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The Sarasota-Manatee High School Sports Awards is proud to announce the player of the year nominees for all winter sports. The winners will be announced during the live show on Friday, May 31, at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.
The show is presented with the support of Lakewood Ranch.
During the live show, athletes of the year in 25 state-sanctioned sports will be honored. In addition, top teams, coaches and overall athletes will be honored as will a Courage Award winner. Nominated athletes who RSVP will receive a complimentary ticket to the event thanks to sponsors.
Nominated athletes can register here: Nominee Registration for the 2024 Sarasota Manatee High School Sports Awards (smartsheet.com):
The Sarasota-Manatee High School Sports Awards show is part of the USA TODAY High School Sports Awards, the largest high school sports recognition program in the country.
What are two of the hottest buzzwords around town today? Yes, “affordable housing.”
Well, our city manager has mistakenly convinced the Sarasota City Commission that the city should become a landlord in the affordable housing game (“Sarasota City Commission approves city-owned ‘attainable housing’ proposal,” April 15). The plan is to purchase property across from City Hall and construct rental units that would fit that profile.
I have not seen or heard one word about a business plan for this venture. Has consideration been given to all the costs and expenses of such an undertaking?
Acquisition and construction costs aside, how about rental rates versus anticipated vacancies, turnover vacancy, delinquencies, collection efforts, potential eviction and legal expenses, repairs and upkeep, insurance for structure and liability, the inevitable trip-and-fall lawsuit, compliance issues, etc.?
Also, one of the first things the public sector does when becoming involved in a new program is increase staffing. Translation: more people, salaries and benefits.
This venture will most definitely become a taxpayer-subsidized burden. Historically, public sector housing ventures eventually become expensive problems. If this continues to gain traction, buckle up for a costly ride!
The games that came before served as a prelude to this.
Everybody's record is 0-0. Everybody aspires to graduate out of district play and into regionals.
Here's the first step on this road for local teams on the diamond with baseball and softball district tournament schedules. Play starts today and culminates Thursday night with championship games.
After hearing explanations from project team members about the efforts already underway to improve the road network in the area, the six Sarasota County Planning Commission members present voted unanimously on April 18 to recommend that the County Commission approve the petitions necessary for the development of a 6,576-unit residential community south of Clark Road, east of Interstate 75 and west of Skye Ranch.
The site encompasses approximately 2,721 acres; it is known as part of the Clark Properties.
The Neal Communities initiative also would encompass up to 120,000 square feet of office uses and 250,000 square feet of commercial and retail space, as the county staff report noted. The property is identified in the application and staff report as 3H Ranch. The neighborhoods would be created in accord with provisions of the county’s Village Planned Development concept, which is part of the 2050 Plan for residential areas east of I-75.
The County Commission hearing on the proposal originally was scheduled for May 22, county Planning and Development Services staff told The Sarasota News Leader via email on April 24. However, just hours after the staff reported that date, Planning and Development sent an update: “Just yesterday, at the request of the applicant, we have rescheduled the 3H Ranch project to the June 5, 2024, [County Commission meeting].”
Most of the 10 members of the public who spoke during the April 18 hearing stressed their concerns with Ibis Street, which is on the western border of the 3H Ranch property.
Jim Hamilton, a resident of Serenoa, a development west of the site, pointed out that four communities already use Ibis Street, and Neal’s project would allow four more to do so. Ibis is two lanes, Hamilton said; it has no shoulder, and it essentially is a dead-end road.
Paul Peterson, who also lives in Serenoa, told the planning commissioners, “Traffic is a major problem [on Ibis Street],” including the area around Neal’s Grand Park development, which is south of Serenoa.
“My house faces Ibis,” Peterson continued. Trucks on Ibis operate “at a high rate of speed,” he said.
More than 6,500 homes set for Sarasota County development. Here's what we know:
Flowering plants grow and collections of cows graze across 2,700 acres east of Interstate 75 and south of Clark Road. The site is zoned under a designation reserved for agriculture — and, for now, remains untouched.
By 2040, the now-vacant swath will host the latest in a line of village-style developments out east.
3H Ranch — a development consisting of more than 6,500 homes, 250,000 square feet of commercial space, 120,000 square feet of office space and more than 400 acres of green space across 14 interconnected neighborhoods — will replace the grassy expanse. Sarasota County Commission approval on a rezone amendment and Development of Critical Concern order will allow construction to proceed as outline in the development’s application.
The application for 3H Ranch submitted to the Sarasota County Planning Commission and obtained by the Herald-Tribune includes almost 800 pages of site plans, studies and background material. These are the key takeaways from the documents.
Public safety experts and advocates for law enforcement transparency are expressing concern over two pieces of new legislation — bills HB 601 and SB 184 — written to support Florida’s law enforcement but that critics worry will erode the public’s ability to hold police agencies accountable after HB 601 takes effect July 1.
