Sound Off: Is Consolidation Possible In Sarasota And Bradenton?

Could you imagine Sarasota and Bradenton as a unified Super City in each county?

With presentations and reports outlined on both sides of University Parkway in the coming weeks, it seems that ideas for consolidating government will come within and beyond county boundaries in various forms.

Officials are beyond the point of simple piggyback contracts for services and purchasing equipment. 

It's coming to the point of sharing departments and public safety.

This week, Sarasota County Commissioners' counterparts in Manatee County floated a few ideas to save money, The Bradenton Herald reported.

Those ideas focus on public safety and transit, the paper reported:

"Those services include traffic management; emergency medical services; 911 services, or perhaps co-habitation at Manatee's $55 million, state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center in Bradenton. Cooperative ventures might also apply to jail facilities, court services, and maybe eventually even firefighting services, commissioners suggest.

Sarasota County is already advertising for a new transit director, and Commissioner Carol Whitmore asked whether Sarasota might want to hire Carl Hunsinger, Manatee's transit division manager.

"Now that their director left in Sarasota County, they have no director of transit right now, and this is the time to go regional," said Whitmore.

Manatee and Sarasota already share a combined court system through the 12th Judicial circuit. The judges and prosecutors work in both counties.
Also political leaders from both counties meet on the Metropolitan Planning Organization or MPO. 

Even with the MPO, Florida's Transportation Secretary Anath Prasad emphasized at a meeting Monday the need for Manatee to think regionally, The Bradenton Herald reported:

"It's important we continue to look regionally," said Prasad at the meeting at the University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee.

The state hopes to encourage such planning bodies to consolidate, and when they do and approach their tasks with a regional emphasis, there will be monetary incentives to help, Prasad said.

"There's a role for a very vibrant MPO process," the secretary told the board.

Sarasota County Commissioners are keeping an open mind saying they only know a little what the Manatee County Commissioners have talked about. Sarasota Commission Chair Christine Robinson said consolidation can't be a "one size fits all" approach, she told The Bradenton Herald, and Commissioner Nora Patterson told WWSB it's possible, but early:

"Its certainly a possibility," said Sarasota County Commissioner Nora Patterson, "there are services that might make sense, provided we can put equitable amounts of funding into it."

But, she says, the idea is still in it's infancy.

"We haven't even had unofficial discussions so far," said Patterson, "what I know about it I know pretty much from reading in the newspaper that Commissioner McClash has broached the subject."

WHERE TO START

Just how and where do you start in a process like sharing 911 services across county lines or police agencies in Sarasota?

Some of those answers could be revealed starting Tuesday when Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jerry Abramson will make a special presentation to the City Commission at 1 p.m. Tuesday about how to restructure government while upgrading public safety and the city's quality of life.

Abramson was the former mayor of Louisville and was named by both Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report as one of America's Top Mayors. Abramson's presentation will be during the commission's workshop in the Commission Chambers at Sarasota's .

According to media reports, Abramson has made a bit of a minicareer doing these "will consolidation work here?" presentations.

One topic Abramson highlights is how Louisville really became a unified metropolitan area, prompting places like Dayton, Ohio and Evansville, Indiana, to take notice.

How did it go in Louisville? The Dayton Daily News sought to find out:

“We’re not the best in the world yet, but we’re not done,” said Jerry Abramson, former Louisville Metro mayor and a candidate for Kentucky’s lieutenant governor. “Are we better merged? Absolutely.”

Communities around the country — including Montgomery County — are studying Louisville’s four-decade-long journey to consolidation as a role model for becoming the next “Possibility City,” an official slogan for the unified metro area of nearly 600,000.

Sarasota and Manatee counties have a combined population of 702,281, according to the U.S. Census, providing similar figures to what Louisville worked with, but there has been no talk of consolidating Sarasota into Manatee County, or the other way around. Louisville's consolidation was only within its county — Jefferson County.

The Dayton paper documented how consolidation was a long road for Louisville, but did highlight one idea that the Manatee County Commission commented on — a regional emergency communications center.

What did a merger actually do? In some ways, government shrank and in other ways, like a unified council, it grew, The Dayton Daily News wrote:

"But not everyone is a fan of the new government structure, which has a Metro Council with 26 members nominated and elected by district.

“There are too many people on the council,” said Vince Osbourn, 53, who also works downtown. “When you put 26 people in a room trying to make legislation, I don’t know how they get anything done. The concept was a good idea, but I haven’t seen a tremendous cost savings.”

Abramson said the initial cost savings was about $700,000 a year. He and staff crafted a unified budget eliminating more than 700 jobs.

City and county police departments merged under a new management structure that placed more officers on the street, Abramson said. City and county EMS systems also came together to create the Louisville Metro Emergency Medical Service.
 

In more detail, in Louisville, the city grew from 62 square miles to 285 square miles, went to a chief executive form of government and 80 cities in Jefferson County, Kentucky, still had its own elected mayors and councils who could tax, The Dayton Daily News reported.

Abramson told a crowd in Evansville, Indiana, that the key to start a unified government approach is to start broad, the Evansville Courier & Press reported in 2010:

Instead of offering detailed proposals that voters could oppose on the grounds of a single objection, they proposed to merge the executive and legislative branches of government and leave the details to the merged government’s Metro Council.

“We learned, if you tell (voters) you’re going to — no, that sounds like we did something sneaky, I don’t mean to say that. What I mean to say is, we saw where we had come up short,” Abramson said. “And when somebody says, ‘My cousin’s EMS, he doesn’t want to merge,’ the rest of the plan may have been great, but they were (opposing merger) because of their cousin.”

Services seem to cross boundaries here already. Some of Manatee County Area Transit and Sarasota County Area Transit buses already go into each other's counties for certain routes and services, and the synced traffic light operations between the two counties are already shared in a building in Bradenton.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Manatee County Commissioner Joe McClash had sparked this regional idea with emergency radio communications in mind. In Sarasota, Tuesday, Sarasota County Commissioners are expected to vote on the location of a in either Lakewood Ranch or Cattleman Road, WWSB reports:

Whether it's Lakewood Ranch, “There's an existing building there that would have to be retro fitted to meet the standards,” or Cattleman Road, “The one at Cattleman would be open land where we would build new construction,” Sarasota County Emergency Operations Center Chief Ed McCrane says the EOC can't stay here. “It doesn't meet the critical facilities standards for an Emergency Operations Center or 9-1-1 center.”

At the municipal level in Sarasota, , and those talks haven't gone anywhere yet publicly.

Manatee and Sarasota commissioners will meet face to face May 1 for a joint work session at the Manatee Public Safety Center 2101 47th Terrace E Bradenton, and the 12th Circuit Judiciary will also meet with the Manatee commissioners Wednesday.

Regionalization is not officially on the agenda for the commissioners' May 1 work session yet, WWSB reported on air Monday evening.

Sound Off: Where will this go? Could unified government and consolidation work in Sarasota and Manatee counties? How would you do it? 

Bradenton Patch Editor Toni Whitt contributed to this report.