"We're all watching with bated breath."
That's how A.G. Lafley, the volunteer CEO of the Bay Park Conservancy, described the mood inside the organization building Sarasota's signature waterfront park. He wasn't talking about weather or construction delays. He was talking about a state ballot question that could reshape how much of The Bay actually gets built.
If you've walked the Sunset Boardwalk or let your dog loose on the Ibis Playground lawn, you already know The Bay as a fixture of your week. What you may not know is that the stretch of ground between Municipal Auditorium and the Chidsey Library is about to become something with a lot more history behind it than the fresh landscaping suggests.
A Name Sarasota Gave Itself in 1964
This October, the Town Square feature along Van Wezel Way is scheduled to open, and Bay Park Conservancy leadership has decided it won't be called a town square at all. It will be called The Plaza.
The name isn't a marketing choice. In April 1964, then-Mayor Herschel Mayo dedicated that same patch of ground as Plaza de Santo Domingo, honoring Sarasota's sister-city relationship with Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Bay COO Diana Shaheen told city commissioners that Mayo called the site "the very hub of our civic life" at the original dedication. Sixty-two years later, the Conservancy is reviving that framing rather than inventing a new one.
The centerpiece will be a large shade structure built for gathering space, event programming, and rentals, sitting between two buildings that have their own recent honors: Sweet Sparkman Architecture's rehabilitation of the Chidsey Library building won a 2026 AIA Florida Design Honor Award for historic preservation, and the broader Bay project itself picked up a 2026 AIA Regional and Urban Design Award. Whatever else happens with the rest of the park's buildout, The Plaza is one piece of Sarasota's civic memory getting reattached to a name it lost track of decades ago.
What's Actually Locked In for October
It matters that The Plaza sits inside Phase 2 of The Bay, not Phase 3. That distinction is the whole story here.
Phase 2, which also includes the resilient shoreline work south of the boat launch basin and the first of three planned restaurants, is fully funded and either underway or close to it. The Plaza's October opening is real, scheduled, and not contingent on anything happening in Tallahassee.
The scale of what The Bay has already delivered helps explain why the Conservancy is confident enough to keep building. As of mid-May 2026, the park's people counters had tabulated 1.15 million visits since the first 10-acre phase opened in October 2022. For a city with a population of roughly 58,000, Mayor Debbie Trice called that figure extraordinary, and it's hard to argue otherwise. That kind of traffic is also the reason the tax base around the park has grown faster than anyone forecast. The Bay's tax increment financing district was projected in 2020 to generate about $190 million over its 30-year life. Redevelopment around The Quay and the Rosemary District has already pushed that estimate to $378 million as of fiscal year 2026, nearly doubling the original math in six years.
That growth is precisely what's now at risk.
The Ninety Million Dollar Question
Everything beyond Phase 2, the fourth boat launch ramp, the rehabilitated seawalls, the Sarasota Performing Arts Center site, and two additional restaurants, falls under Phase 3, an estimated $90 million project. And as of early August 2026, Sarasota County still had not signed off on its share of that funding.
The holdup traces back to a single piece of state legislation. House Bill 203, a property tax reform measure, passed the Florida House by an 80-30 vote earlier this year on its way toward the statewide referendum voters will now decide as Amendment 3 this November. It would need 60 percent voter approval to become law, but city finance staff aren't waiting to find out. A legislative analysis presented to Sarasota city commissioners in March estimated the reform could drain roughly $23 million combined from the city's general fund, The Bay's tax increment district, and the Newtown Community Redevelopment Agency over the next decade.
The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. The Bay's TIF district captures the growth in property tax revenue above a 2019 baseline and funnels it toward the park's capital costs. If homestead exemptions expand significantly, or if the tax itself is reduced or eliminated for homesteaded owners, that growth in captured revenue shrinks, and so does the county's ability to make good on its share of the park's remaining construction bonds. County commissioners flagged this risk as early as October 2025, when they opted to wait for clarity from the legislature rather than commit to a proposed $20 million borrow that would have split repayment between the city, the county, and the Conservancy itself.
The caution has spread well past The Bay. At a July budget workshop, Sarasota City Manager Karie Friling recommended pausing six "generational projects" until after the November election, citing the same Amendment 3 uncertainty. None of those projects would stop immediately, and Friling was clear the pause doesn't touch the city's fiscal year 2027 budget. But it tells you how much weight one ballot question is carrying in a city that's spent the last four years building around the assumption that this revenue stream would keep climbing.
What This Means for Your Next Walk Through the Park
If you're planning a fall visit to see what's changed, here's the practical version. The Plaza will be there in October, shade structure and all, a genuinely new piece of public space with a name that ties back to a 1964 civic dedication most current residents have never heard of. The resilient shoreline work and the first of the park's three restaurants are also moving forward on schedule as part of the same fully funded phase.
What you shouldn't expect anytime soon is the fourth boat ramp, the rebuilt north and east seawalls, or the Sarasota Performing Arts Center, which still doesn't have a finalized site beyond a general description of three to four acres north of Municipal Auditorium. The first standalone restaurant, planned for the former U.S. Coast Guard station site at the southwestern tip of the boat launch basin, is targeted for fall 2027. It's being designed by Sweet Sparkman in what the Conservancy calls Sarasota Modern architecture, built atop 12-foot pylons for flood resilience, with room for fewer than 220 indoor seats and about 100 outside. The operator will be Venice Pier Group, the family business behind Fins at Sharky's and Sharky's on the Pier in Venice, along with the concessions stand at Siesta Beach Pavilion. Two more restaurant spaces are planned within the eight acres of parking lot slated for conversion to green space, though exact locations haven't been set.
All of that is still on the drawing board, and all of it depends on how November's vote lands. For a park that's already logged over a million visits in four years, the question isn't whether Sarasota wants the rest of The Bay built. It's whether the funding structure that got the first two phases done can survive a statewide tax reform vote intact.
Either way, the ground between Municipal Auditorium and the Chidsey Library is about to have a name again. That part isn't waiting on anyone's ballot.
If you're curious how projects like this one tend to shape property values and demand in the neighborhoods around downtown Sarasota, the team at Leisa Erickson Group tracks these shifts closely across Sarasota, St. Petersburg, and the greater Tampa Bay coastline. Let's Connect.
