The manatees, the singing birds, and the peace of living on the water drew Kristy Molyneaux to Phillippi Creek, where she and her husband bought a home a decade ago. From their backyard, they watch the waters rise and fall with the tides.
Their home flooded three times last year. Since then, Molyneaux has become a community activist, attending more commission meetings than she cares to count. But she can’t escape her worries that the county has not acted fast enough to prevent a repeat of the disasters wrought by Hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton in 2024.
"The angst that I have for the hurricane season coming up is palpable," said Molyneaux. Hurricane season begins June 1, and “not one grain of sand has been removed from Philippi Creek," she said.
Her chief concern is the sediment that has built up for decades in Phillippi Creek, which residents fear will overflow again once heavy rains return this summer.
During Debby, about 10 inches of water entered Molyneaux’s home, and “just brought unbelievable amounts of sand,” she said, recalling how “you could walk from my pool deck all across the dock. I mean, it was just hard-packed sand all over."
Molyneaux and other people affected by flooding near Phillippi Creek have formed community groups, like SAND (Supporters of Action Now for Dredging), to press county workers for a better plan to tackle much-needed maintenance of the stormwater system.
“I am trying to work with these people, so I don't want to throw anybody under the bus,” Molyneaux said in early May, when it was 23 days before the start of 2025 hurricane season.
She is far from alone in her critique of the county's response.
"For so much of the infrastructure to be so far behind. I mean, Phillippi Creek dredging. That's decades of neglect," said Stephen Suau, on a Zoom call with a community group called SCAN (Sarasota Citizen Action Network) in April.
Suau is an independent water engineer and consultant who has been involved in stormwater management in Sarasota for 40 years.
He was the one who discovered that a breach in an earthen berm, or dike, led to massive flooding in the Laurel Meadows neighborhood during Debby.
Suau looked into why areas by Celery Fields, Pinecraft, Southgate and elsewhere flooded after that same storm, which brought about 17 inches of rain to some parts of Sarasota.
He ran models that showed how water would flow and how high it would get, given different factors.
"What it turns out is every single one of those areas, the reasons they flooded worse was because of a lack of maintenance or operation of the system," Suau said.
The county should focus on clearing clogged debris and vegetation, inspecting dikes, and dredging out sediment to restore creeks and bayous, Suau said.
Homeowners are paying more than ever for these services, thanks to an added assessment on property taxes.
"The amount of revenue that the county's getting to manage stormwater, ironically, has increased dramatically over the past five or six years, but it appears the level of service has gone down. And so there's a real question, I think even some of the commissioners are now asking, where is that money going?" Suau said.
Want to check your Sarasota tax assessment? Here’s how.
Annual revenue for the Sarasota County stormwater department is about $27 million and set to rise even more in the coming years.
Basically, an added fee is now included in property tax that is based on every 500 square feet of impervious area on a property, meaning areas that don’t allow water to pass through, such as concrete, roof tops, and more, explained Sarasota public works director Spencer Anderson.
“We went through a rigorous process to evaluate that and some, yes, some were larger than others, but the majority, I want to say, somewhere in the amount of 70% or so, were not terribly significant,” Anderson said.
Furthermore, a key reason for the increase was to keep pace with cost demands, Anderson added.
"The rate for the storm water utility hadn't been changed, I think, since the early 2000s, so the rate being flat and all of the credits we were giving, it wasn't providing a reasonable level of increased revenue that was keeping up with expenses."
Who does the work?
As residents clamor for more work to be done on proactive maintenance of stormwater systems to prevent flooding next season, Anderson said his department has been busy cleaning up from the trio of 2024 storms, which is necessary to prevent future flooding, too.
Some stormwater money goes to a county department called field services, which handles stormwater maintenance.
Field services also handles road work, but Anderson said the stormwater money is kept separate, and about a third of field services’ budget comes from stormwater funds.
