The plaintiffs may appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. But it’ll only get more difficult to challenge developers.
Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: Feb. 5, 2025
Host: Last week, a three-judge appeals court panel in Tampa ruled in favor of a developer and Sarasota County in a lawsuit brought by a couple whose lives in the rural east county is about to be turned upside down by the 5,000 homes LWR Communities wants to build on 4,000 acres. We talked to Mike Hutchinson, one of the plaintiffs, about the implications of the ruling, both for himself and for rural lifestyles and agriculture in coastal Florida.
Johannes Werner: The ruling came as a bit of a surprise to Hutchinson and Eileen Fitzgerald, his co-plaintiff and wife, after one of the judges in a hearing two weeks ago praised the quality of the plaintiff lawyer’s argument.
Hutchinson has yet to see the legal arguments backing the judges’ ruling. He told WSLR News that once he has, they might appeal again and take their case to the Florida Supreme Court.
Mike Hutchinson
Mike Hutchinson: We have to decide, I guess, whether we want to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court or not. That’s a decision we haven’t made yet. With two losses in a row, that’s going to be a big decision if we want to move forward with that. Without having seen their arguments—we had 15 days to ask what their rationale was, and we would need to get that before we could even consider going to the Florida Supreme Court.
JW: He now expects dust storms during construction, he fears there will be more flooding down the road, and he already is coping with Miami-style traffic on Fruitville Road.
MH: I think, down the road, we’re going to find out that a lot of the assumptions their experts made are going to be wrong, and it’ll be too late to worry about it. For us, the short term: it’s going to be a lot of traffic. On Fruitville at certain times of the day now, it’s just unbearable for people that live down here. If you lived in Fort Lauderdale or Miami, it’s probably not that bad, but if you try to go out at 7:00, 7:30 in the morning and get onto Fruitville, you’ve got to wait a while for an opening, and if you miss it, then you’ve got to wait a while again because there’s just a steady stream of traffic.
JW: But more than anything, the county commission’s practices are killing a way of life, according to Hutchinson.
MH: For me, it’s disappointing in that I believe you should be able to have different ways of life in different parts of the county. In this county, for instance, you live out in the beaches, that’s a way of life. You can have it. If you want to live in a downtown-type environment, we have that downtown, and we have suburbia. We used to have, out east, where you can have 4-H and everything, and right now, the county commission seems to be saying, “We don’t want that anymore.”
Residents of Old Miakka, the county’s oldest continuous rural settlement, created Keep the Country Country, to protect the remnants of rural life in Sarasota. The non-profit has helped fund the lawsuit.
JW: Hutchinson and Fitzgerald did get help—mostly through a grassroots group called Keep the Country Country—but they are bearing most of the cost themselves. And that cost piled up very quickly, coming close to six digits, he says.
MH: We’ve been fine. We got some help from Keep the Country Country—people around the area who have helped out through Keep the Country Country, which is a 501(c)(4)—but Eileen and I paid the majority of it. We’re what you call pretty conservative with our money generally, so it hasn’t been a big burden or anything.
JW: A new Florida law raises the financial stakes to the point of making a legal challenge to new development near-impossible. Senate Bill 540, which became law in 2023, makes citizens or groups who file lawsuits against a developer responsible for the opponents’ legal cost if they lose the case. Hutchinson’s lawsuit is not subject to the new law because he filed suit before it became effective. His costs would be astronomical if he had filed now.
MH: Now, I doubt people will do it because in our case, we had two full-time and a part-time lawyer. Our bills were not staggering compared to what I assume they were on the other side. What they ran up has to be staggering. I have no idea. When we had the hearing here in Sarasota, they had three attorneys—well, four attorneys on the bench—and behind them, they had two either law clerks or paralegals supporting them, and then they had about three people that were lawyers from the firm over in the audience. I have no idea how many of those were being paid and how much.
JW: So the cost would be staggering for any future plaintiffs if they lose?
MH: If they lost, yeah.
JW: Even so, Hutchinson believes there are still ways to file suit.
MH: My guess is—a way to do it, maybe, is with a non-profit in the future.
JW: How would you structure that?
MH: I don’t know. I’m assuming you would get a non-profit that somehow has standing in the case, and that can be very difficult. How does the non-profit have standing? So that has to happen, and then if they lose the case, they can only take their assets. But I’m not sure about that. We’d have to check with a lawyer. But that’s what my thoughts would be, down the road, is that’s what you would look at maybe.
Lakewood Ranch Southeast: 5,000 homes on 4,000 acres of pasture land.
JW: Ultimately, it all boils down to politics. Within that, Hutchinson paints a contrasting picture between Sarasota and neighboring Manatee County. Hutchinson ran as a Republican for Sarasota County Commission in 2020 and narrowly lost.
MH: A lot of the grassroots people in the Republican party over there got tired of the development, and the Republicans basically went and elected county commissioners in opposition to the developers’ candidates. They basically pissed off the developers. Soon thereafter, the Republican party of Florida cancelled the Republican Party of Manatee. It’s been—what do you call it?—told you don’t exist anymore. That’s their retribution, and I presume their hope is they can get their people elected back in next time around. That’s what has caused Manatee County’s commission to be a whole lot better than ours. In our case, it’s a whole lot tougher at the moment because the Republican Party of Sarasota is totally in the tank with the developers.
JW: Asked about the two Sarasota commissioners who voted “no” last week on the expansion of Lakewood Ranch, Hutchinson said this:
MH: We had hoped to have three. Alex Coe [a Republican running for District 1] didn’t make it. But it shows that it’s growing, showing that if we get the right candidates, we can turn it around. The big thing is to find the right candidate for the next elections.
JW: Reporting for WSLR News, Johannes Werner.
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