The pushback grew louder with the April 12 signing of the bills by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in St. Augustine as both critics and public officials from across the state spoke to the Herald-Tribune about what the new citizen oversight board legislation could mean to communities and how restricting oversight committees could weaken public safety.
The citizen oversight board legislation (HB 601) is set to impose limitations on the powers of these committees. After July 1, “county sheriff or chief of a municipal police department may establish a civilian oversight board to review the policies and procedures,” the bill reads.
Essentially, HB 601 would limit what citizen police oversight boards can do, including investigating complaints of officer misconduct. The bill would require these citizen-led panels to be re-established under county sheriffs and municipal police chiefs. Law enforcement administrators will be tasked with appointing members of law enforcement to newly established review boards. They will soon be able to review cases of alleged misconduct within their agencies.
The forthcoming change has ignited a wave of criticism from community leaders, who say the legislation will undermine transparency and accountability efforts. However, Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Commissioner Mark Glass backed DeSantis's bill, adding that police are already held accountable by the FDLE and agencies' internal affairs departments.
"These men and women do not need to be scrutinized again and again by a committee that has no idea what they're talking about," Glass said at the press conference after the signing.
Critics around the state, however, are refuting the FDLE commissioners' comments.
Oversight leaders speak out
In Miami, approximately 2,000 Miami Police Department officers work under the watchful eye of the city of Miami's Civilian Investigation Panel (CIP). The oversight panel is led by Executive Director Rodney Jacobs, a former military intelligence officer for the United States Army Reserve, lawyer, and adjunct professor. He’s worked in the oversight industry for a decade and took over the Miami CIP in 2022.
Jacobs has followed the recent HB 601 legislation and criticized the bill and lawmakers last week.
“It's unfortunate that they’ve taken the approach they have. There is a large misconception about officers being critiqued, but we simply do our investigation. We don’t have the power to discipline police officers,” Jacobs explained.
“I understand the police officer's sentiments. In some other agencies, it happens. Agencies can get co-opted by bad actors and it can be vicious ... but just because there may be a few bad actors in one part of Florida that doesn't mean that the whole state should be punished.”
Miami’s CIP is the leading oversight entity in the state, Jacobs said. Beyond reviewing complaints, Jacobs and his team service Miami-Dade's 500,000 citizens through its first-of-its-kind community police mediation program, investigations, audits, and review services. The CIP also provides standard operating procedures for smaller agencies within the Sunshine State.
“Right now, we're still reviewing the law and figuring out how it affects us. In some ways it, maybe, affects our ability to do investigations, but we still will likely have the ability to audit cases,” Jacobs said.
The investigation panel was enacted in 2000 via a local vote following a string of violent crimes around lower-income communities in central Miami. At the time, the panel was heavily supported by the city's Cuban-American voters, in addition to its Black citizens, following a federal indictment of 13 Miami officers who planted weapons at a crime scene involving the police shooting of a Black man and mistreatment of Cuban residents by local police.
Initially, the city's CIP was created to investigate police officers' misconduct; however, over the past 25 years, Miami's CIP has become a prototype for Florida law enforcement accountability efforts.
Sarasota law enforcement and leaders lean optimistic
Sarasota’s police department runs a high-visibility agency that has worked to build trust between the agency and citizens over the past several years through its many community engagement initiatives.
The agency has two separate entities that provide oversight for complaints against the SPD or its 190 sworn officers— the Police Complaint Committee (PCC) and the city’s Independent Police Advisory Panel (IPAP).
Sarasota’s PCC serves as an independent oversight component and assists the chief of police with the policies, practices, and procedures concerning the processing of complaints against SPD police officers.
The IPAP was formed in 2011 and consists of five civilian volunteers appointed by the City Commission. Its main goal is to build transparency and accountability for the community to boost the public’s overall trust in the law enforcement agency and its administration.
Maintaining transparency and accountability for its officers and the agency is vital to the agency, its leaders say, and the new bill will take some navigating, Sarasota city officials admitted at an IPAP meeting on April 19. However, SPD staying on the right side of legislators and aligning with HB 601 is a priority for the city’s leaders.
“We don’t want to run afoul of the new law,” said Assistant City Attorney Joe Polzak. “That’ll be our primary consideration, following the law.”
A 20-year veteran of the Sarasota Police Department, now deputy city manager Pat Robinson, echoed Polzak's statement and said he was confident that city leaders would want to maintain both the PPC and IPAP. However, city leaders, including the city attorney, SPD Chief Rex Troche, and PCC director Heather Salazman, are working on reviewing the legislation’s effects before it becomes law in the state on July 1.
"I can assure you that our commission is very interested in maintaining what we have, and we're going to see if we can work through the law to see if we can maintain both of our boards,” said Robinson.
