If You Can't Beat 'Em, Just Write New Law!

Alan Garrett is Anna Maria’s City Planner. His income is primarily derived from developers and in Anna Maria the list of current developers paying for his services is pretty short. Garrett owns his own business and apparently “consults” for a number of nearby municipalities including Anna Maria, Bradenton Beach and Sarasota. His income is generated by developers developing developments. The more of it there is, the busier he is. Stay with us by hitting the "Please Read More" link below:


In a now infamous June 17th City Commission/P&Z work session, Gene Aubry presented a parking plan that encompassed Pine Avenue and dumped 262 parking spaces on the stretch from Gulf Drive to the City Pier (yes, that’s right, 262 parking spaces but let’s not get off track here…). As you can read at the tail end of the minutes from that meeting by clicking HERE, after much discussion and input from commissioners, board members, consultants, developers and citizens, the joint commission/board decided by straw vote to task the P&Z with further detailing the plan. Specifically, Garrett was directed to meet with P&Z Chair Randall Stover “to come up with an outline for the P&Z Board’s discussion.” We are going to go out on a limb here and interpret “discussion” as meaning actual verbal communication of some kind by and between members of the P&Z Board. And assuming the members of that board understand and respect Florida law concerning meetings “in the sunshine,” that discussion, by law, must take place in a public P&Z meeting to which the public has access.

Well, it seems your City Planner apparently interpreted the directive to “come up with an outline” as a carte blanche opportunity to create from thin air a completely new law, in the form of a new land development regulation (LDR) that cynically seeks to trump current Chapter 90 language and, surprise surprise, the language of the Citizens Initiative on Pine Avenue parking. Coincidence? Yeah, right. Read Garrett’s supposedly unilateral stab at drafting legislation HERE and decide for yourself but it certainly reads as if it fell out of a developer’s briefcase, particularly if that developer has an immediate and ongoing interest in developing property on Pine Avenue.

We hesitate to bore you with mundane esoterica related to laws and LDR’s and comp plans so let’s just put it this way. Somewhere between June 17th and today (and after it became clear to certain elements of the development community that the Citizen’s Initiative had legs and was sprinting to the finish line), and with none of that public “discussion” or debate by the P&Z Board whatsoever (and only a cryptic passing reference of “with no discussion” in the July 6 P&Z minutes HERE), current Chapter 90 parking regulations were hijacked and sought to be made irrelevant by adding language that subordinates them to Garrett's new law. The proposed law was then labeled “Chapter 91” and will apparently somehow be made a point of discussion at today’s (August 4th) City Commission Work Session on Pine Avenue parking.

So what the heck’s going on here? Well, the City Commission Work Session tonight at 6p.m. is the perfect place for you to ask that question. Garrett will be there, so show up and ask him where he got the idea to invent a new LDR? Ask your Commissioners when they found out about this new proposed law.

Their answers may surprise you. Just another reason to...

Stay informed.