About Old Miakka: An open letter to the Sarasota County Commission

To: The Board of Sarasota County Commissioners

When I drive out to east Sarasota - which I do when I visit Crowley’s Nursery, or Florida Native Plants, I experience a sense of going to another place - a bit of travel to ranches, open spaces, a reality different from our core residential areas, filled as they are with gated communities, Publixes and Walgreens.

 

An environment that has not been tamed and rubber-stamped into a profit-maximizing business plan seems somehow life affirming and reassuring. The rural quality of east Sarasota is unique because it has not been packaged into yet another sterile commodity. We need the otherness of places like this - they enrich the diversity of where we live, and remind us that Adam and Eve didn’t require sidewalks, generic house plans, or well-coiffed dogs on leashes.

Sarasota County has prided itself on individual flair - the creative experimentalism of Bertha Palmer, the Baroque extravagances of John Ringling, the public spirit of John Nolen's vision for downtown Venice. 

John Nolen Park

Individuality - the unique - endows a place with character.

When you take that away, you end up with the tedious regularity of yet another Florida residential product -- packaged, commodified and sold. For whose profit?

As a Board charged with using sound judgment and common sense in the process of deciding what is gained and lost through human construction, you might at least weigh the value of another 5,000 Pat Neal homes behind Pat Neal gates with Pat Neal names like Cielo, Milano, or Vicenzo against the irreducible uniqueness of nature -- rural life, the heritage of a 172-year-old community like none other. This balance of nature and artifice should be factored into any deliberation with so much at stake.

Frederick Law Olmsted didn’t look at 3.5 square miles of Manhattan and see dollar signs. He saw a green place that provides escape and a saving natural environment for the millions of New Yorkers who benefit from the varied delights realized in Central Park:

Mr. Neal appears to aspire to be an Olmsted in reverse: He sees green and wishes to turn it into a replication of what he’s producing all over this county, for another sort of green.

Our minds, hearts and souls need something more than infinite Nealification. Give this organically grown community of Old Miakka the honest recognition that it deserves. Because without such otherness, we - and Sarasota - will be diminished in more ways than we can imagine.

Tom Matrullo

WSLRNews: The Fight to "Keep the Country Country" Continues