‘Community Development Districts’ have mushroomed on the Suncoast.
By Josh Salman and Derek Gilliam/Suncoast Searchlight
Original Air Date: May 9, 2025
Host: If you buy a home in the suburbs, beware: Dozens of new local governments have popped up in Sarasota and Manatee Counties recently. They are not led by elected officials but by corporations that make a profit from residents. Josh Salman with Suncoast Searchlight reports.
Josh Salman: A Naples developer had big plans in 2022 to bring more than 850 homes to a rural area of DeSoto County, betting that the region’s unprecedented housing demand would continue stretching further east into Arcadia.
With no connections to municipal sewers, the homebuilder wanted the authority to tax future residents for the cost of a new utility plant needed to bring basic plumbing to their homes. So the company petitioned local officials to establish a new special government that it would control.
Photo by Josh Salman via Suncoast Searchlight.
Three years later, there are still no sewers, and the 412 acres of vacant land is back on the market for $28.6 million, a billboard on the property advertising houses that never came. But unlike other nearby farmland, this site now comes with the power of its own local government, a growing model where private interests hold public authority.
Dozens of local governments, led not by mayors or town managers but instead by businesses profiting from those who live there, have sprouted up across the Suncoast.
The real estate developers behind these independent Community Development Districts use their government status to float multimillion-dollar, tax-free bonds to finance construction and dictate exactly how homeowners pay it back—all with no reins on the spending, a Suncoast Searchlight investigation has found.
The districts now span the entire region—from Parrish’s 40-acre Rye Crossing district in northern Manatee County to the more than 12,000 acres at the West Villages district in southern Sarasota County.
Suncoast Searchlight combed through thousands of pages of documents to build a dataset of the region’s special independent districts. Reporters then used that data to track how much developers bonded, the scope of their projects and board turnover.
Among the findings:
- Special districts across the Suncoast faltered during the Great Recession under the weight of substantial bond debt. But since then, more developers are turning to these districts for municipal bonds than ever before, leaving tens of thousands of homeowners on the hook if the market sinks.
- During the past five years alone, local districts raised $2.9 billion in public bond money. That gave the real estate developers behind these entities nine times more cumulative spending power than the City of Sarasota over that same period.
- With the authority of a municipality, these development districts levy assessments, enforce rules and process liens on those who don’t pay. But, unlike a city, people in the district go years with no say over who represents them. Even through a project’s final stages, builders sometimes take extreme measures to keep control out of the hands of residents.
- The steady flow of capital allows developers in special districts to advance massive projects much faster than traditional subdivisions. That, in turn, produces droves of new homes and boosts the region’s population—a strain on public infrastructure outside these districts.
Paul Asfour. Photo courtesy of Paul Asfour via Suncoast Searchlight.
Paul Asfour, a tax attorney who serves as a homeowner board member at the River Hall district in Lee County, has harsh words for community development districts. They “are a legislatively-sanctioned license to steal. There are basically no limitations on what a developer-controlled board can do.”
One district financed a spring training stadium for the Atlanta Braves using public bond money while another utilized funds for luxury amenities such as swimming lagoons and golf courses.
Attorney Henry Kenza van Assenderp represented the first developer to form a community development district, or CDD, in Florida and says he helped write the initial state laws in the early 1980s.
He said he believes these districts can work to help with growth management but that more builders are exploiting the law by using the districts just for the stream of bond money. The majority now operating in Florida, he said, have not lived up to the law’s original intent.
Since the law’s passage, these developer-led governments have tapped nearly $10 billion in municipal bonds between Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties—nearly a third of them authorized since 2020, Suncoast Searchlight found.
“The problem is the abuse of the law from developers who view these districts simply as financing mechanisms.These CDDs are not banks.…It’s gross abuse,” van Assenderp said.
This has been Josh Salman with Suncoast Searchlight. This report was produced jointly with Derek Gilliam. You can read it in full at suncoastsearchlight.org/developers-cdd-special-district-bonds-sarasota-manatee.
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