Shining light on the good, bad and ugly of bureaucracy in Florida

Part 2 of a series (read Part 1 here) 

Special Report by Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

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When we left our story in Part 1, it was late 2024 and the City of Tallahassee had just dropped a $150,000-plus sidewalk demand on a bookstore owner who just wanted to add 700 square feet. But that wasn’t where the adventure began. To understand the Sidewalk of Doom, we need to go back to the beginning. 

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Before the Sidewalk of Doom, there was the deviations gauntlet. 

A deviation, as noted in Part 1, is a formal city approval allowing a property owner to depart from a specific development standard. Think of it as asking permission to not follow a rule. 

What Sally Bradshaw discovered is that some of the most consequential rules aren’t written down anywhere. 

The accidental discovery 

When Bradshaw first planned the expansion, she envisioned developing the full Waterworks lot. That meant full compliance with something called the MMTD — a layer of design requirements that governs everything from sidewalk widths to window placement to where you can put your parking. 

Full MMTD compliance is expensive, time-consuming and, as it turns out, sometimes unnecessary. 

It turns out City Hall has a secret menu. You just have to know to ask. 

Here’s how Bradshaw found out. 

The project’s civil engineer was simultaneously working on a small addition for a church on Pasco Street. The engineer had done everything right: she went through the full MMTD compliance process, dotting every “i.”Then, after all that work, the City informed her that a project adding less than 33 percent of new building area to an existing structure didn’t have to comply with the strict MMTD standards. 

Nobody had written this policy down. It lived, apparently, in the institutional memory of city planning staff. It is not known how many times it has been applied to those who discovered it – or not applied to those who were unaware. 

The engineer on the church job applied that hard-won knowledge to Midtown Reader. She made sure their plans kept the new addition under the 33 percent threshold — ending up at 29.88 percent — and suddenly a significant portion of the regulatory burden evaporated. 

The unwritten rule had saved Bradshaw. But the fact that it was unwritten had nearly cost her the entire project. 

Food trucks, gardens and eye bolts  

Even with the 33 percent workaround, the deviations process ground on. 

City planning officials informed Bradshaw she needed to provide what staff called an “active use” area — a minimum 1,200-square-foot paved space, open to the public, on her private property. Part 1 referred to a food truck, which was a non-starter.

Bradshaw proposed a pollinator garden instead. The City agreed — then proceeded to weigh in on the exact configuration of the sidewalks running through it, the precise design of the garden itself, the requirement of a water feature, and the mandatory placement of a bench. All of it open to public access, on private property. 

It was, as one participant in the process later described it, the “least-worst” solution. 

Then there was the bike rack. 

All properties within the MMTD overlay are required to provide secure bicycle parking. The City’s preferred solution has historically been large, box-style bike lockers. Bradshaw pushed back because the large bike area was inconsistent with the building’s design and was far too large for a modest expansion. After negotiation, the requirement was whittled down to its code minimum: a covered structure with hardware sufficient to lock a bicycle. 

The final result was a shed roof and 8 eye bolts for bike spaces. 

Of note, since the grand opening, the bike rack has held either one or zero bikes every time Sally has seen it. And she recently discovered that the one bike that has been using the rack is from someone who walks across the street to do work at another business.  

The window that wasn’t 

City planning staff informed Bradshaw she was required to install an 8-by-8-foot window on the west wall of the addition for what the MMTD calls transparency — the idea that buildings should have visible, active frontages. 

The problem: it’s a bookstore. The west wall needed to hold bookshelves. 

Bradshaw’s team argued the point. The City rejected the reasoning. So, the architect did the math — calculating all existing glazing on the building and determining, by what one participant described as “the smallest ofmargins,” that the existing windows already met the MMTD transparency standard. 

The 8-by-8 window requirement disappeared. But not after weeks of back and forth. 

The cost of time … and email. 

Consider what it took just to communicate with the City.  

 

The project’s architect logged 997 emails on the Midtown Reader project alone — to the owner, the engineers, and a cast of city staff spanning multiple departments. Many of those emails required hours of research. 

And this for a modest 700-square-foot bookstore expansion. 

Bradshaw was fortunate enough to know how to persevere in a war of attrition.  

But most small businesspeople never find out the unwritten rules and pay even more.  

Or just give up. 

COMING NEXT: PART 3 

What will the City accept in place of the Sidewalk of Doom? The city makes an offer Midtown Reader can’t believe … or refuse 

PART ONE

Special Report by Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

This is a story about 997 emails, a $150,000 sidewalk, an 8-eye-bolt bike rack and a parking lot that never got built.

