Cutsinger flips on surplussing county land on Lemon Bay

VENICE — Sarasota County Commission Vice Chair Ron Cutsinger asked his colleagues Tuesday to kill a proposal to declare more than a mile of land along Lemon Bay surplus following a news report about how he might benefit from the action.

He advocated for the actions in 2024, even suggesting the language for a motion to direct staff to proceed, though he recused himself from voting on it.

“I’ll be abstaining, but that does not preclude me from being part of the discussion process on this,” he said at the Commission’s March 5, 2024 meeting.

He said then that he was taking the lead because his neighbors had been asking for relief for about 15 years. Their problems include not being able to build a dock or trim their mangroves but still being taxed as waterfront property, he said.

Michael Barfield, the author of a Monday report in the Florida Trident, said that from his research, it was clear that Cutsinger was “guiding” the surplussing process.

Cutsinger would receive a significant benefit as one of 54 owners of property along Bay Shore Drive in Englewood, it states. They who could gain land, and water access, if the county declared land adjacent to their properties to be surplus and vacated the road right of way platted on the land in 1918, the report states.

The land was given to the county in 1998 in one of three deeds from the Hardie family totaling more than 190 acres.

Bay Shore Drive has never been built because most of the right of way is submerged.

Referring to the Trident as a “so-called news blog,” Cutsinger said that its report contained “several factual inaccuracies” and its accusation he was acting out of self-interest “could not be further from the truth.”

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