Robinson said during a recent IPAP meeting at City Hall that the makeup of the advisory panel may change but that he believes it will stay intact following the July 1 legislative change.
“The challenge at this point is what will happen at the PCC and how that comes out, but I do not see this going away. We're definitely going to work through it and we're going to make sure that it's legislative and statutorily sound before we make a determination.”
In an interview, Trevor Harvey, president of the Sarasota County Chapter of the NAACP, spoke candidly about his concerns with HB 601. Harvey noted the efforts by SPD in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of Newtown, along with a strong relationship with SPD’s Chief Rex Troche.
Harvey’s concerns, he said, are more about the high-level legislation than the local agency’s efforts to serve effectively its community members.
“This is a bad decision (of) Florida government ... what it does is pull that connection or relationship with accountability away from the community. Law enforcement will now police law enforcement and that’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to get away from,” he said.
“I just feel, based on what I personally know about the individuals in the city, the stakeholders, I think they're going to make sure that the door is open for us to remain at the table. If not, I know I will be the first one in line to be saying ‘Hey, this isn’t right. You all have to keep us at this table.’
SARASOTA – After traveling around the globe playing and coaching beach volleyball for 20 years, Gretchen Hand feels certain she has truly found a place to call home.
The relationship between Hand and the Cardinal Mooney beach volleyball team looks like a match made in heaven, despite some mid-season upheaval.
Hand, who teaches at the school, took over the team after previous coach Chad Davis resigned on March 15. The Cougars were rolling at 7-1 at the time.
And they kept right on rolling under Hand, finishing the regular season at 15-2, before defeating Sarasota Christian in a district semifinal and going on to win the Class A-District championship over Venice High.
Thursday, May 2, marks the grand opening of Sarasota’s newest boutique. Nestled at 4045 S Tamiami Trail, Bambola promises to redefine the shopping experience for lingerie, swimwear, and sleepwear aficionados in Sarasota and beyond.
The brainchild of Kristin Bear, a seasoned veteran in the lingerie industry with over 16 years of experience, Bambola is the culmination of a journey that started in the bustling streets of New York City and made its way through Miami before finding its home here in Sarasota.
To celebrate its grand opening, Bambola is extending a warm invitation to the Sarasota community and offering an exclusive opportunity to experience its offerings firsthand. Attendees can enjoy music and refreshments, receive a 10% discount on all orders over $100, and pick up a free gift with every purchase while supplies last.
Join Bambola on Thursday, May 2, from 5 pm to 8 pm as it unveils a world of elegance, sophistication, and timeless allure. Guests are welcome to enjoy complimentary refreshments and live music and tour the shop.
Selby Gardens' President & CEO Jennifer Rominiecki is being honored with the "Voice of Sarasota" Award at Visit Sarasota County's National Travel and Tourism Week Celebration! National Travel and Tourism Week is an annual hospitality and tourism industry tradition that celebrates the immense value travel brings to the nation.
Each year as part of the celebration, the Visit Sarasota County Board bestows the "Voice of Sarasota" award as part of the celebration. This award is presented to an individual whose exceptional efforts have significantly promoted and enhanced Sarasota County as a tourism destination. Congratulations, Jennifer!!!
You can tell that the arts season is winding down in May, with fewer than half the number of events that area arts organizations presented in February and March. But there is still plenty to see, hear and experience.
A new national survey lists three communities in the Sarasota-Manatee area among the top small cities to launch a business.
WalletHub released a Small Business Survey ahead of Small Business Week, which kicked off Sunday. The survey covered a number of areas, among them what locals are the best places in America for startups. In its small cities list, South Bradenton ranked No. 6, Sarasota showed at No. 17 and Bradenton made it on at No. 20.
Officials with WalletHub said small cities often provide the best environments for new businesses.
“The benefits of starting a business in a small city include lower overhead costs, stronger relationships with customers and the potential to become a big fish in a little pond,” said Cassandra Happe. “But there are drawbacks, too.
“Entrepreneurs who want to build a large professional network aren’t likely to make as many connections in a town with fewer residents. Other restrictions might include limited industry options, a less diverse customer base, and difficulty attracting and keeping top talent.”
Indeed, the survey wasn’t all good news for the region. It lists Sarasota among the worst communities to find resource availability, for example. But other conditions like access to capital help elevate the local communities on the overall list. And the business conditions in the state overall, including the low tax environment, help Florida show up strong throughout rankings.
Notably, the same survey ranked Florida the No. 3 best state to launch a business, behind only Utah and Georgia. Four other Florida communities made the top 20 in the list of small cities as well, with Fort Myers ranking the highest at No. 3. Altamonte Springs ranked No. 9, Winter Park rolled in at No. 13 and Casselberry made the list at No. 18.
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