Healthy, beautiful water defines our sense of place here in Sarasota County. I challenge you to find a piece of promotional material for tourism or economic development that doesn’t feature a prominent visual of our sparkling waters. Our region’s economy, reputation, and quality of life depend on clean waterways.

But when a water crisis comes along—which seems to happen more and more often—we tend to have more questions as a community than responses. Following a harmful algae bloom, sewage spill, or fish kill, many people ask, “Why doesn’t someone do something?” or “What can I do to help stop this?”

A new resource published last week answers those questions. 

The Community Playbook for Healthy Waterways is a “how to” manual for transforming the environmental quality of water in our region through coordinated, community-wide action. It recommends 43 specific activities to secure the health of our waterways, wildlife, and lifestyles.

This interactive website, available at www.WaterQualityPlaybook.org, addresses everything from wastewater treatment and stormwater management to fertilizer use, landscaping practices, and wetlands restoration. Users can easily access and organize the site’s rich information according to their particular interest, role, or expertise.

The Playbook is aimed at decision-makers in all sectors and at all levels of our community: Policymakers and government staff. Business and agricultural leaders. Natural resource managers. Nonprofit environmental organizations. And HOA boards that oversee rules and contracts for things like lawn care and water use in their communities.

Because we all have a part to play, the team that compiled this comprehensive Playbook (over more than a year of intense research, analysis, and discussion) includes experts from science, agriculture, resource management, and more. Gulf Coast Community Foundation’s Jon Thaxton chaired this steering committee. You can see who joined him by going here. 

Jon, who has worked for decades on environmental conservation in our region, is quick to note that we aren’t starting from zero. He points to Sarasota County’s pioneering efforts in fertilizer and stormwater management, seagrass restoration, and watershed land conservation as instructive examples of collaborative success. But for generations, we have created lifestyles, landscapes, and industries that increasingly contribute nutrient pollution, particularly nitrogen, into our waterways. The same natural resource that draws us here and defines our way of life has been pushed to a tipping point of impairment. We must act now to reverse it. The Playbook is our guide for that action. 

Gulf Coast Community Foundation’s vision in conceiving and creating this resource is that Sarasota County’s waterways meet their designated human uses—drinking, shellfish harvesting, swimming, fishing—while sustaining healthy ecosystems that support natural processes and resilient native plant and animal communities. By following the Playbook, we can turn back the hands of time to correct mistakes of the past while also preparing for inevitable new pressures of the future. These actions will create healthier waterways for a healthier economy and healthier wildlife and habitat.

There’s an economic imperative to take the actions laid out in this manual. There is also a social obligation. Alan Jones, owner of Jones Potato Farm and a respected statewide leader in sustainable agriculture, is part of our Playbook team. He summed it up this way: “The Playbook is really a broad perspective of concerned citizens and concerned organizations in our community coming together in an effort to achieve a common goal. At the end of the day, I would like to think that all of us want to leave the world a little bit better place than we found it.”

Mark Pritchett is president and CEO of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation. 

The City of Miami, and especially its Mayor Francis Suarez, has decided to seize upon the heavily taxed state business exodus and unroll the red carpet for tech companies. Mayor Suarez has been aggressive and he has been very clear that Miami is open for business. He is seizing the moment and doing so with purpose.

Mayor Suarez has personally chased companies expressing a willingness to move out of California’s Silicon Valley and New York’s silicon alley on Twitter.  Last month, Varda Space co-founder Delian Asparouhov tweeted, “ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon to Miami.”  Mayor Suarez wrote four simple words in a Twitter response that started a nationwide buzz about Miami becoming a new tech hub, “How can I help?”

Those four simple words from that elected leader has the nation taking notice of Miami.  It wasn’t a hand off to staff, it was an aggressive action that shows that Mayor Suarez isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.  The response went viral and the buzz has lasted for weeks.  

Mayor Suarez has been so successful in his personal recruitment and messaging, that according to various news reports, he plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer in 2021 to help him with all of the inquiries. It does not appear he is letting up on the gas pedal.

Mayor Suarez is nurturing this tech company hub push from all sides. He understands the tech ecosystem and the important relationships of venture capitalism, start-ups, and the tech industry. He also is working to ensure that this creates local opportunities for home-grown young residents, especially minorities.

Suarez has also enlisted the help of the business community in this effort. Just days after the “How can I help” viral tweet, he took to Twitter again to ask for help in his efforts from the community. He heard from some important people who took notice of the open for business attitude, out of town business accelerators, investors and those in the science field.

