A coupling of development fees has political leaders threatening action against the City of Sarasota. They suggest the city has lost out on tens of thousands each on a number of projects while limiting transparency to the public. But developers say it’s already expensive to do business in the city without additional, potentially prohibitive costs. 

The dispute centers around site plan and building fees. Civic group STOP says the city frequently allows large projects to be built without providing sufficient notice to citizens or paying site plan review fees to the city. “They need to provide a definitive answer about whether they are going to provide notice for all of these administrative projects that require a site plan and need to decide whether they will collect fees,” says Kate Lowman, a STOP steering committee member. “If they are not going to do those things, they need to say why.”

Sarasota city spokesman Jason Bartolone says developers have the option to have site plans processed in conjunction with a building permit, rather than doing one process and then the other. “Only one fee is charged in those cases because less staff time is required to process both at the same time,” he says. And that would appear to be an option growing in popularity.

STOP officials says they reviewed 16 projects permitted over the past five years and of those, nine elected to do site plans in conjunction with their building permit review. Lowman says her chief concern with the process is citizens effectively lose the right to appeal approvals on these projects because affected parties don’t get notified the same as when a site plan gets reviewed separately from winning its final permit. And she suggested city staff, knowing developers involved in the permit process have already invested substantially in a project, end up being less likely to advise site plan changes that make for better city planning.

Beyond transparency, she says there’s also a financial cost. She looked at five projects that did pay fees separately—BLVD, Cityside, The Mark, Renaissance and The Vue—and on average those developers paid $23,897 per development.

But one of the developers who elected to process site plans and a building permit simultaneously says it would make no sense to force developers to pay more than they already get charged. While his BOLD Lofts appears on the list of developments STOP says paid no site plan fee, BOLD developer Jesse Biter says that’s because the project did not require an initial site plan approval. “We submitted for building permit,” he says. “There is no reason to take an initial site track when the project meets all zoning by right.” Still, pulling all necessary permits for BOLD Lofts cost almost $200,000, and that’s before another $522,000 in impact fees.

Lowman says that shows that for a developer, the site plan fee would represent a fraction of total cost. Law firm Lobeck & Hanson sent a letter to the city saying STOP is prepared to take legal action to compel the city to fulfill its obligations regarding the fees.

Bartolone says right now developers who undergo the formal Development Review Committee process get charged appropriately. But city officials will review their process. “Senior staff, administration and the City attorney plan to meet sometime in the next week or so to address possible changes to administrative procedures involving site plan applications,” he says.