Venice community leaders highlight affordable housing, other key issues for the region

VENICE – Employee training and retention, affordable housing and  growth and infrastructure were all key issues touched upon Friday morning, at a forum assessing the state of the Venice area.

All three panelists at the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce 2023 Community Scorecard event – Venice Mayor Nick Pachota, Sarasota County Commissioner Neil Rainford and Venice Area Chamber of Commerce Board Chairman David Joyner – painted a rosy picture of the area’s outlook and offered insight on issues that dovetailed with their public or business interests.

For example Joyner, owner of Venice-based Joyner Family Insurance, said that while rising homeowners insurance premiums and diminishing coverage choices since Hurricane Ian paint a bleak picture now, he believes insurance reforms enacted in 2023 by the state Legislature will make a difference.

“The good news is that we did get major insurance reform done,” Joyner said. “A lot of folks have a misconception that the issue is centered around hurricanes and catastrophes.

“Yes, that's a challenge for our market but there’s answers to those challenges,” he added. “Really our issues were around other things, like free roof schemes and lawsuit abuse and that's what the legislation targeted.”

Two years ago, he said, Florida represented about 8% of all home insurance claims nationwide and more than 80% of home insurance litigation.

“Clearly there’s something off there,” Joyner said, then added that those reforms are already starting to have some impact and was hopeful rates would stabilize before the end of the year.

“We are just starting to see little – and it is little – glimmers of hope,” he continued. “There are new companies coming into the market. The advantage they have is they don’t have all the prior experience under the old rules of all of these lawsuits and claims that they’re having to work through. The flip side is that they’re a new company and you’re trying to learn how they’re going to perform long term.

“Hurricane Ian just exacerbated the whole issue.”

Employee training and retention

Joyner said that while the local business community can work together to solve many issues, that teamwork can’t solve the workforce issue.

“It’s trying to find good  and able people who are willing to come to work,” Joyner said. “Every business owner I talk to, that's probably the number one thing they’re saying.”

He discussed the chamber's efforts to develop trade academies with Venice High School and “Real World Wednesdays” during which chamber members talked to students about career opportunities.

Rainford said Mullet's Aluminum Products Inc., where he is a senior project executive, could hire 30 people tomorrow because it is busy supplying finished product to various local construction projects, including Allegiant Airlines  Sunseeker Resort in Charlotte County.

He offered several similar anecdotes, saying Sarasota County government could quickly hire 30 to 40 project managers; one confident Riverview High School student received a job offer on the spot after addressing a local trade association meeting. He said his son – after graduating from Sarasota Military Academy and Sarasota Technical College – landed a job at a local dealer as an auto mechanic where he made close to $60,000 a year.

“He just got recruited away for over $100,000 – and he's 22 – in Sarasota County, to be a mechanic,” Rainford said. “We have to go into these schools and paint the picture that that’s an option.

“When I was in high school, it was looked down upon and we’ve got to do everything we can to keep our kids here.”

Affordable housing

Bolstered by a $25 million infusion from American Rescue Plan COVID–19 relief funding, Rainford could cite roughly 700 workforce housing units currently in various stages of development.

Another $30 million in Resilient SRQ funding – a $201.5 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development block grant tied to Hurricane Ian recovery – has also been earmarked by Sarasota County for workforce housing and the state Legislature’s passing of the Live Local Act offers more options to increase similar housing stock.

“It’s a super contentious issue I’ll tell you,” Rainford said, adding that while he campaigns for election to the commission in 2024, he frequently hears people don’t want such homes nearby.

“I think we have to change that mentality and I think we do that slowly and by making sure that we’re delivering a nice product to our community and I’m committed to that because as business owners we need to make sure your workforce can stay here in Sarasota County,” he added.

Pachota related the city’s contribution to Family Promise of South Sarasota County’s Pathways Home  program as something the city could do – and noted that workforce housing may be a component of the redevelopment of the city's central Seaboard District.

He also admitted that he was frustrated that his fellow council members did not think the city should take a lead role in the issue.

He did get to talk about how Venice Pier Group Inc. recently broke ground on an apartment building that features four four-bedroom apartments that can house as many as 16 seasonal workers.

VPG – which operates Sharky’s on the Pier, Fins at Sharky and Snook Haven in south Sarasota County, as well as concession operations at Siesta Beach and The Bay in Sarasota – also has roughly 10 homes on the island of Venice that they will lease to 32 seasonal employees, as well as some full-time employees.

“The goal is to try to keep our price for our employees at under $800 a month,” Pachota said.

The apartments are modeled after college dorms, while the other properties – on the island of Venice – could easily rent for more than four times that but the pier group considered housing is something the company could try and solve on its own.

Growth and infrastructure

Frustration about growth – something Sarasota residents persistently highlight as a major concern on Sarasota County’s annual community opinion survey – are frequently tied to traffic, noted Rainford, who pointed to the Fruitville Road corridor east of Interstate 75 and the area around Wellen Park in North Port as two booming areas.

“We need to get in front of the infrastructure and I think we have the ability to do that,” Rainford said, pointing to the effort to connect Lorraine Road south to Knights Trail Road in Venice as one example. “Then it’s less intrusive in our life.”

Hurricane Ian also highlighted infrastructure needs with respect to hurricane evacuation, flooding and sea level rise.

A significant percentage of Sarasota County’s Resilient SRQ funding request involves that aspect of infrastructure.

“This  is the lower lying area of the county and we really need to shore up what we can in terms of infrastructure, make sure we can control flooding and we mitigate where we can,” Rainford said.

Pachota said that in Venice, city officials are working everything from a comprehensive road network plan to moving Fire Station 52 and possibly the city’s water treatment plant out of a a flood prone area south of Hatchett Creek.

Council members are also contemplating a renewed effort to improve water quality at the city’s stormwater drainage outfalls – “things that we had already been working on and councils before us initiated."

Rainford equated clean water with the lifeblood of Sarasota County.

Over the past three decades, Sarasota County has spent roughly $1billion on water quality improvements and is currently in the midst of upgrading its wastewater plants to advanced treatment standards.

“Water quality is our way of life,” Rainford said. “If we don't have good water quality then we don’t have the tourism, we don’t have the growth and we have to make sure that we are doing everything possible to improve our water quality.”

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Venice forum underscores need for employee retention and housing