The rest of us will survive just fine, Dan
"We live or die by the county." Those were the sentiments offered up by land development attorney Dan Boone at Friday's emergency city council meeting. His son, Jeff, the more prominent force in Venice land development, was conspicuously absent from the council meeting, a meeting that was more vitally important to their personal and financial interests than almost anyone else in Venice.

At issue is whether or not an amendment to the County of Sarasota's charter will appear on this November's ballot, a proposed amendment that will limit Venice's ability to annex and rezone land. Even that is a deceptive oversimplification as the amendment does not address the city's ability to annex, rather it addresses quite specifically the city's ability to rezone after any annexations.

The amendment goes much further than that, though.

The county's proposal of this amendment was enough to make Venice City Manager Marty Black accuse the county of declaring open war upon the cities of Venice and North Port, this in an e-mail to council that was sent out prior to Friday's meeting.

Boone was being deliberately cagey, stopping short of urging council to do open battle with the county. Boone was being cagey for good reason: if the proposed amendment passes, he'll need to do all of his business on Ringling Boulevard in Sarasota rather than at Venice City Hall. In Venice he is king; in Sarasota, he'll be just another voice in the crowd, although he will spin with the changes and land with both feet on the ground.

For Boone, playing two ends against the middle right now is the only survival tactic that will pay off in the end, hence his obliquely cautionary and open-to-interpretation repeated warning: "We live or die by the county." If Boone advocates open battle and the city loses, he's screwed and he knows it. In all fairness to Boone, the Machiavellian approach of two ends against the middle is the only play he has that makes sense.

"The average voter will think this is about controlling growth and it's not," Councilman Bill Willson angrily stated after the meeting. "This is about control." Willson went on to accuse the county of being just as growth-oriented as Venice, if not more so.

To Willson, this is nothing more than the county flexing its muscles in wanting to be the final arbiter of what gets built where throughout all of Sarasota County. The wording in the proposed amendment would seem to support that claim:

"...in the event of a conflict between a municipal ordinance and a county ordinance, the municipal ordinance shall control except as provided in the [county's] charter, providing that the Sarasota County Comprehensive Plan shall control the development of lands outside of the urban service area and that the Board of County Commissioners shall approve changes to future land use designations of lands outside the urban service area regardless of whether some or all of the lands are located within a municipality..."

In other words, cities throughout Sarasota County can do pretty much what they want in their downtown areas, but after that, they need to get county approval for rezoning changes as the county's comprehensive plan will override any comprehensive plans that the cities have made.

Bring your own popcorn

The county commission will meet on September 14 to decide whether or not to put the proposed amendment on the ballot. Despite outcry from the governments of Venice and North Port, the two most affected cities, the commission will, in all likelihood, approve the wording for the November ballot.

At their Friday emergency meeting, Venice's city council decided to wait until North Port had a chance to meet and decide a course of action. If North Port chooses to take legal action and seek an injunction after the county approves the referendum wording, Venice will likely join in with the two cities sharing the legal expenses. That's the tentative plan for now, anyway, unless heads get hot and there's every indication that that could happen: interim Mayor Fred Hammett came out of the gate at Friday's meeting practically advocating an armed incursion of county chambers with tanks and germ warfare. Black cooled him down a bit, but it's clear that Hammett is prepared to advocate going to the wall and spending whatever it takes to fight the county in the courts for as long as it takes to exhaust the city's options.

Black, meanwhile, was more aloof. "We don't want a war and end up spending another million dollars in legal fees," Black stated after the meeting.

Boone's PAC, the Citizens for Quality Government, is also jockeying for position. Their annual meeting, originally scheduled for September 14 (the same day as the county commission meeting) has been bumped back to September 13 at the Venice Yacht Club, presumably so that Boone can give marching orders to the troops as to how to approach the next day's county meeting.

Other groups are paying equally close attention. Both Herb Levine of the Venice Taxpayers League and Sue Lang of the Venice Neighborhood Coalition have been sending out e-mails urging members to attend the county commission meeting in support of the proposed amendment.

Whatever happens, the county's September 14 meeting is guaranteed to be a circus.