The story includes specific instructions on a pollinator “water feature,” an order to build bookshelves into windows and a very, very expensive patch of grass. 

But ultimately, it’s a story about what happens when a city government mistakes a beloved small business for a regulatory obstacle course. 

This is The Amazing Adventure of Midtown Reader (and the Sidewalk of Doom). 

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The City of Tallahassee almost broke Sally Bradshaw. Almost. 

The founder and owner of Tallahassee bookstore Midtown Reader has turned it into a beloved Tallahassee institution. 

But as the store bustled, it also busted at the seams. She needed additional inventory space and parking — the latter a chronic issue for Midtown merchants. 

So, after Don Quarello decided to close the adjacent Waterworks after a long and iconic run and after no successor emerged to run the bar, she purchased the property  

By August of 2024, Waterworks had been demolished and Sally was ready to go. 

Then, the real adventure began. It was time to deal with the City of Tallahassee. 

It took more than a year before the small expansion opened. 

And the cost? Well, read on … 

The city had some ideas 

There were two main phases to the attempt to get the renovation complete. 

As it turned out, the building permit was the easy part. It was the process of getting approval for what are called “deviations” that turned a modest 700-foot expansion into a novel more at home in the sci fi section of the bookstore than home improvement. 

A deviation is a formal city approval allowing a property owner to deviate from a specific development standard — a waiver, essentially, from what the code requires. 

There are plenty of rules in the City’s voluminous book of codes. But it was the ones NOT listed that city officials started dropping on Midtown Reader. At one point, city officials suggested the bookstore set aside space on its private property for food trucks. 

Food trucks. For a bookstore.

Now, a pause. 

One thing Red Tape Florida has discovered in its first year is that local government planning departments are all quite familiar with the state’s public records laws. It’s for that reason that most “suggestions” are delivered, you guessed it, verbally. 

While email traffic can still be voluminous (more on that later) there are other things local government officials wouldn’t be caught dead putting in a public record. 

Red Tape Florida has found that builders and contractors will often send an email with a question, but the reply will come by phone. Emails asking to confirm what was discussed go unanswered. 

With that backdrop, let’s return to Midtown Reader. 

The biggest city demand wasn’t about food trucks. It was about a sidewalk. 

Remember the left turn lane controversy? 

To understand this story, one has to remember what was happening in the news in Tallahassee. In early 2025, as the Midtown Reader project was gaining steam, opposition began to form over proposed changes to Thomasville Road in Midtown. 

A Blueprint 2000 “placemaking” project would result in the road becoming one way for at least 2 years while the left turn lane was eliminated and utilities were upgraded. Among many Midtown merchants, Sally Bradshaw spoke publicly against the plan and its devastating impact on her business. 

Oh, and one more change was a part of the Blueprint plan: The Thomasville Road sidewalks would be expanded from 5 feet wide to 6 feet wide on the east side of the street and 7 feet on the west side. 

When sidewalks go sideways 

In Midtown, about 3,000 feet of sidewalk line Thomasville Road on each side, from the intersection of 7th Avenue, south to Monroe Street. The 5-foot-wide stretch of sidewalk in front of Midtown Reader and the old Waterworks lot is only 150 feet long. 

But for the City of Tallahassee to issue a building permit to Midtown Reader, it had some demands. 

Namely this: Midtown Reader would be required to double the width of the sidewalks in front of its half block — from 5 feet to 10 feet wide. 

AND it would be required to do all the accompanying utility work – gas and electric.

The result would be a 150-foot stretch of 10-foot-wide sidewalk, while the other 97 percent of the sidewalk on either side of Thomasville Road in Midtown remained 5 feet wide. 

Oh, you might be thinking … how much does that cost? 

The initial estimate obtained by Bradshaw was a whopping $150,000-plus and included grading, earthwork, curbing, demolition and much more. And that was before any utility work. 

But things get even stranger. 

You might be asking, where did 10 feet come from? 

Good question. The ill-fated Midtown Placemaking project — eventually scuttled by FDOT after concerns about the devastating impact on affected businesses — only called for sidewalks to be widened to 6 feet on the east side of Thomasville Road (the Midtown Reader side) and 8 feet on the west side. 

Why was 6 feet good enough for Blueprint, FDOT and the City of Tallahassee but now 10 feet was the new rule for Midtown Reader? 

Bradshaw never got a clear answer to that question. 

For Sally, the sidewalk demand was a non-starter given the cost, and the fact that walking traffic in midtown is extremely low — most customers come from other areas of the city, they drive, they need parking. 

