- April 7, 2025
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You know the saying: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Ask the Turner family, owners of Hi Hat Ranch in east Sarasota County, about that.
Ever since 1943 and 1945, when Herman Turner purchased Hi Hat’s 26,000 acres, you cannot argue that the family has been judicious stewards of its property.
Turner and his heirs — son Latimer and now his grandsons (and two generations of their offspring) — have worked the ranch. They raised cattle, operated a pine and timber nursery, grew sod, citrus and vegetables. Along the way, they sold parts of the ranch to accommodate Sarasota’s population growth.
Sitting on what was once Hi Hat ranch land are the residents and homes of Lake Sarasota, Bent Tree, Heritage Oaks, Misty Creek, Gator Creek, Saddle Creek, Saddle Oak Estates, The Forest and Oak Forest.
After all that, the Turners still owned 10,000 acres, property the family knew would one day be in the path of Sarasota’s growth.
Indeed, from 1996 to now — 29 years — Hi Hat Ranch has been identified for residential development on all Sarasota County future growth maps. And ever since the county adopted its 2050 plan in 2002, the Turner family has spent close to $2 million with planners, architects, engineers and lawyers mapping out exactly how those 10,000 acres would be developed over a 40-year timeline — where the villages and hamlets would go, the road network, infrastructure, retention ponds, future public schools, parks, including 55% of the property set aside as open space and native habitat.
Four years ago, in fact, when the Turners submitted their master development plan, the Sarasota County Planning Commission first, and then the Sarasota County Commission each unanimously approved and praised at Hi Hat’s plans and conscientious attention to detail.
Which bring us to no good deed going unpunished and a controversy that will be addressed at the April 9 Sarasota County Commission meeting.
It’s a controversy Commissioner Tom Knight, the Venice Gondolier Sun and Sarasota Herald-Tribune fueled with erroneous statements that painted the Turners as trying to rip off taxpayers out of $14 million to extend Bee Ridge Road east for the Turners’ benefit.
But the crux of issue actually is this: The case can be made that the county, out of nowhere, surprised the Turners by halting the start of development so the county could extract — extort? — concessions from the Turners to address two traffic problems of the county’s making.
Knight made matters worse. He sparked a public outcry.
Follow the chronology.
In every iteration of the county’s future land-use maps, starting with the 2050 plan in 2002, then 2005, 2007, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 and up to Hi Hat Ranch filing for a master development plan for the entire ranch in 2022, the county’s maps, documentation and communication with the Turners showed Bee Ridge Road being extended into the center of Hi Hat Ranch.
For reference, Hi Hat goes from Fruitville Road on the north down to Clark Road on the south. Bee Ridge Road is just about dead center, although Bee Ridge essentially stops at the Lorraine Road roundabout west of Hi Hat.
To the east of the roundabout, Bee Ridge turns into a short paved road that leads to a county-owned animal services center, a public works maintenance yard and the entrance to Rothenbach Park.
For more than two decades, county documentation repeatedly showed Bee Ridge Road being extended east to go through the county-owned right of way. There is also an long-established policy in the county’s comprehensive plan stating the county “shall provide for the protection and acquisition of existing and future rights of way for all modes of transportation.” Which means the county has committed itself to protecting right-of-way access for all future roads.
The Turners always implicitly understood this policy to mean they would be able to extend Bee Ridge Road through the county property to the entrance of Hi Hat Ranch.
What’s more, the Turners also say they have always expected they, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of building that Bee Ridge Road extension. Jim Turner told us the family expects to spend some $50 million to construct a four-lane extension from the Bee Ridge and Lorraine Road roundabout to the entrance of Hi Hat, plus whatever improvements might be needed for the roundabout.
This is also important: Turner told us that never in the 29 years of the planning and design of Hi Hat’s future villages and hamlets has the county ever mentioned that it would demand concessions to extend Bee Ridge through the county right of way.
Consider this timeline:
In 2022, Sarasota County initiated a comprehensive plan amendment to permit the Bee Ridge Road extension and other east-west arterial roads east of Lorraine Road to be four lanes.
