Florida residents want development pause after Debby flooding

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) — Residents from across Sarasota County, Florida, showed up at the south county commission chambers Tuesday morning for a chance to speak face-to-face with their elected officials during the first public meeting since Hurricane Debby devastated neighborhoods with floodwaters.

Vicki Nighswander presented county officials with a petition during her public comments.

The petition , signed by more than 1,200 people, requested the county conduct a third-party hydrology study, pause land-use changes relating to development in vulnerable areas, and conduct a waste water spillage analysis report and prevention plan.

“It was a disaster and them couching it under a 100-year flood is not fair to what really happened,” Nighswander said. “By just cleaning up what happened, that doesn’t take care of the questions or people’s safety.”

Multiple residents shared a similar message during their comments, expressing concerns about over-development and questioning whether it played a role in the severity of the floods after Debby.

Before Lynn Inganamort expressed her concerns to commissioners, the commercial realtor explained she is not anti-development.

“I am going to request like some of the other folks did, to please consider a pause until you have the solutions, and you can prove to a wider area, not just a community, that we will all be safe,” Inganamort said, referring to residents in the hard-hit Laurel Meadows neighborhood. “It is just heartbreaking their lifelong belongings thrown out to the road as they were trash. It was a really bad situation that we feel those in charge should have prevented, so we hope can do that next time.”

During an unrelated rezoning petition later in the meeting, commissioners expressed concerns surrounding the existing standards in place relating to stormwater.

“I have a lot of heartburn here, to be perfectly honest, when I am out in my community seeing the images, seeing the devastation,” Commissioner Joe Neunder said. “I am just having heartburn with our stormwater and the data I am receiving, I am having some heartburn that we are at ’92 standards. (In) 1992 I was in high school. I think we need to have a larger conversation, a broader conversation. Water is incredibly destructive, and we are all Sarasota County residents. We are all neighbors. We are all family. I feel like I need more information. This is something that, as far as I am concerned, I really need to dive into in greater detail.”

Commissioner Ron Cutsinger pointed out Sarasota County has some of the strongest standards in the state when it comes to stormwater but acknowledged it may be time to make some revisions.

“That is one of our agenda items for the year is to look at stormwater, and certainly we are going to look at all of the issues associated with it,” Cutsinger said. “We are going to take a lot of time and be very deliberate. We are going to get a third party involved, and we are going to make sure we do everything we can as a county to see what happened and then look at solutions. See what we can do reasonably, and part of the solution may be to revise those standards higher based on more current data. I think that is a good thing, and I think that is the right thing.”

Residents said they will continue pushing for answers and accountability.

“If they still want people to move to Sarasota, we need to address these points,” Nighswander said. “I am not going to drop it, and neither are these other people, and it is going to snowball into probably suits along the way.”

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