VENICE — Tom Knight and Neil Rainford, the Republican candidates for the Sarasota County Commission District 3 seat, traded barbs at Friday’s South County Tiger Bay Club meeting, while the candidate one of them will face in November stayed out of it.
Whoever secures the Republican nomination in the Aug. 20 primary will be opposed by Shari Thornton in the general election Nov. 5.
A retired health care executive from Ohio, she’s running without party affiliation.
District 3 includes the area roughly from Laurel Road to U.S. 41 in South Venice, extending from the Gulf into the northwest part of North Port.
This isn’t the first time Knight and Rainford have competed for the seat.
Both men threw their hats into the ring last year for appointment by Gov. Ron DeSantis following the death of Commissioner Nancy Detert.
Rainford got the job though he wasn’t a resident of the district. He moved into it shortly after being appointed.
He said he’d gotten the nod because the governor saw him as a grassroots advocate while Knight had supported Black Lives Matter and diversity, equity and inclusion.
“We don’t want to become Seattle or Minneapolis,” Rainford said.
Knight said he wasn’t going to get into any social issues, like wokeness.
“I’m into reality,” he said. But he said if he’s such a bad guy, the county can “take my name off the building” — the Sheriff Tom Knight Support Services Facility. Knight served as the county sheriff for 12 years.
He said he decided to run for election because he’s tired of developers controlling elections and elected officials.
Those officials have allowed growth to get ahead of infrastructure, done little to promote affordable housing and failed to cut taxes even though the county is “rolling in money,” he said.
“This campaign is about the many vs. the money,” he said.
Rainford said the commission has made a major commitment to infrastructure, citing the widening and extension of Lorraine Road east of I-75.
The state did away with the requirement of road concurrency, he said. Knight agreed, but said the Commission could create a policy embracing it by requiring fiscal neutrality. Otherwise, the cost of building roads is borne by county taxpayers, he said.
“Where’s the money?” he said. “Is it just dropping out of the ceiling?”
Thornton cited Detert for the proposition that the property rights people have are what they get when they buy land. But the Commission regularly allows big increases in density and decreases in green space to accommodate development, she said.
She said she’d hold the line on such changes.
Knight said Rainford had missed an opportunity to reduce the county’s millage rate last year after a large increase in taxable values in the county.
Rainford said he’d taken his seat on the Commission too late last year to have any influence over the budget but at a recent workshop had called for reducing the millage rate to its lowest level in 25 years.
County staff hasn’t yet presented the next budget based on that direction.
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