An independent engineer and hydrologist said Sarasota County should make a series of changes when it comes to managing development and floodplains, after storms caused widespread and costly flooding in the 2024 hurricane season.
Stephen Suau sent a list of 10 recommendations to the county this month, urging more proactive protection for floodplains, more scrutiny of proposed developments and regular inspections of areas that could flood.
"Maybe the most important recommendation is that they need to build the internal capacity and expertise of staff," said Suau.
"I've seen over the decades that expertise has been thinned. My sense is they're trying to get it back. But for a long period of time, the county seemed to just rely on consultants," he said.
Suau was one of the first professionals to lead the stormwater department in Sarasota County. It was created not long after a no-name storm in 1992 dumped more than 11 inches of rain on Sarasota and Bradenton and flooded thousands of homes.
This year came another so-called 100-year flood in Debby, which passed Sarasota as a tropical storm and made landfall as a hurricane in the Big Bend region.
Suau said he hopes the flooding that Sarasota experienced in Debby will be another impetus for change.
"Out of 1992 came a lot of progress in managing stormwater with the creation of a funding source and acquiring lands like the Celery Fields and putting in an extensive monitoring system," he said.
Sarasota County put $25 million into its stormwater department last year. Yet Suau's independent review found some things are lacking.
"One of the things I learned in meeting with county staff over this process, for example, is that the stormwater department does not have a drone — you know, very basic technology these days — that would enable them to do reconnaissance after a storm pretty quickly and pretty accurately," Suau said.
Also, "they don't currently have a person that reviews at a building permit scale that the lot drainage for a new house is not going to impact the people next door," he added.
"This is at a very micro scale, but that's the kind of thing that they need to have. They have the funding sources."
Last month, Suau spoke at Selby Library about his discovery that a breach in a dike near Cowpen Slough led to flooding in the Laurel Meadows neighborhood, where nearly all of the 86 homes sustained water damage in Debby.
In part of the recommendations he has submitted to the county, Suau urged yearly inspections of all dikes and levees to avoid such disasters in the future.
Sarasota County's public works director Spencer Anderson has said the area that leaked was not looked at for some years prior to Debby, but offered no further specifics.
"There was not a pre-storm inspection of the earthen berm between Cowpen Slough and Phillippi Creek," and its last inspection prior to Debby, which made landfall in early August, is "unknown at this time," Sarasota County Public Works said in a statement this week.
Some residents of Laurel Meadows have said they are considering legal action after their homes, which were not located in a FEMA flood zone, took in more than a foot of water which lingered for days after Debby passed.
Given the increasing population of Sarasota County, and ever present demands to build more homes, commissioners should probably say "no" more often when developers ask to increase density in flood-prone areas, according to Suau.
"We've built in the floodplain in the past. It's not really a good idea, in my opinion," Suau said.
"I think that you need to be scrutinizing that in more detail before you increase densities in the floodplain. And I'm not saying that you should never develop in the floodplain. I'm just saying you need to be really careful and plan it and figure it out, to make sure that it won't put the new people in harm's way and the existing residents, make it worse for them."
Asked for comment on Suau's recommendations, public works said in an email: "We partnered with Mr. Suau on providing him with the data for his evaluation and are continuing to review his findings while we finish our own evaluation of the flooding from Hurricane Debby."
Both Suau's finding and the county's results "will be discussed with the County Commission during their scheduled workshop on January 21, 2025," the spokesperson added.
