms. Griggs, are there any changes to the order of the day? No, Mayor. Okay. So may I do I need uh No? Okay. We don't need to approve the approve the agenda. Okay, then uh we are going to be taking public comments. So, Ms. Griggs, would you uh provide the pledge of public conduct? Thank you, Mayor. We may disagree, but we will be respectful to one another. We will direct all comments to issues. Thank you. And we have uh four people who have signed up to speak. Uh Dan Lobeck. Um, Mayor, before you go, go through those. You do you just have the ones that are regular public comment, or are we going into the budget items? Because those are two separate things. Or if you want to just put it all together, you can't. I I was calling the non-budget item first. Okay, perfect. But but I figured they could all come up at one I'm okay with that. Okay, well, the commission is. We'll just take Mr. Lobeck first. And welcome. Good evening. Another busy meeting in this one. Um Dan Lobeck, uh, Florida resident, homeowner, business owner, longtime citizen advocate. And I have obviously taken with great interest the developments with the Florida Department of Commerce, Florida Commerce. And uh have passed out to you what I don't think you yet have, and that is the full staff report from Commerce and FDOT with respect to the uh rewrite of the transportation chapter. And basically, it's not just a matter of changing some shells to shoulds, as staff may have passed on to you from a recent meeting. It goes much deeper than that. Basically, what they're saying is that legally, under Senate Bill 180, um, or the law that was passed by that legislation. You can't pass anything that would increase burdens or constraints on developers. So staff's attempt to switch to alternative modalities of transportation and require developers to contribute to sidewalks and bus stops and uh maybe a fee for parking um breaks being given to the developers, which frankly is not a good idea anyway. Look what happened in the Rosemary District when they cut parking requirements for developers. That uh instead of that, you can only pass things that weaken controls on developers. And it's not just those five or six things that have a shell in it. The transportation approach entirely. Um you can't require developers to do anything if you do an amendment. But if you don't do an amendment, you have controls today in the existing comprehensive plan that you can continue to enforce. And uh there have been recent articles in the observer, for instance, about how that's been applied, and it may not be perfect, but it's legal, and it does the job of evaluating what kind of impacts developers have on traffic congestion and dealing with it. Your CIP that you're gonna be dealing with at a moment has an LOS table, improvements to traffic related things, roundabouts, intersection improvements, and so forth.