SEIDMAN SAYS: Siesta Promenade development threatens neighborhood intrusion - again

One of Sura Kochman’s favorite past times as a young girl was to visit residents of the nearby Pine Shores Estates mobile home park on the northwest corner of Tamiami Trail and Stickney Point Road.

“I’m going to the trailer park!” she’d yell to her parents before slamming the front door and running across the street to wander the park’s tidy grid. “I used to walk through there all the time as a little girl. All these old snowbirds welcomed me and gave me drinks, cookies. I thought it was like a big doll house.”

More than 60 years later, Kochman still lives in that home on Glencoe Avenue, which now looks out on the mostly vacant 24-acre lot that is soon to become a mixed-use hotel, shopping center and residential complex built by Benderson Development. From 2014, when the project was first proposed, until 2018, when it was approved by the Sarasota County Commission, Kochman and her neighbors worked diligently to oppose and eventually modify the project’s impact on their Pine Shores neighborhood.

After a protracted battle that included a lawsuit, to no one’s surprise, Benderson won.

“They pretty much got what they wanted,” says Kochman, whose prodigious paper and computer files attest to the degree of effort that went into the losing cause.

Kochman and her neighbors were able, however, to work with the county to get some “neighborhood protections” that would help deter traffic intrusion and, in accordance with comprehensive plan ordinances, to “preserve the existing neighborhood areas and their cohesion and integrity.” These included the removal of a “back” entrance into the development off Glencoe and the promise of a landscape buffer and sidewalk between the residences that line Glencoe and Crestwood avenues and the complex.

But when Benderson subsequently acquired the final two homes (zoned single family)  that remained on the acreage, it returned to the county to request a rezone and a change in the original site plan. After requesting to see the revision, Kochman was horrified to discover that not only had the neighborhood buffer and sidewalk disappeared, but parallel parking had been added along the entire length of Glencoe and Crestwood avenues, which border the back side of the complex – a change that would seem to actually encourage traffic intrusion into the neighborhood.

At a neighborhood workshop held by the applicant on Zoom earlier this year, the developer claimed it had worked with the county to add this parking, which would serve as a “traffic calming” device, because people automatically slow when drivers pause to park. An email Kochman received from Sarasota County Transportation Manager Paula Wiggins after an inquiry, however, disputed this collaboration.

“To be clear, Transportation is not recommending parking, the applicant is,” Wiggins wrote.

What Kochman and her neighbors can’t fathom is why anybody headed for the shopping center “should even be going down Glencoe for any reason.”

“We are at wits’ end as to why this is here,” she says. “It makes absolutely no sense. We’ve been lied to for years. [The developer} has always said, ‘We want to be a good neighbor. We’re not going to infringe on the neighborhood. We’re putting in all these sidewalks for walkability. They keep saying this is traffic calming, but we’ve never had a parking problem here. They’re getting public parking within in the Glencoe right-of-way.”

Although these parking spaces cannot legally be counted to fulfill the amount required by the zoning code for the development’s uses, Kochman suspects Benderson, which has encountered insufficient parking issues with other projects, envisions the spaces could be of use for overflow and valet parking. But Kochman insists that if guest or valet parking cannot be supported on site, there should have been a revamp of the site plan to accommodate those needs. The acquisition of the two parcels that triggered the zoning request gave them additional space that could have been used for that purpose.

Despite other changes in the site plan – including moving a 65-foot building closer to the neighborhood – at the end of the Zoom workshop, Kochman told the developer: “You take away this parallel parking and we will go quietly into the night. We have no objection anymore.”

But the request that will come before the county Planning Commission Thursday – which is being considered as a new site application – retains the parallel parking. It does replace the landscape buffer and sidewalk, but not between the street and the development as proposed, but rather between the parallel parking and the development.

That will leave Kochman and her neighbors looking out on a row of parked cars rather than the nature buffer that was promised. The design will encourage “cut-throughs” to the complex, require lighting that will also be intrusive and fuel a consistent traffic turnover disruptive to residents, she believes.

“This is just going to exacerbate the spillover into the neighborhood,” Kochman says. “They’re not respecting our neighborhood integrity at all. I am not anti-development – I was chair of a planning board up north for years – but I understand proper development. To have neighborhoods suffer because everyone is afraid to say no to Benderson is not right.

“Believe me, once they start parking here, it will spill to other neighborhoods.”

Contact Carrie Seidman at carrie.seidman@gmail.com or 505-238-0392.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota residents say developer's plans are too intrusive