But the City had a counteroffer. 

The sidewalk was the final indignity. But it wasn’t the first. 

COMING NEXT: PART 2 

The Rules Nobody Wrote Down: How being unaware of the City’s unwritten rulebook almost buried Midtown Reader before the sidewalk fight even began. 

In Austin, rents are at their cheapest in 20 years. In Florida, local governments are the reason yours aren’t. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

Here is a number worth sitting with: 18.3 percent. 

That is the share of income the typical Austin, Texas, renter now spends on rent — the lowest on record going back at least 20 years, according to housing analyst Nick Gerli of Reventure App. The typical Austin rent has dropped to $1,565 a month while the median income has climbed to $100,000. Apartment rents are down roughly 22 percent from their 2022 peak. 

The reason is simple: Austin built its way out of the problem. Building permits spiked to more than 50,000 units in 2022. That supply has been hitting the market ever since. Developers built. The market responded. Renters won. 

Now compare that to Florida, where the median renter spends more than 30 percent of income on housing, and where economists at FSU’s DeVoe L. Moore Center and the Reason Foundation found the state is missing roughly 120,000 rental units. Miami-Dade alone is short more than 7,000 rentals. Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, is missing more than 8,000 units. Broward is short more than 10,000. 

The difference between Austin and Florida is not geography or demand. It is local government. 

Say it again louder for those in the back: If you are about affordable housing you, by definition, can’t be anti-growth. 

The Data Is Unambiguous 

Gerli’s analysis of major U.S. metros finds that inventory surplus is the single strongest predictor of where rents are heading. Cities with the biggest supply surpluses — Austin, Tampa, Dallas — are seeing prices fall. Cities with deficits are seeing prices rise. The correlation is -0.80. This is not a complicated relationship. 

Florida had the same pandemic-era demand surge Austin did. What Florida does not have is a political culture at the local level willing to let the market build. 

What Florida’s Local Governments Actually Did 

In December 2023, Pasco County commissioners voted unanimously to sue any developer who tried to build apartments on commercial land under Florida’s Live Local Act — a state law designed specifically to fast-track affordable housing. The county’s concern about losing industrial land to housing has some merit. Threatening builders with litigation does not. 

In South Florida, roughly two dozen cities and counties filed lawsuits to block a state law that temporarily froze local restrictions on development. Miami Beach officials warned the Live Local Act would destroy the city’s architectural character. The city’s median home value exceeds $700,000. Workers who serve that community cannot afford to live there. 

These are not isolated examples. They reflect a political economy baked into Florida’s local governments: single-family homeowners who dominate local politics have a direct financial interest in housing scarcity. Scarce housing means higher property values. Those homeowners vote. They show up to commission meetings. And local officials, who answer to them, have spent years converting the government’s power over land use into a mechanism for making existing homeowners wealthier at the expense of everyone else. 

The Honest Question 

If you are a Florida renter wondering why your rent is not falling the way Austin’s is, the answer is not corporate landlords, not inflation, not the insurance market — though all of those make a bad situation worse. The fundamental constraint is the political decision, made in city halls and county commission chambers across this state, to make it difficult, slow, and expensive to build housing near where people want to live. 

And those decisions are often enforced by bureaucrats who act as the foot soldiers of anti-growth radicals who would rather see “placemaking” than lower rents for working people. 

Austin got out of the way. Its renters are paying 18.3 cents on the dollar. Florida’s local governments have spent years making sure that doesn’t happen here. The question is whether the voters being priced out of their own communities will eventually hold them accountable for it. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

There may be no more reliable sign of local Facebook economic illiteracy than the phrase: “We don’t need another car wash.” 

Or gas station. 

Or mattress store. 

Or storage place. 

Or chicken place. 

Or whatever else somebody happened to see while driving by a construction site and feeling suddenly appointed Secretary of Commerce for Leon County. 

It is one of the dumbest recurring civic comments in modern life — a smug little performance of fake sophistication by people who apparently believe the economy is supposed to operate like a personal Pinterest board. 

News flash: the local economy is not curated around your aesthetic preferences. 

A developer does not spend millions of dollars building a business because Brenda in Killearn is emotionally maxed out on car washes. A lender does not finance it because three guys in a Facebook thread have decided the corridor has “enough already.” Investors do not risk real money because somebody with a punisher skull profile picture thinks Tallahassee needs more “unique local concepts.” 

They build because they think demand exists. 

And if they’re wrong, they lose money. 

That’s called a market. 

It is amazing how many people who claim to love capitalism turn into Soviet central planners the minute they see a new commercial site plan. 

