Any attempt by the development community to change the rules of the game in a way which favors them, such as the repeated efforts to amend the City of Sarasota Charter to elect a “strong Mayor” who can make deals with developers out of the sunshine rather than keeping power in an elected City Commission. New citizen initiatives should be considered to protect sound growth management from attack by development interests, such as perhaps a measure to require that impact fees and other exactions to make growth pay its own way be levied to the maximum extent allowed by law. Another good reform would be the election of County Commissioners in single member districts in order to reduce the biggest corrupting influence, the impact of the big money of development interests in elections

We fight to keep concurrency in place. The Florida Legislature repealed the statewide requirement for what has been called the “linchpin” of growth management (that is, you pull out the linchpin and everything else falls apart). That is the law called transportation “concurrency”. It provided that a development could not be approved if the roads needed to handle its traffic were not adequate concurrent with, that is at the same time as, the impacts of that development. Now, the state law effectively allows cities and counties to do whatever they want in controlling the traffic impacts of development, or not. Locally, County and City of Sarasota staffs are pushing measures to greatly increase the density and intensity of allowable development by measures which include lifting limits on the amount of traffic a developer may add to crowded roads and intersections.

We push for developers to pay their fair share. Growth should be required to pay its own way for the road improvements and other facilities required to serve that new growth, through impact fees calculated to cover the full expense. That expense should not instead be placed on the backs of the taxpaying public, nor should facilities be allowed to become overstressed due to insufficient revenue to expand with the demand. Certainly, with development rebounding, it cannot be argued that reduced or waived impact fees are needed to encourage or “incentivize” development. Increasingly scarce taxpayer dollars should not be used for outright subsidies of developers. Tax revenue, including from taxes on rental of six months or less (the “tourist tax”) should be used only for public, not private purposes, to benefit everyone rather than enrich the privileged few.

We side with neighborhoods threatened by bad development. In addition to allowing increased traffic congestion, local government staff and some other advocates of increased densities and intensities of development have in recent years proposed to weaken current provisions which protect neighborhoods from incompatible development. Those present protections for neighborhood compatibility include setbacks, buffers, limits on traffic cut-throughs, and reductions in development density and intensity for compatibility purposes. Strong neighborhood compatibility standards should be maintained and preserved, developer workshops should be subjected to procedures which ensure fairness and local government staff should be more sensitive to the legitimate concerns of nearby homeowners.

We fight for environmental regulations that will protect habitats and wetlands that are precious and not easily remediated or "restored". Regulations need to be strengthened, not weakened. While Sarasota County has done a good job of purchasing and preserving large tracts of environmentally sensitive lands, it could do better in other measures to protect the environment from the adverse impacts of development. The County weakened important protections of urban wetlands, allowing developers to destroy them in exchange for “mitigation” elsewhere without recognizing the importance of protecting open, natural spaces as part of the urban landscape. ​ Development interests are basically allowed to write the rules that govern them. Enforcement of environmental regulations has suffered in the name of streamlining of development applications and “cooperation” with developers, who County staff is now told to refer to as their “customers”. Recordkeeping of violations and enforcement actions has been changed in a way that makes it more difficult to track them. Staff members untrained and unskilled in environmental regulation have been put in charge of that task in the name of “cross-training”. Environmental regulations should be strengthened, including the adoption of a Green Building Code to add the environment to the public health and safety concerns protected by building standards. County staff should be given the time necessary to adequately review development proposals rather than held to artificially short deadlines in the name of “streamlining”. A new culture of strong enforcement should be promoted within the County’s environmental agencies and permissive coddling of violators no longer permitted.