The decadent degradation of planning and community input in Sarasota County

In the wake of authoritarian Board actions with regard to LWR and Benderson proposals, the Neighborhood Workshop format has become a desiccated shadow of its former self.

Instead of an actual meeting with live human beings, a recent workshop about the expansion of Lakewood Ranch - a proposal that threatens the very existence of Old Miakka, a rural community older than the county itself - we were treated to a glitchy, unresponsive meeting via Microsoft Teams. 

There was no help for residents seeking to get into the Teams meeting - by accident we discovered that "anonymous" worked - nor was there clarity of sound or visual. I sent the Stantec presenter an email after the workshop - I received no response. 

This was a new low for the act of meeting a neighborhood to talk about a vast and dangerous developer's proposal. Is this how Sarasota County is going to push through its illegal approvals of absurdly overambitious plans? 

The unanswered email to Stantec's Katie Labarr is below: 

Hi Ms. Labarr,

You invited us to offer further comments after last evening's "workshop" regarding the Lakewood Ranch East Plan. I have attended many neighborhood workshops over the years - most were lively in-person presentations, with clear visuals, audible speakers, and valuable give-and-take. 

I believe a great deal is lost when such meetings are moved online, especially when captured through somewhat dysfunctional software like Microsoft "Teams."

There were problems with Teams last night meeting - these are detailed in the comment I posted online, and leave below.

More importantly, even if that app had worked well, the loss of the dimension of live interaction with people in the same room was a real deficit.  The significance of a live workshop is that the public sector matters; the input of residents that goes beyond just specific questions. With a live give and take, people can look closely at the images, hear each other, and develop a sense of whether a plan can be fashioned to take into account the realities of the community impacted by the developer's plan.

For years our Commission has shrunk from asserting the rights and values of the public sector, and holding up the Comp Plan values and framework that was fashioned through a challenging process of compromise. To subject the small chance a community has of meaningfully interacting with the County and developers using the detached, remote, glitchy and ineffective software of "Teams" is yet another layer of alienation. 

Below is my comment regarding specific difficulties:

Tom Matrullo
Citizens for Sarasota County

Ms. LaBarr,

An entirely new workshop should take place in East County at a location where real people show up, are seen and heard, and questions can be asked, with follow-ups, so that actual information is exchanged.

This online meeting had serious communications issues. E.g. 

1 - those unfamiliar with Microsoft Teams might have been foiled at the outset - the meeting was set up so that unless Stantec - the planning business that ran the meeting - recognized your email, it would not admit you. However, if you chose to be "anonymous," it would let you in - but no one would know who was there. 

2. The "Teams" software proved glitchy as hell - the only two voices on the meeting - the host and the person reading questions - dropped out often - leaving us to wonder what answers they had offered to questions that were read out, or what questions they were answering. 

3. Some images shown through the Teams software were blurry - so their value as illustrating the details of the development was virtually nil. See sample below. In brief, aside from the two Stantec people we heard no voices of any people in attendance, we saw nothing but the images presented, we had no visual or aural contact with the attendees to the meeting, and the entire presentation took only a few minutes. This is not how Neighborhood workshops used to be conducted, and given the failings of the software, this "workshop" was, for this attendee, pretty useless.