“We don’t need another car wash.” 

Who is “we,” exactly? 

Did the city appoint a Council of Approved Consumer Preferences? Was there a countywide summit at which residents voted that, yes, one more dentist’s office would be fine, but a car wash would be a bridge too far? 

No. What usually happens is much simpler. Somebody looked at traffic counts, rooftops, demographics, vehicle volume, disposable income, and site economics — and concluded the project could work. 

That person may be right or wrong. But he is at least participating in the economy, which already puts him a step ahead of the Facebook commentariat. 

Because here is what these critics almost never acknowledge: even the businesses they sneer at create value. 

A car wash is not just a car wash. It is land acquisition. Site work. Concrete. Steel. Electrical. Plumbing. Engineering. Equipment. Signage. Landscaping. Professional services. Construction jobs. Permanent jobs. Property taxes. Utility revenue. Local spending. 

Industry data suggest the sector supports somewhere in the neighborhood of 175,000 to 195,000 jobs nationally, depending on dataset and year, and the trade group for the industry says a new professional car wash typically creates 5 or more local jobs. Federal revenue data show employer-firm car washes generated more than $16 billion nationally in 2022.  

In other words, even if a car wash is not your dream TED Talk economy, it is still an actual economy. 

And that is where the social-media snobbery gets especially irritating. 

People talk as if a town has somehow failed when it gets a car wash or a gas station, as though every vacant parcel should instead become a biotech campus, a beautifully branded mixed-use district, or perhaps a farm-to-table marketplace featuring artisanal stationery and moral superiority. 

That is not how most local economies work. 

Normal economies have ordinary businesses. Service businesses. Convenience businesses. Repetitive businesses. Businesses that solve boring problems for thousands of people every week. That is not evidence of decline. That is evidence that people live there, drive there, and spend money there. 

The same people mocking “another mattress store” are often the first to complain that Tallahassee lacks private investment, lacks tax base growth, lacks higher wages, and lacks economic energy. Fine. But private investment rarely arrives wearing a tuxedo and carrying a white paper. A lot of it shows up looking mundane. 

That does not make it worthless. 

Now, none of this means every project is a good project. Some are bad fits. Some are poorly sited. Some create traffic problems. Some deserve scrutiny on design, access, stormwater, or compatibility. 

But “I personally don’t like this kind of business” is not economic analysis. It is just self-flattering ignorance with a comment button. 

And it misses a larger point. 

The problem in Tallahassee is not that we have too many people willing to invest private capital in ordinary commercial projects. 

The problem is that we do not have enough people willing — or able — to build the next layer of the economy on top of that: more headquarters, more scalable firms, more serious industrial growth, more homegrown wealth creation, more high-wage private employment. 

That is the real conversation. 

But it is easier, of course, to type “we don’t need another car wash,” collect a few likes, and pretend you’ve contributed something meaningful to local economic development. 

You haven’t. 

You’ve just announced that you do not understand how an economy works. 

The state passed a law to build more housing. Now the same local officials who created the shortage are in court trying to kill it. 

Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

Florida has a housing shortage. That much is settled. Economists at FSU’s DeVoe L. Moore Center and the Reason Foundation have estimated the statewide gap at more than 100,000 missing rental units. Miami-Dade is short more than 7,000. Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, is missing more than 8,000. Broward is short more than 10,000. More than half of Florida’s renter households are cost-burdened, spending over 30 percent of their income on housing. 

The shortage did not happen overnight. For decades, local zoning rules locked large swaths of Florida into single-family development, imposed height and density limits that made apartment construction impractical, and layered permitting requirements that made the whole process slow and expensive. Local officials made those decisions. Local officials enforced them. And local officials collected the political benefits: a homeowner class whose property values kept rising precisely because supply was constrained. 

In 2023, the state legislature decided enough was enough. The Live Local Act was designed to cut through local obstruction and get housing built on underused commercial and industrial land — strip malls, vacant office parks, aging retail corridors — by allowing developers who include affordable units to bypass local zoning and move through approval faster. 

The response from local government was immediate. And revealing. 

The same officials who created the shortage are now in court fighting the law designed to fix it. 

Hillsborough County: Suing the State. This Week. 

On March 9, Hillsborough County filed suit against the state of Florida, arguing the Live Local Act is unconstitutional. The commission voted unanimously to bring the challenge. 

Commissioner Joshua Wostal, who made the motion, announced the filing on social media. “I have had enough of these greedy multifamily developers,” he wrote, accusing them of “destroying our communities.” 

