Derek Gilliam/Suncoast Searchlight

Sarasota County administrators are stiff-arming recommendations from a stormwater consultant and plan to push another rate hike on residents despite a new audit showing the utility could have more than $70 million over the next five years without raising rates.Just two years after a substantial increase in stormwater environmental utility rates, Sarasota County staff is once again asking taxpayers to open their wallets to bolster water quality and flood protections ahead of future storms. The proposed tax increase comes as county leaders scramble to fill gaps in the stormwater system that last year left thousands of homes flooded in unsuspecting neighborhoods miles from the coast.A joint investigation by the Florida Trident and Suncoast Searchlight into the failures found the county ignored sediment buildup in Phillippi Creek, left key stormwater positions sitting vacant while work orders piled up and overlooked glaring system vulnerabilities noted by consultants years earlier. All contributed to a stormwater utility operating in disarray.

Tropical Storm Debby didn’t look like trouble.No hurricane-force winds. No mass evacuations. Just forecasts, quietly urgent, calling for historic rainfall.Sarasota County officials weren’t alarmed. Days before landfall, the public works director — who two years earlier had called the county “one of the most flood-protected communities in the state, if not the nation” — went on vacation.On Aug. 5, the rain came. Then the flooding. Then the reckoning.