News

Homeowners in the city of Venice who bought from Pat Neal are up in arms. The big developer now wants to build a strip mall anchored by a grocery store on a piece of land that was supposed to be a natural preserve, next to a subdivision he himself built.

In April, the Florida Supreme Court sided with the Sarasota County Property Appraiser in a lawsuit filed by a homeowner who was told to pay tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes after he rented a room above his garage.

Over the past two years, adults have been fighting at Sarasota School Board meetings, often in overbearing, bullying, sometimes plain silly ways. Most of this went over the heads of the main subject of this whole debate: the students.

Last week was Gun Violence Awareness Week. With neighboring Manatee County turning it into a gun rights celebration, a Stop the Violence cookout in the city of Sarasota turned into a noteworthy event. WSLR Reporter Ramon Lopez has that story.

The Washington-based transformative justice coalition offered, and the Florida NAACP accepted it. The 15-city rolling protests through the state titled “Stay WOKE Florida,” sponsored by the National NAACP, by the American Federation of Teachers and by the Rainbow PUSH coalition, this is an African American poke in the eye for a governor with presidential ambitions who keeps saying that Florida is the place where woke goes to die.

Instability is worrying many at and around New College, the small public university in Sarasota. Following the appointment of New College’s conservative majority Board of Trustees, a hot topic this spring was whether the college’s primarily LGBTQ+ student population was going to stick around.