Note what Wostal did not say. He did not say Hillsborough has enough housing. He did not say rents are affordable for the teachers, nurses, and deputies who work in his county. He did not say the shortage his commission helped create over decades of restrictive zoning is someone else’s problem. 

He said he’d had enough of developers building apartments. 

Hillsborough is not alone. Hollywood and Bal Harbour have filed separate constitutional challenges. Roughly two dozen cities and counties have sued over a related 2025 state growth law. Pasco County commissioners voted unanimously in 2023 to threaten lawsuits against any developer who tried to build apartments under the Live Local Act at all. 

What They’re Actually Protecting 

Local officials frame their opposition as a defense of community character, neighborhood identity, and home-rule authority. Those are real values. But they are not the whole story. 

The whole story is that restrictive zoning benefits the people who already own property in Florida. Scarcity keeps values high. The homeowners who show up to commission meetings and donate to local campaigns have a direct financial interest in keeping supply constrained. And the officials who answer to them have spent years building a regulatory architecture that delivers exactly that result. 

The Live Local Act threatens that arrangement. Not because it is radical — it simply allows apartments on land already zoned for commercial use, provided affordable units are included — but because it removes the local veto that has kept supply artificially low for a generation. 

That is why they are suing. 

The Cost of the Veto 

Every lawsuit filed by a Florida county to block the Live Local Act is a choice. A choice to preserve the regulatory veto that has made existing homeowners wealthier while pricing working families out of the communities they serve. 

Wostal called the developers “greedy.” That is one way to look at it. Another is to ask who benefits when a county with an 8,000-unit housing deficit goes to court to stop apartments from being built. It is not the sheriff’s deputy paying $2,200 a month in rent. It is not the nurse driving forty minutes each way because she cannot afford to live near the hospital where she works. 

The officials filing these suits know exactly what they are protecting. The question is whether the people being priced out are paying attention. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

If Florida is serious about affordable housing, it must get serious about impact fees. 

For months, the House had been carrying that water largely alone. House Bill 1139 was moving methodically and quietly through committees while the Senate sat on its hands. 

The Senate finally acted. Sort of. 

Last week, the Senate Rules Committee approved a sweeping “delete everything” amendment to SB 1566 — a bill originally focused on local government financial transparency — and stuffed into it a significant package of impact fee reforms. 

The maneuver is worth noting. Rather than give impact fee reform a standalone bill with its own hearing record and floor debate, the Senate buried it in a transparency omnibus through a late-filed amendment. That’s not how you signal that a policy is a priority. That’s how you check a box. 

But the substance matters, and on substance, the amendment moves in the right direction. 

What the Senate amendment actually does 

Impact fees are the one-time charges cities and counties levy on new construction to fund roads, schools, parks and utilities. In theory, growth pays for growth. In practice, fees have exploded in some jurisdictions — with limited transparency, unpredictable timing, and math that local governments haven’t always been required to show. 

The SB 1566 amendment would require that impact fees be grounded in a “demonstrated-need study” using what the bill calls a “plan-based methodology” — localized, current data tied to specific capital projects and projected growth over a defined period. The data can’t be more than four years old. The local government must adopt the study within 12 months if it wants to raise fees. 

The amendment also codifies a protection that should go without saying: developers can’t be charged twice for the same transportation impact. When a county and a municipality both want a piece of the same infrastructure cost, they now have to coordinate through an interlocal agreement. 

Critically, the amendment creates a new refund and credit process. If a developer overpays (it happens) the local government now has 30 days to respond to a written refund request and 30 days to deliver the refund or credit once elected. That accountability didn’t exist in statute before. 

And for local governments that want to blow past the phase-in limits on fee increases? The amendment says they can, but only under “extraordinary circumstances,” only with a unanimous vote of their governing body, only after two publicly noticed workshops dedicated specifically to the extraordinary circumstances question, and only with a demonstrated-need study completed within the past year. That is a meaningful set of guardrails. 

What it doesn’t do — and why that matters 

No one is eliminating impact fees. The amendment does not zero them out. It does not strip local governments of revenue tools. It says: show your work. Show it with current data. Show it tied to real capital plans. And don’t blindside the market with sudden spikes you can’t defend. 

That matters in a state where housing costs are suffocating working families. 

Impact fees don’t get headlines. But add $15,000, $20,000 or $30,000 to the cost of a new home, and that invisible policy decision becomes very visible at the closing table. Unpredictability is a tax. When builders don’t know what fees will be six months from now, they price in risk. Risk becomes cost. Cost becomes higher home prices. 

This is how decisions made in commission chambers end up pricing teachers, deputies and nurses out of the communities they serve. 