The confidence and business climate he has built in the community created a wave of interest. Just this week, Suarez held a public talk on cryptocurrency with Gemini Trust Company co-founders, a company that is considering going public that started in New York. Suarez’s tweet caused the company to reach out to Suarez to consider a headquarter move to Miami. In the conversation, Suarez’s first question was about problematic regulation, which dominated much of the conversation.  

This bold vision and aggressive personal public pursuit of tech companies is a fascinating study of government being truly open for business in words and actions, genuinely understanding the ecosystem of the targeted industry, and creating the right environment.  Suarez did all of these things and had Miami positioned well for this opportunity.

Miami is a great case study for Sarasota’s local governments to look at for our own future.  We don’t want to be Miami, but we want to be successful in economic development. Aggressive local elected officials who are willing to get actively involved, understand the ecosystem, and most importantly, create the business climate with an open for business government attitude and reputation will be key to our own future.

Christine Robinson is the Executive Director of The Argus Foundation. 

I am writing to voice how crucial it is that the city of Sarasota allow local nonprofit Streets of Paradise to provide free showers and hygiene services to our city’s houseless.

In 2019, our Sarasota community spent months raising money for a completely hygienic, disability accessible shower truck with a washer/dryer for free use by our city’s houseless. It was a game changer: hygiene is a basic need for any human being but absolutely urgent in Sarasota, one of the hottest and wettest places to live in the United States. Highly contagious skin infections, such as MRSA, have become a real danger to those on our streets. SOP’s shower truck provides the only outdoor, sanitized, COVID-19-friendly, accessible, free showers within Sarasota city limits.

City opponents of SOP’s shower services say that they are “redundant” and better offered by government partners. However, the Resurrection House showers are not disability accessible and the Salvation Army showers are not free and accessible to everyone. The SA enforces a strict 10-minute shower-time limit and they are a “no touch facility.” People in wheelchairs must undress, shower, re-dress and get out of the bathroom with no help in under 10 minutes. As an SA representative told me, the showers only work for “totally self-sufficient” disabled people. SOP makes their showers and laundry facilities work for every single person they can.

On SOP’s first shower day, an elderly woman in a wheelchair got her first shower in an entire year. A few months later, despite the best efforts of SOP and many others in the community, the city had successfully banned the shower truck. Every week city officials continue this cruel ban; they are stealing health and well-being from people like this elderly woman. The City claims to represent the interests of all Sarasota residents— are the homeless not residents of Sarasota, too?

My friend, Devon Oppenheimer, who volunteers with SOP, said that prior to the pandemic someone on the streets would want a hug, but then say, “‘Oh, you shouldn’t come too close to me, I stink’... it’s absolutely heartbreaking,” she told me. “No one should have to go without love and physical touch because they feel ashamed.”

Hygiene is paramount to mental health and wellbeing. City officials have said that SOP’s services “enable people to remain homeless.” The only thing they enable people to remain is alive. In this dark time of losing loved ones by the thousands each day to suicide and COVID-19, the city of Sarasota is preventing people from services that improve their mental and physical wellbeing is unconscionable. During this crisis of eviction and unemployment, they halt services that enable people to get jobs and housing. No one will hire or rent to a person who seems like they cannot take care of themselves physically.

The Sarasota government pledged to protect its homeless citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they have utterly failed. The pandemic response work the local government homeless initiative says they did in their articles was actually done entirely by SOP. In the early days of the pandemic, the governmental organizations to help the homeless shut their doors— there was no one else feeding, registering people for COVID-19 tests, or providing hygiene except SOP.

After the homeless staged protests against the Sarasota government’s inaction, they installed public downtown “hygiene stations” in April 2020. Then in September 2020, the same week they extended the state of emergency due to COVID-19, city officials had the public hygiene stations removed. The pandemic is worse now than it has ever been. The Sarasota government should be thanking SOP for doing their job for them and striving to follow their lead to help our most vulnerable citizens in this unprecedented time of hardship. Instead, they are choosing to waste everyone’s time and money on a campaign to prevent Sarasota residents from providing free hygiene to our brothers and sisters on the streets.

Willa Tinsley is a 20-year-old student at New College of Florida. 

Nightclub Cardio at Fly Dance Fitness Studio. 

Click here to read the full article in SRQ's January 2021 edition.