Scenes From an Interview

Finish the following sentences: 

I hope that when someone visits Sarasota they tell their friends about…

The fabulous people they met. 

The best thing Sarasota has going for it is….

Its arts and culture.

When people come to Sarasota they can expect…

Fabulous weather.

Sarasota is a great place because…

We still have a small town feel even though we are growing into a bigger city.

Are most of the tourists largely still coming from the I-75 corridor and the Midwest?

We still are heavily Midwest-dominated, but we are seeing a bigger creep from the East Coast, the Northeast Corridor and down I-95. We have some outliers from the West Coast of the United States, but it’s still generally the I-75 corridor. I think what we find is that somebody has to come here first and then they bring their friends. That’s true if they’ve move here from Sweden, France or Toronto. It only takes one bell cow and then they want their friends to move there. That’s true whether you’re from Chicago or Helsinki.

How big an impact has Nathan Benderson Park and the rowing facility in the Lakewood Ranch area had on Sarasota?

Before that existed, when you went to Lakewood Ranch from let’s say downtown, you would think that you’d have to cross this “no man’s land” and that’s no disrespect to the fabulous communities that are in the Ranch, but there was nothing that defined them that you could articulate to somebody. And now you have this fabulous park and facility that defines this space. I find that’s integrated the sense of Lakewood Ranch and Sarasota, even though they operate as distinct lifestyle communities. I love the fact that we now have this great connector that sort of brings the two together. As those events build and grow in years, we are all going to look back and talk about what a major contribution this was to our community.