Who’s opposing it 

Predictably, the Florida Association of Counties and the Florida League of Cities have lined up against measures that constrain local fee authority. Their argument is familiar: local control, infrastructure needs, flexibility. 

But here’s the tension. 

You cannot hold press conferences about affordable housing and then oppose reforms that bring discipline and transparency to one of the largest local cost drivers embedded in new construction. That’s not a defense of local government. That’s protection of a revenue stream. 

If a county or city truly has defensible math behind its impact fees, these reforms should not scare anyone. The requirement is alignment with capital plans and recent data. That’s not a burden. That’s competent governance. 

The bigger picture 

Florida’s housing crisis is not theoretical. Population growth continues. Construction costs remain elevated. Insurance remains volatile. Land is finite. 

You cannot solve that equation while leaving every local cost lever untouched. 

The Senate’s decision to move these provisions — even through a side door — is meaningful. But a delete-everything amendment filed late in session, tucked inside a transparency bill, is not the same as the Legislature treating this as a priority. 

The question now is whether the House and Senate can reconcile their approaches and get something to the governor’s desk before session ends. HB 1139 and the SB 1566 amendment cover similar ground, but they are not identical. Conference will matter. 

If lawmakers are serious about housing supply — not just speeches — the path forward is clear. Reconcile the bills. Pass the reforms. Show the work. 

Opposing it, or letting it die in conference, sends a different message: that maintaining fee flexibility for local governments matters more than lowering the structural cost of a home. 

Florida’s working families are watching. Even if they don’t know the bill numbers. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

Siesta Key has become a case study in a familiar Florida contradiction: communities that depend heavily on tourism and redevelopment dollars while simultaneously trying to prevent redevelopment from occurring. 

A recent decision by the Sarasota County Commission on Nov. 12 to reject a Comprehensive Plan amendment underscores that tension sharply. According to coverage in the Observer, the proposal would have allowed aging, nonconforming condominium communities to voluntarily rebuild at their existing unit counts rather than conforming to today’s lower density limits  

But here’s the uncomfortable reality: on a barrier island repeatedly exposed to hurricanes, newer construction is almost always safer, stronger, and more environmentally resilient than legacy structures built under outdated codes. 

Florida’s building codes evolved dramatically after Hurricane Andrew. When the storm exposed widespread construction and enforcement failures, the state adopted a uniform Florida Building Code in 2002 with significantly stronger wind, flood, and structural requirements. Homes built under that code have sustained measurably less damage than older structures in comparable storms. 

The most famous example is the so-called “Super House” in Mexico Beach — built to withstand extreme storm surge and catastrophic wind. When Hurricane Michael devastated much of the Panhandle, that reinforced concrete structure remained standing while older homes around it were destroyed. Even homes just on the leeward side of the “super house” were protected and suffered less damage. It became a national symbol of what resilient coastal construction can look like. 

Siesta Key does not exist outside the laws of physics. When storms come — and they will — structures built to outdated standards are more vulnerable. Debris from older buildings becomes environmental contamination. Extended recovery slows tourism. Insurance pressures mount. Tax revenue drops. 

If Sarasota County is deeply reliant on Siesta Key’s tourism tax revenue — and it is  — then resilience is not optional. It is economic policy. Red Tape Florida has previously documented that Siesta Key generates roughly one in four of Sarasota County’s tourist-development tax dollars — revenue that flows largely into countywide spending rather than back to the island itself. 

The regulatory framework is already in place: an overlay district, zoning rules, setback standards, short-term rental regulations, residential protections. What’s increasingly visible is a mindset that deploys anti-growth arguments to preserve a nostalgic version of the island, even when that approach conflicts with environmental durability and long-term economic health. 

Freezing redevelopment does not freeze risk. It may amplify it. 

When officials delay or deny projects that would replace older structures with modern, code-compliant buildings, they are not protecting the environment. They may be prolonging the life of the very structures most vulnerable to catastrophic failure in a major storm. 

And when communities that benefit disproportionately from tourism tax revenue resist modernization while continuing to rely on that revenue stream — including for countywide obligations — the optics become harder to defend. 

Barrier islands must evolve or they will erode — economically and structurally. 

The real debate on Siesta Key shouldn’t be “growth versus no growth.” It should be this: are we encouraging smarter, stronger, storm-resilient redevelopment within existing zoning — or are we preserving aging vulnerability under the banner of nostalgia? 

That’s not a culture war question. It’s a resilience question. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

For years, they rolled out the red tape. 

