The November election for Sarasota marked the first time Sarasota City Commissioners won office the same day voters elected a president. During SRQ’s Where The Votes Are post-election workshop, the question predictably arose how this affected city politics. I suggested at the time that it will take a few election cycles to know exactly what this change will mean in terms of how commissioners govern.

But one thing that became clear immediately was the number of voters who participated in the election. To the degree that elections deliver mandates, the three city commissioners sworn into four-year terms this month enjoy a larger endorsement than any elected since the implementation of district level voting.

The most noticeable shift — albeit the most unfair comparison in many ways — could be found in District 1. Kyle Scott Battie won 3,485 votes as he unseated Commissioner Willie Shaw, who garnered 2,987 votes. Shaw notably won election without opposition in 2015. The last time he appeared on the ballot was actually when he won his first term in 2011 over Linda Holland. Back then, he won office with a mere 735 votes to Linda Holland’s 499 in a May election.

Commissioner Liz Alpert in District 2 won reelection with 6,066 votes to Terry Turner’s 5,688. By comparison, Alpert won office in 2015 with 2,126 votes over Eileen Normile’s 1,885 votes.

In the open District 3 race this year, Erik Arroyo won with 3,666 votes to Dan Clermont’s 3,486 votes. About five years ago, Shelli Freeland Eddie won the same seat with 894 votes to Stan Zimmerman’s 774 votes.

To unpack things a little further, that means Sarasotans just went from having a commission with two members elected by less than 1,000 voters to one where the commissioner with the most modest level of support was put in office by nearly 3,500 votes. In fact, Alpert received more votes than at-large Commissioner Jennifer Ahearn-Koch received in 2017, when she took 5,080 votes, and nearly as many as Commissioner Hagen Brody's 6,371 votes the same election. That’s remarkable considering Ahearn-Koch and Brody were running city-wide; the top two vote-getters win seats in Sarasota's at-large contest.

Of course, commissioners never set the rules of elections, and their legitimacy means no more or less based on the raw number of ballots. John F. Kennedy, when asked in 1960 about whether his narrow win over Richard Nixon would weaken his presidency, replied “Mandate, schmandate, the mandate is that I am here and you’re not.” Commissioners win their seats and get to cast votes as they choose for the duration of their term, period.

But it’s fair to say the commissioners sworn this month can more confidently claim to hold the support of the people.

Yes, maybe it’s just the people who bothered to vote for commission when they really came to vote for president, while the voters in May elections were all die-hard City Hall watchers. There’s a case to be made special election and off-cycle contests measure a candidate’s ability to organize a coalition from scratch, rather than coat-tailing the sentiments of voters whose eye is on a larger ball. Regardless, that’s now how Sarasota elections work anymore.

When voters in 2018 — 13,787 of them in fact — decided to “Change The Date,” they also changed the philosophy of choosing leaders. A premium was placed on winning over the participating electorate during major cycles. The result is these commissioners all have a stamp of approval on their respective agendas greater than any district-level commissioners in city history.

And just wait until someone in two years shatters records when it comes to a city-wide vote.

Jacob Ogles is contributing senior editor for SRQ Media Group. 

Photos: Kyle Scott Battie, Erik Arroyo, Liz Alpert.

According to Albert Einstein, “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.” Little did I know that an onslaught of a global pandemic would have brought Einstein’s words to life. Creativity has helped us retain access to art and culture, certainly, but it has also been crucial to business continuity as so many of us transitioned from our traditional working environments to something that looks and feels much different.

Over the last seven months, there is no question the American workplace has changed dramatically. Many of us have relocated our offices from our physical places of work to our homes, from cubicles and corner offices to dining room tables, spare bedrooms and living rooms. Nicholas Bloom, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, credits the “working-from-home economy” with having kept the economy going through the initial lockdown phases of the pandemic. Nearly double the number of American workers are conducting business from home as from their business premises, with 42% of the U.S. labor force working full-time from home and only 26% — mostly essential workers — having returned to their businesses. Those numbers translate to more than two-thirds of the U.S. economic activity coming from employees working from home.

