City staff working on revisions, with goal of presentation to commissioners on Nov. 2
On Aug. 3, members of the public urged the Sarasota City Commission to delay a vote on what staff characterized as an update of the Transportation Chapter of the city’s Comprehensive Plan, given controversial aspects of some of the proposed changes.
Ultimately, a 3-2 vote — with Mayor Debbie Trice and Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch in the minority — the board cleared the updated chapter for transmittal to the Florida Department of Commerce, which must undertake a review of any proposed comprehensive plan changes statewide before those can be adopted.
Yet, as it turns out, city staff members will have more time to address facets of the chapter: On Sept. 9, Yazmin Valdez, chief of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Community Planning and Growth, declared the proposed amendment to the Transportation Chapter “null and void” because of provisions in the 2025 state law based on Senate Bill 180. The latter was approved by the Florida Legislature to try to spur redevelopment and rehabilitation in counties that suffered extensive damage during the 2024 hurricane season. Sarasota was among those named in the bill.
As Valdez pointed out in the letter to Mayor Trice, SB 180 made it clear that “[e]ach county listed in the Federal Disaster Declaration for [Tropical Storm] Debby, Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton … and each municipality within one of those counties … may not … propose or adopt more restrictive or burdensome amendments to its comprehensive plan or land development regulations; or propose or adopt more restrictive or burdensome procedures concerning review, approval, or issuance of a site plan, development permit, or development order, to the extent that those terms are defined [by Florida Statute 163.3164, also known as the Community Planning Act] before October 1, 2027 …”
However, Valdez added, Commerce Department staff was “providing a technical assistance comment consistent with Section 163.3168(3) [of the Florida Statutes],” though that “will not form the basis of a challenge.”
Instead, Valdez explained, “It is offered either as a suggestion, which can strengthen the local government’s comprehensive plan to foster a vibrant, healthy community” and serve as a means of ensuring “consistency with the Community Planning Act …”
The technical assistance comment follows:
Ron Collins, a city resident who voiced opposition to the revised chapter during the Aug. 3 hearing, emailed a copy of the Commerce Department letter to the commissioners late last week and included his own assessment of the comments in the letter.
He first urged the commissioners to rescind a vote that they took on Jan. 20 of this year to authorize staff to process the amendment and then re-authorize that work after SB 180 sunsets on Oct. 1, 2027.
Second, he asked that they direct City Attorney Joe Polzak “to provide a written opinion before the Commission or the [city] Planning Board takes another step” on the initiative.
Along with the Commerce Department’s findings, Collins reported, “My own review of the transmitted documents has turned up several dozen internal inconsistencies, places where the Plan, the Evaluation Matrix and the Support Document say different things about the same provision, along with policy misrepresentations and policy conflicts. I have requested a meeting with the City Manager to go through them and will provide written questions afterward,” he added.
“Waiting is better than trying to salvage the amendment now,” Collins continued.
To that end, he pointed out, “Orange County has already been through this. It adopted Vision 2050 in June 2025 after roughly eight years of work, the Department voided it a month later under [the] same section [of state law], and the county is still working toward re-adoption. Adopting first and sorting it out afterward cost them a year.”
Responding to a Sarasota News Leader inquiry about staff action in response to the Commerce Department letter, city Communications Specialist Luke Mocherman wrote in a Sept. 17 email, “City staff are working diligently to review and address FloridaCommerce’s comments on the proposed Transportation Chapter update. Following a meeting between FloridaCommerce and City officials on Sept. 15, staff will move forward with revising the proposed Transportation Chapter update and expect to bring the revised update to a public hearing during the Nov. 2, 2026 City Commission meeting.”
More tools
During the Aug. 3 public hearing, none of the eight speakers expressed support for the amended chapter. Among them were two candidates for the two at-large commission seats up for election on the Nov. 3 ballot. (Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch is the third candidate in that race.)
Several of them contended that the changes would benefit developers, instead of the public. Another prominent objection was the timing of the hearing, when most seasonal residents who own city property would be expected to be at their summer homes.
One of the candidates, commercial Realtor John Harshman, underscored that point: “Aug. 3 is really a very unusual timing to bring such a massive document to the public and let us comment on it.”
(In response to a question from Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich on that point, Alviemarie Corales, manager of the city’s Capital Projects Department, said, “There isn’t a prescribed timeframe of when you can have public engagement.” Nonetheless, she added, “We had a public engagement event that did not occur during the bulk of the summer,” along with three open houses in October 2024, which were held at three different locations in the city.)
The proposed change that seemed to elicit the greatest opposition related to road congestion.
Jason Collins, president of the Tampa consulting firm ADEAS-Q, who had worked with city staff on the project, reminded the commissioners that, in 2024, they “approved funding and direction to address how the system performance is to be evaluated. Part of that,” he continued, was to transition from a letter scale to indicate level of service on a particular road segment to what he called a “volume-to-capacity ratio approach to evaluate congestion.”
“The city of Sarasota is largely built out,” Collins continued. “There really aren’t many greenspaces or green properties left.” Thus, he noted, “The widening of roads is often very limited, generally due to the constrained right of way.
“Therefore,” he said, “the focus goes into maximizing the exiting network, focus on operational efficiency improvements and then evaluating it as a connected system.”
Historically, Collins pointed out, planning efforts were predicated “on how quickly cars could speed through intersections without too much consideration for other purposes. That does not reflect reality,” he said.