Now they’re staring at the consequences — how to fund police and fire, maintain parks, and keep local government running when nearly all your revenue comes from homeowners. 

At a South Dade State of the Market event last week, the mayors of Pinecrest, Palmetto Bay and Cutler Bay did something rare for local officials — they admitted the obvious. 

“We didn’t have the foresight to increase the zoning enough to bring in a commercial,” Pinecrest Mayor Joseph Corradino said, according to reporting by Chloe Gallivan in Bisnow. “Commercial wouldn’t be subject to the property tax issue, and we’re going to get crushed, probably because of short-sightedness.” 

“Short-sightedness.” That’s not a blogger’s word. That’s the mayor’s. 

The immediate backdrop was a state-level debate over property taxes. But the larger story has nothing to do with one bill in Tallahassee. 

It’s about what happens when a town spends decades treating growth like a contagious disease. 

Pinecrest is more than 90 percent single-family homes. Palmetto Bay is 92 percent single-family. These are communities that carefully curated their zoning maps to limit commercial intensity, restrict multifamily, and preserve a certain aesthetic. 

That wasn’t accidental. It was enforced — by planning boards, by staff reports, by zoning codes thick enough to stun a horse. 

Developers were told, politely or not, that this wasn’t Miami. Go build somewhere else. 

And many did. 

Here’s the problem: local governments don’t run on vibes. They run on revenue. 

Police. Fire rescue. Infrastructure. Parks. Schools. All funded by a tax base that, in these towns, leans overwhelmingly on homeowners. 

When you deliberately wall off commercial development, you’re not just protecting neighborhood character. You’re narrowing your revenue base to one economic lane. 

That works fine — until it doesn’t. 

When revenue growth slows, when costs rise, when policy shifts at the state level, there’s no cushion. There’s no diversified commercial sector absorbing part of the load. There’s just homeowners and a shrinking set of options. 

And suddenly, the same governments that once treated developers like intruders are wishing they’d approved more storefronts. 

Palmetto Bay offers a case study in lagging realization. The village implemented a pay-to-park system meant to support a future downtown vision. The idea: people will walk. The problem, as Mayor Karyn Cunningham admitted, is that “there’s nowhere to walk right now. There’s no retail there.” 

You can’t regulate your way into an ecosystem. You either allow the market to build one — or you don’t. 

Cutler Bay at least has the massive Southplace City Center redevelopment in the pipeline. That project could meaningfully diversify its tax base. But even there, Mayor Tim Meerbott acknowledged that until it’s built and stabilized, the town remains heavily dependent on homesteaded property taxes. 

In other words, the diversification comes after you say yes — not while you’re still saying no. 

This is the recurring theme Red Tape Florida has documented across the state: anti-growth zealotry feels principled in the short term and fragile in the long term. 

Communities convince themselves they are protecting residents from traffic, density or change. Bureaucrats enforce the rules with precision. Permits get slower. Zoning stays tight. Projects get watered down or walk away. 

And then — years later — the same leaders discover that fiscal resilience requires exactly the kind of growth they spent decades resisting. 

Government slows growth. Growth goes elsewhere. The tax base stagnates. And eventually, government itself feels the squeeze. 

That’s not ideology. That’s math. 

No one is arguing for reckless overdevelopment. But pretending you can fund full-service municipal government indefinitely with a nearly all-residential tax base is fantasy. 

The quiet part isn’t really about one property tax proposal. 

It’s this: if you block commercial growth long enough, you don’t freeze your town in amber. You weaken your own foundation. 

And when the numbers stop working, there’s no planning-board motion that can undo 20 years of saying no. 

For many Florida cities and counties, the time to fix that mistake is right now. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida 

Tallahassee International Airport is adding two new nonstop routes on Breeze Airways — Fort Lauderdale and Raleigh-Durham. 

That’s really good news. 

Full stop. 

More destinations are better than fewer. And increased supply ought to eventually drive down price. 

It wasn’t free – $3 million in Tallahassee taxpayer money is headed to Breeze as a part of the deal. But with a limited number of $39 introductory one-way fares, that’s a pill that many residents will find easier to swallow.  

Now, let’s look at this development from cruising altitude and compare the new Breeze world to where TLH stood before Silver Airways shut down and JetBlue ended its brief Tallahassee flirtation. 

The Silver/JetBlue baseline 

Before Silver ceased operations in 2025, its Tallahassee network consisted of two nonstop destinations at its recent peak: 

• Fort Lauderdale 
• Tampa 

Fort Lauderdale was the last route standing when Silver collapsed. Tampa had already been discontinued. 

