SARASOTA — Benderson Development Co. filed a response in late December to the Critical Area Plan application for its proposed Siesta Promenade project at U.S. 41 and Stickney Point Road.
The responses are a result of Sarasota County staff finding the plan “incomplete” and “insufficient” after it was submitted in June.
Sura Kochman, a representative of the Pine Shores, says the plan is still far from resident friendly, pointing to both the development scale and plans to dump traffic onto Beechwood Avenue and into the Pine Shores neighborhood, and a suggestion to designate Constitution Boulevard — a local roadway that connects U.S. 41 at Phillippi Estate Park to Swift Road via several neighborhoods — as a significant local roadway, something not reflected in the county’s 2040 future thoroughfare plan.
“Unfortunately there are still things that are wrong with it and things that are misrepresented in it,” said Kochman. “They’re not putting their best foot forward on this.”
In its most recent, scaled-back plan, Manatee County-based Benderson Development wants to build 140,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, 130 hotel rooms and 415 condominium-style residential units on the 24-acre site, located at the northwest corner of the busiest access point to Siesta Key.
Benderson documents claim that the density is less than 18 units per acre. Though, by considering the 130-room hotel as having the same impact as 65 homes, the project density becomes more than 20 units per acre.
Siesta Promenade is still in an early review stage. Once the submission is dubbed complete by county staff, it will undergo a formal review, including a neighborhood workshop, and then must go through quasi-judicial hearings before both the Sarasota County Planning Commission and the Sarasota County Commission before approval.
Benderson director of development Todd Mathes did not respond to two phone messages and an email for comment. In an August email, he characterized county staff changes as very reasonable.
Kochman, a former planning board member in the township of Wayne, New Jersey, found fault with both Benderson’s 71-page third response to staff criticism of its Critical Area Plan and Kimley-Horn’s 544-page third response transportation analysis.
She specifically singled out Kimley-Horn’s response — which was dated Nov. 29 but submitted on Dec. 28 along with Benderson’s application — for omitting a Dec. 19 letter from Nathan Kautz, a Florida Department of Transportation District One traffic service engineer who has been reviewing the proposals.
Kautz’s email to Kimley-Horn raised several issues not answered in its Nov. 29 response, including:
• Ensuring that a proposed traffic light on Stickney Point Road and Avenues B and C will not cause traffic headed west to Siesta Key to back up all the way to U.S. 41.
• Benderson and Kimley-Horn have not yet met requirements to show that intersection warrants a traffic signal.
Internally, an email from fellow DOT engineer Richard Matthews questions whether the two left-hand turn lanes on U.S. 41 northbound at Stickney Point Road — traveling to Siesta Key — will back up beyond the 350-foot length of vehicle storage capacity weekday nights and during Saturday peak traffic flows, and the spillover into the northbound travel lanes will further snarl traffic.
Kochman is also leery of Siesta Promenade residents using entrances into the Pine Shores neighborhood to then use neighboring streets to use Glencoe, Elmwood and Beechwood avenues, which have non-signalized intersections with Stickney Point Road.
In addition, the increased traffic at Stickney Point Road and U.S. 41 may prompt more people to use Beechwood Avenue — which intersects with U.S. 41 north of the project — as a cut-through to Siesta Key.
“They want to move the traffic through the neighborhood,” Kochman said. “It boggles the mind because that flies in the face of what the comprehensive plan states, because you’re not supposed to dump traffic into existing neighborhoods.”
“I'm not anti-development but it should be developed in a smart and sensitive manner,” she later added. “It’s not a little local neighborhood issue anymore, it’s a Sarasota-wide issue because so many people love to come to Siesta Key.”