“To evaluate how the system is performing overall,” Collins continued, “one must recognize how the network works together.” This shift, he said, puts the focus “on managing and optimizing what is already there and not a default roadway expansion.”
The volume-to-capacity ratio — or, VC ratio, as he shortened the phrase — “is a tool to simplify evaluation metrics …” A 1.0, he continued, is used for a road that is over capacity, or — as he also characterized the situation — “beyond acceptable congestion.”
Instead of triggering a road expansion project, Collins told the commissioners, a VC ratio of 1 would prompt an analysis of “trends across the network.”
Use of that VC ratio, he further noted, would allow the use of “professionally accepted techniques to measure impact from new development.”
He showed the board members a slide that compared the historical letter grades used to classify levels of congestion to the volume-to-capacity ratios.
Next, Collins turned to what he called a “real world example” involving Bahia Vista Street, in the context of a recent proposed development. Because of the city’s current standards and existing conditions, he continued, no additional capacity for traffic was required of the developer. Given the provisions of the current Comprehensive Plan, Collins said, “The discussion was focused primarily on roadway capacity improvements. However, we do know Bahia Vista Street is quite a congested street.”
Those roadway capacity needs can be used as a tool, he added, but — if the amended chapter were approved — “no longer the only tool. Staff can evaluate a broader range of solutions based upon neighborhood context, such as traffic signal operations, safety improvements, bicycle and pedestrian improvements, transit, etc. The purpose,” Collins stressed, “is to expand the toolbox of solutions that best fit the corridor instead of just widening Bahia Vista Street.”
Corrine Arriaga, the city’s chief transportation planner, told the commissioners that the updated chapter “modernizes how transportation performance is evaluated, … broadens the city’s mobility strategies and strengthens guidance for future decisions. It does not mandate specific roadway designs, commit funding, deny development or replace the Downtown Master Plan or future project-level decisions.”
Moreover, Arriaga emphasized, “The Transportation Chapter does not stand alone.”
The city’s Sarasota in Motion transportation plan will help “inform mobility investments and network strategies,” she said, while the city’s Engineering Design Criteria Manual (EDCM) will “[translate] policy direction into design standards and implementation tools.”
Arriaga explained further: “The [Comprehensive Plan] establishes the policy direction, the Zoning Code guides the location and form of development, concurrency procedures evaluate development impacts, the multimodal impact fee helps fund needed improvements and the Engineering Design Criteria Manual establishes consistent design standards.”
The Florida Bar explains, “The 1985 Florida Legislature created the requirement that infrastructure be available to accommodate new development. This requirement is called ‘concurrency.’ ”
However, W. Lee Dobbins of the Dean Mead law firm, which has five Florida locations, points out the following:
Florida Statute 163.3180(5)(d) says, “The premise of concurrency is that the public facilities will be provided in order to achieve and maintain the adopted level of service standard. A comprehensive plan that imposes transportation concurrency shall contain appropriate amendments to the capital improvements element of the comprehensive plan, consistent with the requirements of [Florida Statute] 163.3177(3). The capital improvements element shall identify facilities necessary to meet adopted levels of service during a 5-year period.”
‘A major revision’
During the board members’ exchanges with staff, Commissioner Ahearn-Koch maintained, “This is a major revision to our Transportation Chapter. It’s a major change in how we calculate traffic and concurrency … and it’s removing one tool and replacing it with another tool that is less serving to the public, in my opinion.”
When Commissioner Liz Alpert asked for more details about the implementation of the volume-to-capacity ratio, Acting Assistant City Engineer Alex DavisShaw stressed that, instead of allowing just for road improvement projects or paying a mobility fee, “There are some other options that could be considered to go towards their concurrency evaluation.”
For example, DavisShaw said, a developer “potentially could upgrade a bus shelter or a sidewalk. … Those would be options they would have in the future that they wouldn’t have now.”
She continued, “When we talk about grades [for level of service], people sort of assume that the best thing for a city is A. … But from a financial perspective and from a multimodal perspective, having cars be able to free flow makes them drive more quickly. That’s not really the best thing for a community or neighborhood.”
As they were wrapping up the exchanges, Commissioner Alpert said, “I think this was a phenomenal effort by staff to update and modernize our Transportation Chapter. … I, for one,” she added, “definitely saw this as an update and not a total rewrite of the transportation plan.”
Commissioner Kyle Battie told the project team, “You all are taking a herculean effort to update this plan and bring us to where we should be and whatnot …”
However, Mayor Trice told her colleagues and the team, “I think that there’s more thinking and discussing that needs to go on before we move forward.”
Trice added, “I would love for us to say, ‘Let’s continue this until maybe a meeting in September,’ so that we in the interim can continue to have a dialogue, maybe make some improvements, better understand what’s in there.”
Commissioner Ahearn-Koch was the only board member to agree with that suggestion.
Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich later expressed support of the transition from the level-of-service standard to the volume-to-capacity ration, “because our city is practically built out. … It gives us more options to improve all modes of transportation,” she noted.
Commissioner Alpert ended up making the motion to approve the updated chapter for transmittal to the Commerce Department, and Commissioner Battie seconded it.
Vice Mayor Ohlrich did call for one change. On Page 60 of the resolution that staff had drafted, she asked that one more directive be added, in regard to examining parking issues: the inclusion of the need to examine parking impact fees. Alpert and Battie both consented to that.