End game or game on?
To Levine, this is end-game, a culmination of all of his political efforts to date. Developers will now have to go to the county for planning and rezoning approvals, effectively cutting the city out of the loop. More importantly to groups like Levine's and Lang's, this will change city government forever. With all development decisions resting with the county, developers and their attorneys will be far less interested in swaying city council. The city's planning departments and Planning Commission will come perilously close to being unnecessary and obsolete. Campaign financing will shift drastically from city races to county races and the city will finally have to focus on internal problems such as long-overdue repairs to its existing infrastructure instead of expanding the infrastructure for new development.

John Ryan, president of the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce, is urging caution and delay. In an e-mail that appeared to have serious legal review and input before being sent out to all county commissioners, Ryan cautioned that placing this amendment on the ballot is unfair to county constituents for two reasons. "Voters deserve the opportunity to be educated as to the merits of this amendment," Ryan wrote. "There is simply not enough time between now and November 7 to properly advertise, educate and debate this issue in the public arena."

Curiously enough, this was a concern that several of the more moderate council members also gave voice to at and after the Friday meeting, notably John Moore and Vice-Mayor Vicki Taylor.

Ryan then gave a legal citation to Florida's constitution that addressed the speed at which an amendment could move through the process of getting onto a general election ballot.

Ryan's second concern is that he believes that "...the proposed charter amendment bypasses Sarasota County's elected Charter Review Board ...and this proposal does not seem to merit bypassing this process."

Rush to judgment
While the city claims to have been ambushed, the county is arguing that this has been an ongoing feud reaching far back into the Hunt/Calamaras administration and beyond. Recent annexations of land in what is now known as North Venice are particularly problematic. Talk of up to 20,000 new homes in North Venice have floated within city circles while the county has stated that new roads won't be forthcoming for the proposed developments. Meanwhile, the county is involved in a flurry of development proposals just to the east of Venice along the Venice Avenue East and Center Road corridors, developments that are outside of Venice city limits. City officials, notably Councilman John Simmonds, argue that such developments will have as much impact on city resources as if the projects were actually within the city, this despite the fact that the city will have no outlay for roads, sewer and water in these new developments.

For City Manager Marty Black, the argument is simple. The proposed amendment takes away Venice's right to plot out its own demographic and economic destiny. Black points to the annexation deal that kept PGT Industries, the city's largest employer, from fleeing the state. "The current charter amendment language that the [county commission] has asked to come forward at its August 31 meeting would have required [PGT and Tervis Tumbler] and many other small businesses in South County to locate out of our region," Black wrote as a guest columnist on August 30 in the Venice Gondolier Sun. Black went on to urge citizens to lobby the county commission to delay what he called "a rush to judgment."

A surprise ambush that was 15 years in the making

While the city believes it has been ambushed, county officials are taking the stance that the city has been passive/aggressive, giving lip service to the county's concerns and then going off and doing whatever it wanted in spite of loud criticisms. County Commissioner Jon Thaxton went so far as to accuse the city of defiantly saying no to any cooperation in planning with the county. This part of the argument surfaced when Gulf Coast Foundation's CEO Teri Hansen inserted herself into the mix on behalf of the city and the foundation:

The Foundation would like to host and facilitate a joint meeting of the Sarasota County commissioners, North Port city commissioners and Venice city council members, as soon as possible, to create an open dialogue that encourages a unified effort to plan and manage future growth.  We applaud the county's support of the asset-based model of community development and know that you support the Foundation's philosophy that together, we are better.
-- Teri Hansen, 09/01/06

Thaxton responded by stating that this was too little too late:

Terry [sic]:

 

Your offer is sincerely appreciated.

 

The issue here is infrastructure and the money needed to keep pace with new developments being approved in recently annexed areas, nothing else. These municipal Comp Plan decisions dramatically effect the County's budget, and have been made entirely without coordination with the County. We have tried dialog as you have suggested, we have requested Joint planning Agreements, we have gone to court, we have challenged comp plan amendments at DCA and rezonings locally, and the response to our pleas to coordinate development approvals with a financially feasible infrastructure plan has always been the same, no. We are backed into a corner and are responding with the only legal option available to us.