If you look at the map above, the one-mile blue strip between Bent Tree Boulevard and the Lorraine Road-Bee Ridge roundabout is only two lanes. It frequently becomes congested, in part because of cars going into and out of the Classical Academy and nearby Publix. Clearly, it needs to be widened, and county officials know it. That’s problem No. 1 for the county.
After the County Commission approved that comp plan amendment, the Turners throughout 2022 and early 2023 prepared a 1,500-page application for a required rezoning for the Hi Hat central village, its first site of construction and which, presumably, would have access at the Bee Ridge Road extension.
But when the Turners submitted the application in the fall of 2023, much to their surprise, Planning Services Director Matt Osterhoudt would not accept it. He sent an email to the Turners saying the county had other needs for the county’s right-of-way corridor and would not allow Hi Hat to use it. Therefore, he said, the Turners did not have legal access and could not file for the rezoning.
Osterhoudt made that declaration even though 23 years of county maps, documentation and comp plan policy indicated otherwise.
From that point on and through all of 2024, the county repeatedly raised new issues, blocking the Turners’ rezoning application. It requested additional conceptual master plans. It wanted proof of creditworthiness.
In discussions about the alignment of the Bee Ridge Road extension through the county right of way, county staff presented the Turners with a 28-point wish list relative to their facilities in the corridor. And yet, county staff knew that two of the facilities will soon be moved from that right-of-way property.
Turner said he and his colleagues eventually saw what was going on. The county staff was stalling to frustrate the Turners to the point of going to the county with concessions in exchange for its rezoning. Governments are forbade from demanding concessions.
So that’s what the Turners did — began a year-and-a-half of proposing millions of dollars worth of concessions — concessions that had never been mentioned for the previous two decades.
For the latter part of 2023 and all of 2024, the county repeatedly rejected the Turners’ offers. “They wouldn’t tell us what they wanted,” Turner recalls. “They accused us of continuing to change our offers. We kept changing to try to find something they would accept.”
Those terms finally came in December 2024. In January 2025, the County Commission voted 4-1 to accept the following terms:
In exchange for this donation of acreage, Hi Hat would receive no mobility fee credits.
In exchange for those contributions and concessions, the Turners would get a temporary construction easement to spend about $50 million on four lanes of the Bee Ridge extension from the Lorraine roundabout through the county right of way to the entrance of Hi Hat Ranch.
After the extension is completed, Hi Hat agreed to turn those improvements over to the county’s ownership. Hi Hat would receive no mobility fee credits.
Hi Hat still is expected to pay its other mobility fee obligations, estimated for the first village to be about $14 million.
Even though the commission voted 4-1 to accept the terms, Knight’s Facebook posts and two newspapers’ articles, in which he and they incorrectly said Hi Hat asked the county to pay $14 million to extend Bee Ridge, sparked public outrage.
In response, the commission decided it needed a workshop to revisit the matter.
The county staff appears still determined to extract more from the Turners.
In preparation for the April 9 meeting, county staff has sent 637 pages of documentation covering the history of Hi Hat’s development plans.
When you reach the staff’s conclusion, you can see county staff wants the Turners to pay more — more. It wants the commission to approve selling the county right of way land to the Turners — just as a private owner would.
This had never been suggested in two decades until now.
That is the punishment for abiding by the county’s rules for 29 years.
What’s more, if you step back from the tit-for-tat over concessions and think about the bigger picture, it should be clear that by proposing to extend Bee Ridge, Hi Hat is taking steps to thwart an obvious future traffic disaster.
Hi Hat is proposing to build infrastructure ahead of inevitable growth — a step citizens constantly demand. But county staff appears adamantly opposed to Hi Hat’s long-discussed plan.
County staff has said the Bee Ridge extension is not needed now. They say Hi Hat’s residents and traffic should use the ranch’s two entrances — on Fruitville and Clark Roads.
“Take that to its illogical conclusion,” Turner told us. “If we’re never allowed to come through Rothenbach Park and have that third east-west access to the village areas, and all we have is Fruitville and Clark, basically, you have, for the indefinite future, doomed Fruitville and Clark to total failure.
“Here we are trying to get ahead of the infrastructure, and they’re potentially dooming this entire network to failure, which is inconsistent with their policy,” Turner said. “What good is long-range planning if you don’t preserve those transportation legs?”