Data from the county showing what the stormwater department has been spending time and money on from October 1, 2024, to May 1, 2025 shows that about $2.4 million — close to two-thirds of total spending for that period in stormwater — was spent on contractors.
“The majority of that contractor work is that debris removal. That was the major effort after Milton,” said Anderson. “All of the rest of that work order activity was targeted towards, really the recovery and repair work, that was the post-storm activities,” he added.
“When we're out cleaning the ditch, it's removing the stuff that was potentially deposited from a previous event that gets it ready for the next event,” Anderson said.
He stressed that the stormwater department does have a plan for regular maintenance but the hurricanes interfered with that.
"We have been in storm recovery and repair for a good six months," he said.
Critics of the county’s stormwater response, however, say the division of responsibilities between field services and stormwater makes for a confusing bureaucracy.
It wasn’t always this way, and doesn’t have to be, according to Suau.
“The stormwater program really needs to be an independent program that is accountable to its customers that it's collecting money from,” said Suau.
Community outreach
The county stormwater department now holds community events to talk about its work, show slides and describe organizational structure.
“We have about 200 hot spots throughout Sarasota County,” said Jason Brown, explaining areas that need extra attention, at one such meeting at Gulf Gate Library on May 5. About 50 people were in attendance.
“If anybody has a hot spot they would like to share, please share. That's how we get most of them, from customer complaints. We want — we expect customers to call us up if there's a problem.” (The county stormwater line is 941-861-5000)
Several people walked out when they were told the dredging of Phillippi Creek would not be discussed. Another stormwater meeting is scheduled for May 21.
"We are out there doing tons of work, whether it be out doing maintenance or in the office or doing engineering work, regulating development, we just don't talk about it very much," Anderson said afterward.
Dredging permits
A key point of contention has been the dredging of the creek. According to Anderson, dredging is not up to the stormwater department. It has to go through a permit approval process with the Army Corps of Engineers.
An editorial in the Sarasota News Leader this month said “not nearly enough has been accomplished to protect those who rely on the integrity of the Phillippi Creek drainage watershed.”
“Dredging of the creek, especially between its mouth and Beneva Road, appears essential to preventing another catastrophe in the event future storms inundate the area this summer and fall,” it added.
"So right now, the stormwater assessments don't fund this type of dredging. They're not calculated or developed to have that budget,” Anderson said after the Gulf Gate meeting.
Statements like that don't fly for residents like Jake Crabtree. He wasn't at the Gulf Gate meeting, but has been to others.
"I find it ironic that you guys come up here and we get all these presentations from county staff from storm water, and they sit there and say, well, the creek's not our responsibility. It's considered a navigable waterway," he told WUSF.
Crabtree's home on Phillippi Creek also flooded three times last season, and he hasn't been able to move back in. He and his wife carried their daughter and their pets out of their house in waist-deep water in the dark of night, during Debby.
The county will say “we manage ditches and everything else. One of the arguments I made to them, I said, Phillippi Creek is your biggest ditch and you don't manage it," Crabtree said.
"It doesn't seem to be moving at an emergency rate, at a heightened sense of urgency? It hasn't really seemed to move that way," he said.
The county is now trying to use $75 million in federal relief money and is applying for a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge some of the “high spots” where sand has built up in Phillippi Creek. If all goes ahead, Anderson said taking out those areas of sediment could begin mid to late summer, right near the peak of hurricane season.
The emergency paperwork for the permit was filed on April 13th, which was the last day possible. More follow-up information had to be added, and was, a month later, on May 14, according to Anderson.
For Molyneaux, who was trying her best not to raise any hackles and work peaceably with county officials, actions like that are a disappointment.
“And again, in true county fashion the RAi (request for additional information) is being submitted on the last day possible. The county is lacking in urgency!” she wrote WUSF in an email, days after her interview. “At this point I would go on the record as being frustrated.”
Asked for comment, Anderson, the public works director responded: "Was it late? I think we were just in time.”
