Local politicians are asking for investigations, some want a building stop.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: August 14, 2024
Joe Gruters
Host: Hundreds of Sarasota County residents have seen their homes or cars wrecked in the massive flood triggered by Tropical Storm Debby last week. So it’s no wonder that on social media, the pitchforks and torches are out. Many are blaming suburban sprawl, and the “m” word – a building moratorium – is now out there in cyberspace. The timing of the Debby floods and the outrage is particular because it coincides with primary elections next week. Our news team is looking at the political ripples of the flood.
Johannes Werner: The first local political figure to wade into the murky waters was State Senator Joe Gruters. The day after the storm, he toured the flooded Laurel Meadows subdivision on the back of a resident’s Humvee. The same week, the pro-growth Republican wrote a letter to Governor Ron DeSantis, asking for a state investigation. In the letter, he wrote, “I don’t know why this has happened, but I know it has, and it should not have.”
DeSantis himself made a pit stop in Sarasota two days after the storm, touting emergency bridge loans for small businesses, while giving a plug to the Phillippi Creek Oyster Bar, whose owners were scrambling to reopen after the flood.
U.S. Representative Greg Steube seems to be doing the exact opposite, and he got immediate heat for it. On Thursday last week, he apparently drove by Stottlemyer’s Smokehouse near the flooded Celery Fields. Upset about Democratic campaign signs in front of the barbecue restaurant, he called for a boycott in a Facebook post. With that, Steube lit a social media firestorm. Which actually had been burning from the moment the first homes got flooded. Posters are pondering the reasons behind the flooding, with most of the blame going to developers and new construction. Many are asking for an investigation and a temporary or even permanent construction stop. But so far, candidates — let alone elected officials — are cautious about picking up the moratorium baton.
Shari Thornton is the first local candidate to suggest a temporary construction stop. Asked what her thinking was in regard to a moratorium, the independent District 3 county commission candidate said this:
Shari Thornton
Shari Thornton: We are doing a disservice to anybody that’s looking at purchasing a home down here until we understand what has caused this amount of destruction. And I would think that it would make sense to have a time limited moratorium until we know what’s going on, what the causes, are and what the cure is.
JW: She is asking for an independent investigation of what caused the flooding.
ST: What I would do is I would hire the best company to review stormwater management and drainage. I’m a health care person, so I would do what we call a root cause analysis. You get in, you pull back all the layers of the onion, you see what you did well, you see what you didn’t do well, and you figure out what went wrong, and you’re going to have to have the best experts to do that.
Tom Knight
I don’t think it should be done within the county. I think we need an independent company that this is their specialty, and we need experts. Because obviously SWFWMD and the county have failed in what they say they’ve done for planning.
JW: Former Sheriff Tom Knight, a Republican who is challenging incumbent Neil Rainford in the same county commission district, sent us a statement via email, without mentioning a moratorium. “While there is still a lot to learn, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that excessive concrete and development is not the same as natural land and watersheds for absorbing water and allowing proper runoff. Debby produced a lot of rain, but it wasn’t record-breaking as some claim. As I have said many times, this is a wake-up call for our community. We can’t continue down the path of unchecked development.” Neil Rainford, the incumbent in District 3, did not respond to our requests for an interview.
Alex Coe
Among the first local candidates to bring up the flood was Alexandra Coe. In her newsletter last week, the candidate for the District 1 county commission seat said that the amount of rainfall Debby brought was similar to a storm in 2012, as well as to the rain event in June, and she pointed the finger at new development. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, she diplomatically asked “Does overdevelopment contribute to flooding? You decide.”
District 1 includes some of the worst flooded areas. In a Republican primary – which will determine the outcome of the election – Coe is running against Teresa Mast, a heavily developer-funded candidate. Mast did not respond to our efforts to reach her.
Beyond the elections next Tuesday, we will get a first glimpse of the new political realities at the first Sarasota County Commission meeting since the flood. On the agenda of that meeting on Aug. 27 is expected to be the approval of 3H Ranch, a 6,000-plus home development by Neal Communities in the rural Southeast of the county. SCANPlan, an anti-development advocacy group, is mobilizing followers and flood victims to speak up at that meeting.
Another long-term decision local elected officials will have to take is about improvements to the existing stormwater management infrastructure. And that probably involves big dollar amounts.
To give you a taste: In the wake of the flooding caused by Hurricane Ian two years ago, the City of North Port is now planning to spend somewhere between a quarter billion and half a billion dollars to prevent it from happening again. But repairing and replacing the city’s aging water flow management infrastructure is overwhelming the budget. So the city is doing it little by little, which will take 40 years.
Thornton, the District 3 candidate.
ST: I think we’ve got to go back and look at the impact fees that were paid for these communities that have gone in and see if it was enough to really do what needs to happen for the community that was built. And we’re going to have to look at if it wasn’t just maintenance. If it was, we need to rework our stormwater management and those types of things. We have an obligation to the people of the county to fix that.
I mean, the county commissioners have approved this development. They’ve approved what’s happened. They have an obligation now that they’ve approved that to make sure that they’re not putting people in harm’s way. I mean, that’s the first obligation of a county commission. So, I think we’re going to have to look at state money. We probably have to look at some federal funds. And we’ve got to make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes again.
JW: Johannes Werner, WSLR News, Sarasota.
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.