Commissioners Knight and Smith say Fruitville Road improvements should have preceded consideration of applications

Although the Sarasota County Commission on Jan. 28 conducted two separate public hearings on rezoning applications regarding different developers’ plans for construction within Lakewood Ranch Southeast, the outcome of each hearing was the same.
Both Commissioners Tom Knight and Mark Smith opposed the applications, while Commissioners Ron Cutsinger, Theresa Mast and Joe Neunder supported them.
The first hearing focused on the application submitted to the county by Schroeder-Manatee Ranch (the developer of Lakewood Ranch), Neal Signature Homes LLC and Neal Communities of Southwest Florida to construct 1,399 homes on approximately 1,746 acres in three project areas. The proposal calls for 220 acres of open space.
The Neal in those companies is former state Sen. Pat Neal.
Project Area 1 has been designed with 99 single-family detached homes on 345.6 acres; Project Area 6, 215 townhomes and 134 paired villas on 874.4 acres; and Project Area 7, 300 single-family detached homes on 526.1 acres.
The rezoning request was for a transition from Open Use Rural (OUR) — which allows one dwelling unit per 10 acres — and Open Use Agriculture (OUA) — which allows one dwelling unit per 160 acres — to Residential Single-Family (RSF) 2/Planned Unit Development, which allows 3.5 units per acre.

Access to all of the communities will be via the completed new section of Bourneside Boulevard between University Parkway and Fruitville road, Katie LaBarr, a planner with the Stantec consulting firm in Sarasota, told the commissioners. The Lakewood Ranch Stewardship District will handle the construction, she noted.
A Jan. 29 Schroeder-Manatee Ranch news release said that the extension of Bourneside Boulevard will cover 4.8 miles.
The county staff report on that rezoning application explained that Project Areas 1, 6 and 7 “will have a frontage along Bourneside Boulevard and University Parkway. Bourneside Boulevard is a designated four-lane minor arterial from University Parkway to Fruitville Road in the[county’s] Future Thoroughfare Plan. University Parkway a is designated as a four (4) lane major arterial from Lorraine Road to Bourneside Boulevard in the Future Thoroughfare Plan.”
After the Bourneside segment has been completed, the staff report added, “The right-of-way and completed road improvements shall be dedicated to Sarasota County.”
LaBarr told the commissioners that the applicants also will widen University Parkway from two to four lanes between Lorraine Road and Bourneside Boulevard, which Schroeder-Manatee Ranch said is a distance of 2.8 miles. Roundabouts will be constructed at each project area’s access points to Bourneside, LaBarr noted on Jan. 28.
In response to a question from Commissioner Mast, LaBarr said, “We are projecting a one- to two-year buildout for that roadway.”

Moreover, LaBarr noted during her presentation, the developer will pre-pay $4 million in mobility fees for improvements to Fruitville Road.
With Bourneside’s connection to University Parkway, she further pointed out, the expectation of the project team’s traffic consultant is that 75% of the traffic generated by the new developments will head north to University Parkway.
The proposals for Project Areas 1, 6 and 7 of Lakewood Ranch Southeast also entail a 40-acre community park that will be turned over to the county as a public amenity, LaBarr said.

During the second hearing, LaBarr presented the proposal of the Pulte Group, a nationally known homebuilding company, which plans 1,000 single-family homes on approximately 489 acres of the Lakewood Ranch Southeast site. Of those units, 150 would be townhomes, the county staff report noted. They will be offered at 120% of the Area Median Income (AMI) for the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), the report added, referring to an annual update from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regarding median income in the MSAs across the United State.
Project Area 3 also will include a 2-acre fire station, the county staff report said.

In late October 2022, the County Commission seated at that time approved an amendment to the county’s Comprehensive Plan — which guides growth in the community — that will allow for a maximum of 5,000 dwelling units on the 4,120 acres slated for Lakewood Ranch Southeast in the far northeastern portion of the county.
Infrastructure needs to come first
In voicing their reasons on Jan. 28 for voting “No” to each rezoning petition, Commissioners Knight and Smith agreed with expectations of speakers during the hearings that the new communities will exacerbate the heavy traffic that residents have described on Fruitville Road for the past several years.
“I believe the infrastructure needs to be in,” Smith said during the first hearing, before the communities are created. Yet, he pointed out, the widening of all of Fruitville Road to four lanes to its eastern limit will not take place until well into the future.
“I think that what people get upset about is sitting in traffic,” along with the crashes that take place on congested roadways, Knight said. (During his three terms as sheriff in the county, he talked at length about having to deal with traffic patrols and crashes when he met with the commissioners during budget workshops.)
Like Smith, Knight suggested that the county should have dealt with the improvements on Fruitville Road in advance of hearing proposals for the expansion of Lakewood Ranch into Sarasota County.
“We are failing you for not having [Fruitville Road] ready to go for you,” he told the project team.

