Kumbaya? Or abject public sycophancy?

SNL: Two of our largest developers have offered to write their own piece of the 2050 Comprehensive Plan (Sarasota News Leader story) to accommodate their unslakable desire to build every available open area of Sarasota County. 

Rex Jensen: Lakewood Ranch has about 2,000 home sales a year. 

    “We’re the second-fastest selling community in the United bloody States,” he added. 

[Commissioner Mike] Moran: “You’re such a visionary.” 

Jensen: “We haven’t developed much in Sarasota, though that will change.” 

    Note: Rex Jensen's Waterside at Lakewood Ranch is a 5,144-home, 5,500-acre development in Sarasota County set around a series of seven large borrow pits left over from mining operations. It stretches from I-75 to Lorraine Road:

Moran noted of Waterside Place, “That project is fabulous.” 

Jensen: “We’re going to be out of land shortly, and we have about 4,000 acres” that Shroeder-Manatee Ranch would like to develop.

“What really grates on us,” Jensen said during his presentation, “is the numerous prescriptive requirements [of 2050] — “the ‘Thou shalt’s’ and the ‘Thou shalt not’s.’”

So, Jensen and Pat Neal offered to write their own Shalts and Shalt Nots:

  Comprehensive Planning -- The Developer Version

“What’s wrong with what you see at Lakewood Ranch?” Neal asked. Jensen is just seeking “to dispense with the prescriptive requirements that you have in the 2050 [Plan].”

 “I think this is a great process,” Chair Alan Maio said

Commissioner Christian Ziegler concurred on the latter point.

And so, as the Sarasota News Leader reports, ". . . the County Commission has given Rex Jensen, the developer of Lakewood Ranch, the go-ahead to work with county staff on a new residential density category within the county’s 2050 Plan, which has guidelines for communities created east of Interstate 75."