For all of us who have had to work at home, we have found that working remotely does not come without challenges; working remotely during a once-in-100-year pandemic comes with even more. In addition to the typical hurdles of finding dedicated working space, ensuring consistent, high-speed internet service and accessing technology support, working remotely in the COVID-19 era comes with homeschooling, sharing workspaces, severely limited socialization and stress over everyone’s health, to name a few.

Creative, out-of-the-box thinking has helped us to meet these challenges. We looked at our dining room tables, stored-away craft tables and other non-traditional spaces and found ways to make them useful as productive work environments. And many of us did that for not just ourselves, but our partners and kids, too.

We also found ways to replicate as best as we could the human aspect of interacting with colleagues that comes with working together in-person. As Harvard Business Review suggests, we launched virtual office parties, happy hours, lunches and celebratory get-togethers to strengthen relationships and remind us that we are not in the work, or this situation, alone. Or, as Marten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne, puts it, we figured out how to “create a virtual water cooler where employees can run into each other and play out their personal and human sides.”

As anyone who has shared office space knows, conflicts can arise when colleagues have differing ideas of neatness and appropriate work environments. This argument reaches a whole new level when it involves family who are also under the stress of working and learning in a non-traditional setting. Rather than reacting in anger, entrepreneur Vanessa Edwards suggests using humor to mitigate the stress of sharing working space by blaming messes on an imaginary co-worker – That Carol, she is so messy; whatever will we do about her?

Organizations have had to rethink and reimagine productivity and performance during the transition to remote work. Business and consulting firm West Monroe, which transitioned its 1,300-person workforce across seven U.S. cities to remote work in March, has focused on work flexibility and overall employee well-being to maintain productivity during the pandemic. The company maintained its connection-strengthening activities, like its annual 5K and National Day of Service, by pivoting them to remote offerings. Imagining ways to help its employees handle the stressors that have come with the pandemic, including lack of summer child care, the firm created a 2020 summer leave program that allowed employees to take three to 14 weeks of consecutive unpaid time off.

This pandemic has caused us all to unleash our creativity so we can remain productive and connected, and maintain, as best as we can, our organizational culture. It is becoming clearer each day that a full return to a pre-COVID workplace seems unlikely. Calling on our creativity will be crucial as we navigate merging traditional with new ways of working to redefine the work environment of tomorrow.

Dr. Larry Thompson is president of Ringling College of Art and Design. 

New City Electorate is Moving Sarasota Forward

Perhaps one of the most consequential outcomes of the 2018 General Election was the passage of a citizen-initiated amendment to the Sarasota City Charter which aligned municipal contests with the traditional August-November cycle. Supported by a broad coalition of community groups such as the NAACP, ACLU and the Manasota Young Democrats, the bipartisan initiative to “Change the Date” of city elections passed with overwhelming support—63% of city voters thought it would be a good idea to triple participation in city elections while saving taxpayers over $100,000 every two years in costs associated with the administration of a stand-alone, off-cycle city election.

With thousands more city voters having weighed in this year on the selection of three district Commissioners, we now have a much clearer picture of the community’s priorities. The Old Guard minority which had managed to maintain an iron grip on City Hall by holding city elections during the off-cycle, low turn-out format was ousted by the new, larger, more diverse city electorate.

We are already seeing the results of this increased participation at the ballot box—earlier this month, by a resounding 4-1 vote, the newly-seated Commission voted to move forward with zoning text amendments that will allow for the design and implementation of phase one of a world-class public park our community now fondly calls The Bay. Commissioner Jennifer Ahearn-Koch’s obstructionist approach to once-in-a-generation community projects such as The Bay no longer has a “second” in former Commissioner Willie Charles Shaw.

With the new Commission led by a son of Sarasota, Mayor Hagen Brody, Sarasota is poised to recapture the creative, entrepreneurial spirit of John Ringling, Owen Burns and Marie Selby as our cultural institutions can now confidently invest in Sarasota’s future.

Gabriel Hament is a Sarasota native. He has managed and volunteered for sitting city commissioner campaigns.