Thomson: 2050 plan is a killer

Rod Thomson: 2050 plan is a killer

Sarasota County's 2050 plan is causing Schroeder-Manatee to considering giving up. It's a model for how not to govern.

2050 plan is a killer

Sarasota County's 2050 plan is causing Schroeder-Manatee to considering giving up. It's a model for how not to govern.

There is a simple lesson in Sarasota County for every Gulf Coast government that wants a centralized vision for development (and there are plenty of them): It won't work.

But it will be expensive for taxpayers. It will further drive up the cost of housing. And it will threaten the health of the economy.

The Sarasota County Commission has long used Interstate 75 as a de facto urban wall, forcing development to the west and keeping the east largely rural. In doing so, it has limited traditional subdivision development, but it has also generated serious unintended consequences. Those include contributing to the high price of housing and generating the worst kind of sprawl from a planner's point of view: the proliferation of five-acre ranchettes.

Finally recognizing that people will indeed continue to move to the Gulf Coast and not wanting to duplicate the error of the county commissions in the 1960s - which eschewed creating a central sewer system in hopes of stopping the flow of new residents - commissioners pursued a new master plan for the eastern areas.

The idea of this central planning effort, called Sarasota 2050, was to create three "villages" that could contain thousands of homes in fairly tight, self-contained areas, plus some small developments called hamlets, and permanently keep the rest of the area rural.

More than $2 million has gone into creating this utopia as regulation was piled upon regulation for a vision that shifting commissions desired. Not surprisingly, as time marches on, it becomes more and more clear that it is turning into a consultants' windfall and an economic boondoggle. Only one village is proposed, a 3,500-acre development with 5,500 homes by Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, the highly successful developers of Manatee County's Lakewood Ranch. SMR knows how to do it.

But after two years of struggle and negotiation with Sarasota County, SMR is close to giving up on the whole deal. The regulations are too burdensome and detailed. SMR would be restricted so tightly to please the vision of a three-commissioner majority that it would not be able to respond to a changing market. And as we see, the housing market can change dramatically.

County commissioners, frantically trying to avoid the complete collapse of their ideal state-sponsored vision, are trying to compromise enough to get SMR to move forward.

Here is the hard truth for commissioners: Such highly regulatory plans, which come with volumes of rules and regulations, are bound to fail. Even if they finally result in rooftops, the costs are enormous. While Manatee County, Lee County and Hillsborough County are allowing more reasonable expansion inland and providing more affordably priced housing, Sarasota continues down this path that drives up costs for everyone by dramatically limiting the amount of land available for new housing.

There is an irony here in that the new Florida minimum wage bumped up to $6.67 per hour Monday. It is irrelevant in a large sense because only 3% of Floridians make the minimum wage, and they are almost entirely teens working part-time jobs.

But does anyone earn minimum wage in Sarasota County? McDonald's - the archetypical minimum wage employer - posts banners offering $7.50 per hour for new hires and still struggles to fill positions. Local businesses en masse are begging for workers. But the shortage only deepens as our youth keep moving away because they cannot begin to find starter homes they can afford.

The lack of developable land also puts office and manufacturing space at an expensive premium, making it difficult to grow or attract companies to such high land costs.

Meanwhile, as the pressure continues forcing home prices upward and the economy staggers under the lack of workers and expensive land, the Sarasota County Commission dithers on with an unrealistic, heavily-regulated dream of the perfect little village east of I-75.

Others should not follow this lead.

Rod Thomson can be reached at [email protected].