JetBlue’s Tallahassee experiment was brief. The airline launched daily nonstop service between TLH and Fort Lauderdale on January 4, 2024, then announced it was pulling out less than a year later, with its final Tallahassee departure on October 27, 2024. 

What Breeze restores 

The new Fort Lauderdale service restores that lost South Florida connection. 

The Raleigh-Durham route is new. 

Raleigh-Durham International Airport serves the Research Triangle region and offers strong domestic connectivity. It is not a legacy airline hub, and Breeze operates as a point-to-point carrier rather than a traditional hub-and-spoke airline, but Raleigh does expand geographic reach beyond Florida. 

What this does not do 

It does not restore Tampa service. 

It does not dramatically increase frequency. Both Breeze routes are scheduled three times per week. That provides options, but not daily flexibility. 

What it does do 

It brings the airport back to roughly the same number of nonstop destinations Silver offered at its recent peak — but with a different mix. 

Instead of Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, the lineup becomes Fort Lauderdale and Raleigh-Durham. 

That’s likely a trade up. Tampa functioned largely as a Florida destination. Raleigh-Durham, by contrast, offers broader connectivity across the eastern seaboard — though Breeze itself operates primarily point-to-point. 

The incentive reality 

Airports across the country routinely offer incentives — fee waivers, marketing support, or revenue guarantees — to attract new service. Tallahassee is no different. That’s not unusual; it’s standard industry practice. 

The real test is whether the routes remain once incentive periods end and the flights have to stand on their own economics. TLH’s track record with incentive-backed carriers is mixed. JetBlue’s brief run is a reminder that incentives can launch service — but they don’t guarantee permanence. Hopefully, Breeze will stick. 

The bottom line 

This is a solid development for TLH. The city regains a South Florida nonstop and gains access to a growing North Carolina market.  It essentially returns TLH to the place it was earlier this decade 

It does feel a bit like Tallahassee’s current restaurant scene, however – one opens; another closes.  

Until Tallahassee experiences real population growth and economic development expansion, the calculus is unlikely to change. 

By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida founder 

When I launched Red Tape Florida, I wasn’t building a business. I was testing an idea. 

The idea: local government needs scrutiny that is informed, data-driven, and relentless. Not performative outrage. Not partisan theater. Just facts, public records, and clear arguments that follow the money. 

Thankfully, the response to RTF has proved the point. 

Stories traveled. Traffic grew. Business leaders began forwarding documents. Citizens sent tips. Even local officials who don’t love the coverage started reading closely — because the work is hard to dismiss when it’sbacked by their own numbers. 

When I see folks now – even those who have traditionally been aligned with the powers that be in local government – they invariably whisper “keep it up” or “that last one was great.” 

Red Tape Florida has become a consistent civic voice in Tallahassee and beyond. In Ormond Beach, Temple Terrace, Siesta Key, Gulf County, and dozens of other communities, we’ve dissected questionable economic development deals, challenged inefficient fee structures, published records that would have stayed buried, and aired reform ideas that struggle to find oxygen elsewhere. 

Here are some highlights: 

• A story on a $35,000 luxury watch that became a North Florida Fair retirement gift. 

• A story on a Tallahassee shed renovation that turned into nightmare. 

• A state legislator responding to Red Tape Florida reporting and calling on Gulf County to shape up 

And many more. 

But the platform still runs on one resource: my time. 

Deep investigations take hours. Records requests take persistence. Data work doesn’t do itself. Consistency requires discipline. 

If Red Tape Florida is going to scale — in frequency, depth, and impact — it needs infrastructure. 

Today, we’re launching the Red Tape Florida Supporter Program. 

This is not a paywall. All content remains free and publicly accessible. 

This is a voluntary model for readers who believe civic accountability shouldn’t fade when it becomes inconvenient or time-consuming. Supporters help fund deeper investigations, more records requests, and increased output across the platform. 

There are three supporter levels: 

• Civic Supporter — $25/month 

• Core Supporter — $50/month 

• Founding Supporter — $100/month 

Supporters receive early access to major investigations, periodic impact briefings on reach and influence, and invitations to occasional gatherings. Most importantly, they help sustain a growing platform built on reform and accountability. 

Red Tape Florida isn’t a traditional newsroom. It’s a civic accountability platform with a clear point of view: government should work, taxpayers deserve answers, and someone needs to show the receipts. 

If you believe Tallahassee and communities across Florida benefit from sustained, informed scrutiny — and practical reform — I invite you to become a supporter. 

The next phase will be bigger, more consistent, and more ambitious. 

This is how we build it.