Yet, Commissioner Mast, who represents District 1, where the new communities will be built, voiced her appreciation for the planned construction of the new segment of Bourneside Boulevard.
“The last two years have been extremely painful,” Mast said, in terms of hurricane evacuations for Sarasota County residents. “So [the plans for Bourneside Boulevard are] extremely beneficial, to me.”
In response to another question from Mast, LaBarr noted that Bourneside Boulevard will intersect with State Road 70, “which crosses the entire state.” It also will connect to State Road 64, LaBarr said, which is an east-west route. “This is a critical improvement to the roadway network,” LaBarr emphasized.
Moreover, Mast maintained that the majority of motorists headed west each day on Fruitville Road, toward the city of Sarasota, are not Sarasota County residents.
She also talked about the national awards that Lakewood Ranch has won. For example, as she noted, in 2024 — for the seventh year in a row — RCLCO Fund Advisors named Lakewood Ranch “the top-selling multi-generational community in the United States, with 2,210 home sales …”
For another example, Ideal-LIVING.com placed Lakewood Ranch on its 2024 list of the Top 100 Amenity Communities.
The majority of the Lakewood Ranch residents, Mast continued, chose to move there from out of state. “It is truly a master-planned community that they are drawn to for the quality of life.”
Commissioner Cutsinger noted his “love [of] the rural area out there [in the area where the new developments are planned]. It is a treasure for Sarasota County.”

He added that staff has told him that about 30,000 acres in Old Miakka has been put under conservation easements or purchased by the county, to protect that land in perpetuity.
Cutsinger pushed back against complaints about the commissioners “paving our paradise,” as he put it. The reason the county is “a great place to live,” he emphasized, is because of all that it has to offer.
His belief, he continued, is that it is better to allow master-planned developments, such as Lakewood Ranch Southeast, than letting people carve up the rural area into “5- and 10-acre lots.”
Referring to the Lakewood Ranch Southeast developers, Cutsinger also said, “They’re going to build a community that is probably second to none.”
Further, he stressed, “This isn’t public land. This is in private ownership. … [People] do have private property rights.”
He did acknowledge the concerns about Fruitville Road, nonetheless. However, he said he does believe that 75% of the traffic from the new developments will go north on Bourneside Boulevard to University Parkway, instead of using Fruitville Road.
After each hearing, Cutsinger made the motion to approve the rezoning, and Commissioner Mast seconded it.
‘Going, going, gone’
Only one of the 12 speakers during the first hearing and one of the seven in the second endorsed the plans that won approval on Jan. 28
Among their concerns, residents expressed disappointment that even more rural land would be lost to intense development, voiced frustrations about the growth in traffic on Fruitville Road, and noted their worries about potential harm to the environment.
“A rural area … is going, going, gone in Sarasota County,” Jane Grandbouche, a resident of Old Miakka, told the commissioners. The residents who live near the Lakewood Ranch Southeast property have a mix of homes, she continued. “The yards are not manicured. … You can lie in the fields and see the night sky, the constellations.”
Old Miakka’s zoning allows for 5- and 10-acre lots, Grandbouche stressed, “and [the developers] are cutting [Lakewood Ranch Southeast portion] down to way under an acre. … It’s heartbreaking.”
She also called the traffic on Fruitville Road “unfrigging-believable.”

Becky Ayech, long-time president of the Miakka Community Club, noted similar concerns.
Pointing out that she is a member of the county’s Traffic Advisory Council (TAC), Ayech said people generally plead with the members of that County Commission-appointed board to help them with speeding in their neighborhoods.
Yet, she indicated, the opposite problem prevails on Fruitville Road, given the volume of traffic.
Ayech said she expects that the developers will build Bourneside Boulevard “very quickly,” because that will be of benefit to the new residents. Yet, she added, Lakewood Ranch Southeast will “dump on Fruitville,” leading to even more congestion.
Sarasota resident Tom Matrullo, founder of an organization called Sarasota Citizen Action Network (SCAN), which focuses on planning issues countywide, pointed out that a 2020 county staff analysis showed that the number of new homes that county commissioners had approved as of that time added up to over 200% more than the county was projected to need for the next 10 years. Yet, he continued, thousands more homes have won board approval since then.
Moreover, Matrullo said, the flooding produced last year by Tropical Storm Debby and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in a number of areas of the county, showed that stormwater maintenance “has taken a back seat to approving vast new developments without close attention to the details.”
“What is driving all this?” he asked. “It is certainly not need. … It seems that county planning has gone off the rails.”
“Protecting the public is your role,” Matrullo told the commissioners, not the approval of “aggressive developers’ schemes.”
Robert Wright, who explained that he was a member of the county’s planning staff when the 2050 Plan for residential development east of Interstate 75 was created, stressed that when he was reviewing an application for a new community, he focused on whether it would benefit the county and whether it would benefit the existing county residents, as well as whether it complied with the regulations in the County Code. In fact, he added, he and the other planners were told by their superiors not to consider the benefits to the developers or the owners of the properties in question.
“You all are not obligated to grant a rezone,” Wright emphasized to the commissioners.
The only proponent of the rezoning action was Glenn Peachey, who explained that his family had been involved in agricultural pursuits since 1953, starting with a dairy farm and transitioning to the raising of beef cattle. He offered plaudits for Lakewood Ranch in Manatee County. Referring to the developer of those communities, Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, he added, “All they build is first-class communities.”
Seven of the speakers during the first hearing also participated in the second one, including Grandbouche, Ayech and Peachey.