 

If the municipalities can not agree to a cessation of annexations and Comp Plan amendments (without JPA's) that increase residential development intensities beyond that which is currently approved in the County's Comp Plan on recently annexed properties, I see no other option than to support the proposed ordinance.
-- Jon Thaxton, 09/01/06 (note: JPA = joint planning agreement)

In an e-mail to Jim Ley dated one day earlier, Thaxton was even more stern:

Without the municipalities agreeing to a cessation of non-infill annexations and a moratorium on Comp Plan amendments that increase residential development intensities beyond that which is currently approved in the County's Comp Plan, I will be supporting the proposed ordinance.
-- Jon Thaxton, 08/31/06

Finally, Thaxton spelled out why he felt that the county's proposed action should come as anything but a surprise to Venice City Council, this in an e-mail to Venice resident Janis Fawn:

We have been thinking about the annexation issue for over 15 years. If the municipalities can not agree to a cessation of Comp Plan amendments that increase residential development intensities beyond that which is currently approved in the County's Comp Plan on recently annexed properties, I will be supporting the proposed ordinance.
-- Jon Thaxton, 08/30/06

That last e-mail was forwarded to all city council members on August 30 by Marty Black with the subject line "County to declare war on Venice and North Port."

10 with a margin of error of 790
What is clear is that in the jockeying for PR positioning, the city and the county are playing with entirely different sets of numbers. In the aforementioned column for the Gondo, Black downplayed the county's concerns over annexation numbers: "This year, the city has annexed a total of 10 acres."

County commissioners are touting numbers much higher than that. In a flurry of short e-mails between commissioners and County Manager Jim Ley on August 31, Ley confirmed to Commissioner Nora Patterson that the county was viewing the impact of almost 800 acres of annexed and planned-for-annexation land, not 10 acres as Black had referenced:

"Venice annexation acreage - could we please have updated as soon as possible?"
-- Commissioner Shannon Staub

 

"In the works."
-- County Manager Jim Ley

 

 

"Jim: Actually I think we need the numbers on what is in the works also.  We got an e mail from someone who sent us their working program with all the applications for annexations included and it looked like 790 plus acres in the works if that was accurate."

-- County Commissioner Nora Patterson

 

"Yup."
-- Jim Ley

So, ultimately, that's what this is all about and why it came up seemingly so suddenly -- almost 800 acres whose future is still up in the air.

That's huge, and the county, feeling mightily burned on what has already happened in North Venice over the past ten years, has had enough. The county, no doubt, believes it will get saddled with building schools and roads and providing the ancillary infrastructure both within and without the proposed developments while the city gets first rights of taxation, impact fees, plus the garbage, sewer, and water fees.

Enemy at the gates
Venice is under siege and the county is making no bones about their military advantage:

You should know that this morning I called Barbara Gross and Fred Hammett and suggested that a signed, sealed and delivered moratorium on annexations for six months would give me some ability to consider a retraction of the referendum initiative for a period while the cities and the county talked about a meaningful JPA. Both were pretty noncommittal. Venice had called a special meeting today on the issue, and I believe the subject must have come up because I just had a call from someone with the Tribune who attended the meeting.  My guess is that you will read this in some version in the paper tomorrow. I made no representation of where the commission would go with this, since I clearly do not know, or even of my own vote, although I was pretty strong that for me, such a show of good faith would be needed.
-- County Commissioner Nora Patterson, 09/01/06

Black's response was to urge council to urge the county commission to take up Gulf Coast's Teri Hansen's offer of mediation, an idea that county commish Thaxton already had rejected. Then came this odd, I don't know what you'd call it (threat? observation?) from Black:

There have also been calls from property owners as far away as the city of Sarasota and the Sarasota mall area that have inquired if they were eligible for annexation into Venice. Obviously the county's actions are driving an even greater interest in joining the cities and we would not recommend favorably on all of these inquiries at this time.
-- Marty Black, 09/01/06

How this will all play out in the end is anyone's guess. Right now, Black and Thaxton seem to be locked at their foreheads in a sweat-streaked staredown that has every appearance of blooming into a lovely war, one that will be vastly profitable for the hired guns that Venice, North Port and the county will bring in.

In the meantime, collateral damage could potentially include the Gulf Coast Community Foundation's foray into North Venice land development. Their proposed "affordable housing" project is still at the stage of being approved by the state as part of Venice's comprehensive plan and the state won't be making their determination on the project until well after the November election, thus throwing the whole project smack back into the county's comp plan process should the amendment pass into law. Not that the county is likely to kill that particular deal, but it is of some concern to Hansen and the rest of the folks at GCCF, hence her interest in moderating a favorable informal arbitration.

The future of Venice, especially its shadow powerbase, is on a knife's edge on this one. Things will get weirder.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.