Michael Barfield/Florida Center for Governmental Accountability

Sarasota Assistant County Administrator Mark Cunningham resigned on Wednesday, becoming the highest-ranking official to step down in the wake of revelations about widespread failures in the county’s stormwater management system.County officials did not disclose the reason for Cunningham’s resignation but said in an emailed statement that County Administrator Jonathan Lewis had accepted it.

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.

Phillippi Creek in Sarasota County won’t be dredged this hurricane season, no emergency permit issued.

Gifted lands created parks and preserves—now one Sarasota County commissioner is pushing to rezone and sell part of it to himself.

When the Sarasota County Commission narrowly approved a $7.5 million federal disaster recovery grant to a startup nonprofit last fall, it was sold as a cornerstone of workforce recovery for trade apprenticeship programs after Hurricane Ian.Just days after the vote, Jon Mast—CEO of the Building Industry Institute (BII) which received the grant—was photographed at a party, cigar in mouth, beer in hand, donning a custom T-shirt that read: “$7.5 Million.”The optics of the photo did not sit well with many Sarasota residents.And in a late move April 22, the county commissioners reallocated the grant.

What started as a routine city manager search unraveled into a public spectacle recently at Sarasota’s City Commission. The breakdown on Friday, April 11, played out over two separate meetings — a morning workshop and an afternoon special session — where commissioners openly admitted to confusion, mistrust, and having no clear path forward.Commissioners contradicted each other, the search firm hired to oversee the process struggled to provide basic materials and information, and the public was left in the dark — literally and figuratively — about how the process would move forward.

The Sarasota County Commission voted unanimously Tuesday morning to stop work on a proposed agreement with Hi Hat Ranch, directing staff to cease further drafts of any agreement. The project will not move forward until a public workshop is scheduled within six months.The decision follows a Florida Trident investigative report published just a day earlier, which raised concerns about the deal’s financial impact — requiring taxpayers to cover half of a $28 million road-widening project for a segment of Bee Ridge Road between Bent Tree Boulevard to Lorraine Road.

A senior Sarasota County staffer called the developer’s proposal ‘insulting’ and urged the county to abandon negotiations.