- March 30, 2025
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There’s no such thing as too much good news. And that’s especially true of a community like Siesta Key, which — like all of Sarasota-Bradenton’s barrier islands — was hammered by two major hurricanes in a two-week span.
And so it happened that on the morning of Feb. 19, as local attorney Eric Fleming arrived at a board meeting of the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce, a colleague approached him and said, “Did you hear the news this morning?”
Tripadvisor had named Siesta Beach the No. 4 beach — in the world.
Good news, indeed.
Fleming, the chamber’s board chair who has a law office on Siesta Key, is fond of the phrase “open for business.” Being named one of the premier beaches on the planet certainly helps support that claim.
In a mid-February interview, Fleming says “99%” of Siesta Key’s businesses had reopened. The slowest recovery was in the accommodations sector, “where about 60%” of the rooms were back online, he adds.
In all, Fleming is proud of the way Siesta Key’s businesses and the community overall rallied to recover from a double whammy of powerful storms. “We really came together,” Fleming says. “Businesses that had employees displaced borrowed employees from businesses that weren’t open yet. That helped service workers get paid. And the residents chipped in too, literally helping shovel sand out of businesses and helping clean up.”
The chamber opened a new office and visitor center in April of last year. The organization caught a break when its headquarters suffered no damage from the hurricanes. “It became kind of the central nervous system for the recovery effort,” Fleming says, “a home base for communications, a place people could stop by to ask for help, or see if they could lend a hand.”
Ten days after Hurricane Milton, the chamber held an emergency board meeting. The members had a key decision to make: whether to go forward with the Siesta Key Crystal Classic, or cancel.
The renowned sand-sculpting competition, the chamber’s marquee annual event, was scheduled just five weeks out, and as the meeting approached, neither the beach nor the storefronts were ready to go. “People were still shoveling sand out of their businesses,” Fleming says.
To move forward with the Crystal Classic, the chamber needed Sarasota County to step in and step up its recovery efforts. “A lot of debris had to be picked up very, very quickly,” Fleming says. The Sarasota County Parks and Recreation department could not make that commitment, he adds. “So I talked to Commissioner [Mark] Smith and said, ‘There’s a question as to whether we can hold the Crystal Classic or not.’”
Smith is an ally, a former member of the chamber board who had been involved in the Crystal Classic since its inception in 2010. “Obviously, all of Sarasota County had been hit hard with the hurricanes,” Smith says. “And because of all that was going on, the chamber didn’t know if our staff would be able to focus enough resources on Siesta Key and the beach.”
Smith says he spoke to County Administrator Jonathan Lewis, telling him “we needed to make this happen, that it’s a great opportunity to show that Sarasota County is open. He saw the value in it all, and so did the staff.”
Armed with assurances from the county, the chamber board voted unanimously to go ahead with the Crystal Classic. The cleanup crews came through, and Siesta Key was ready when crowds descended on the beach to witness two dozen world-class sand-sculpting artists create their works. “The weather was perfect for us,” Fleming recounts about the four-day festival held in mid-November. “A lot of businesses saw a huge spike. At the time, about 65% of them were open. Overall attendance was down a little bit, but we were very pleased with the turnout.”
Three months later, during the height of tourist season, Fleming says there is “a sense of normalcy coming back to the Key. You still see some of the scars from the hurricanes, but it’s very busy here.”
The chamber of commerce has regained its equilibrium as well, although it did lose some members in the wake of the storms. “Some of the businesses, especially on the accommodations side, had to drop us,” Fleming says. “But they told us, ‘Once we’re back up and running and can pay dues, we want to rejoin.’”
With a full-time staff of four, and a budget this year of $436,000, the organization is busy fostering tourism, fielding queries from potential visitors, promoting its own events and others on the island, advocating for business-friendly solutions and looking out for the interests of its 400-plus members.
In other words, the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce is open for business.
