The SPAC proponents will present a changed plan to the city commission Monday.
By Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: February 25, 2026
Host: This Monday, the proponents of a new performing arts center will present a changed and scaled-down plan to the Sarasota City Commission. Parking—all paid for by the city—may not be at the center of attention, but it should be, as Gretchen Cochran reports.
Gretchen Cochran: The Bay Park was on the Rosemary District’s February meeting agenda. Diana Shaheen, the Bay’s chief operating officer, had lots of good news to share, but little was mentioned about a potential new performing arts center’s need for parking that could gobble up street parking all over that neighborhood.
Shaheen’s enthusiasm is contagious. She’s a mechanical engineer taking her Proctor & Gamble experience and plying it to the buildout of the 55-acre park between the Rosemary District and Sarasota Bay. She talked about day docks that just opened. And drawings for the first full-service restaurant had just dropped on her desk.
Diana Shaheen
Diana Shaheen: It’s integrating into the park. You’ll be able to walk around it from all sides. You’d walk up this boardwalk to a beautiful Sarasota School of Architecture restaurant with raised, elevated roofline and different materials. But what’s important is we want everyone to be able to have—we call it circulation. Where people walk. The walkways, whether you’re going to the restaurant or not, will allow you still to get along the shoreline.
It would be great if it was open by 2027 for season, but again, there are a lot of moving parts that we’ve got to work through for other projects on the site.
GC: The restaurant will serve not only boaters and park visitors but also those heading for a show at either the Van Wezel or possibly a second much larger performing arts center yet to be built.
New plans for that performing arts center are scheduled for presentation Monday to the Sarasota City Commission for a thumbs up or down. Parking and its impact on the Rosemary District will be a major consideration.
Tania Castroverde Moskalenko
Tania Castroverde Moskalenko is director of the Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation. It has been working with the city for several years to draft an affordable plan that originally would have replaced the city’s Van Wezel Performing Arts Center. It was in that earlier era that the city commissioned a parking study to determine how many parking spaces would be required to serve the new center with its 2,250 seat capacity.
A consulting firm calculated seven years ago that to serve the new SPAC (short for Sarasota Performing Arts Center), 1,400 parking spaces would be needed and could be satisfied with a parking structure, 112 spots from the cultural district and 870 spaces throughout the Rosemary District.
The new plan proposes two parking garages with 750 spaces total, one three stories and one four stories, sitting south of the new auditorium. They would be used by park visitors as well as SPAC patrons. The city would cover their costs. Fees are as yet undetermined.
The plan Castroverde Moskalenko will present Monday will be for the projected new center up the yet-to-be-built hill 20-some feet above sea level on the northeast edge of the property. The 750-space asphalt parking lot, long considered an environmental hazard, would be removed.
The new proposal includes a smaller SPAC further south than the first proposed location, and it gives the historic Van Wezel a key function.
Finding the Rosemary District parking spots will not be easy and would require patrons walking across heavily trafficked Tamiami Trail. Furthermore, the high-rise condominium towers across the street are not inviting to pedestrians, the study said. There are no public parking garages in the Rosemary District, and transit is practically non-existent. It is expected use of services like Uber and Lyft will increase to meet some of the demand of a new SPAC.
A pedestrian overpass from the district to the arts center continues to be a priority, Shaheen affirmed at the district’s meeting, and could encourage shared parking perhaps at the Jefferson Center and the Players Center lot, equaling 150 potential spaces on certain designated dates and times.
Now embracing keeping both the Van Wezel and building a new performing arts center builds a convivial moment. But it increases the potential dilemma of having enough parking spaces for both venues.
Van Wezel might not have been included in these plans had it not been for Kelly Franklin and her husband, Ron Kashden, and a small group of assertive activists. Kashden was at the last SPAC gathering, where he acknowledged a new climate of collaboration.
Ron Kashden
Ron Kashden: Sarasota is blessed with incredible venues and incredible production companies. How many smaller sized cities have a ballet, have an opera, have two Asolos, have a variety of smaller theaters? There’s the Westcoast Black Theatre; there’s Florida Studio Theatre—so you have all these wonderful venues—McCurdy’s—and The Players! The Players are moving around the corner from me, over in Payne Park. Wonderful. So you have this campus—you have this fabric in Sarasota that’s just a treasure and an attraction and separates us. The question is: How does this new hall fit into all that fabric?
GC: Certainly, piecing together the parking puzzle will be another question to be answered.
This is Gretchen Cochran, reporting for WSLR.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.