Posted on July 2, 2025
Sarasota County Public Works Director Spencer Anderson announced Monday that the community will have to go through the rest of the six-month hurricane season without major repairs to Phillippi Creek, which flooded hundreds of homes during last year’s storm season.
Anderson’s comments came during a press conference at the Sarasota County Emergency Operations Center as questions and accusations have swirled over Sarasota County’s stymied plans for an emergency dredging operation ahead of the peak hurricane season.
People whose homes were flooded last year have accused the county of a lack of urgency to fix Phillippi Creek and dread what a clogged waterway will mean for their property this year. Although Anderson and other county officials have said they are boosting their regular drainage system maintenance, major projects to mitigate flood risk likely won’t get off the ground until 2026.
Anderson said about 1,000 homes were flooded by Hurricane Debby last August as the storm’s historic rainfall overwhelmed Phillippi Creek. The county has not done extensive dredging of the creek in decades, allowing sediment to raise the creek bed significantly, to the point that soil is above the water line in some places, affecting how water drains to the Gulf.
County Administrator Jonathan Lewis introduced Anderson and the press conference, but did not take questions directly from the media. County Commissioners Tom Knight and Joe Neunder also attended.
Anderson addresses federal issues precluding earlier Phillippi Creek dredging
Anderson previously told the Herald-Tribune he wanted to pursue “an expedited permitting process to tackle the high spots in the creek” before the hurricane season. That would have required an emergency permit through U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to avoid a lengthy federal review process.
But on June 24, Phillippi Creek dredging advocates learned that the Corps had denied the emergency permit. Instead, the county will have to wait for a more extensive six- to eight-month federal review of an application to comprehensively dredge the creek.
The window to apply for the emergency permit opened last October, but Anderson didn’t submit it until April 13, one day before the deadline, county records show. Local officials maintain that timing of the application had no effect because the Corps rejected it on grounds that the dredging proposal was too extensive to be considered on an emergency basis.
“The typical projects that they authorize for dredging under the emergency process is like 50 cubic yards of material,” Anderson said in the press conference. “Ours is upwards of 60,000 cubic yards of material for those 11 high spots that we have in our permit application.”
County Spokesperson Jamie Carson also told the Herald-Tribune after the press conference that the Public Utilities department would not have been able to move on the application until it received guidance from the Sarasota County Commission in March.
Why wasn’t Phillippi Creek dredged sooner?
That’s the $75 million question on the lips of flood victims and neighborhood advocates as they push for some kind of county action.
Dredging removes sediment from bodies of water such as canals, creeks, and rivers – an important aspect of flood mitigation. Since 2001, the county process to dredge Phillippi Creek fell under the Navigable Waterways Maintenance Management Program (NWMMP). Any major projects in that process has to be “resident-initiated and petition-driven.”
The last major dredging of Phillippi Creek, when the West Coast Inland Navigation District (WCIND) worked on it from Little Sarasota Bay to Tuttle Avenue, was completed in 2002. There was only one project during that time at Phillippi Cove on Nassau Street in 2008. Other proposed projects did not move past a feasibility study.
The process put the impetus for a major stormwater mitigation project, along one of the most historically flood-prone areas in the county, on local homeowners to push for, under the mien of boating navigation.
“It has certainly not been successful in providing the dredging that the community is looking for,” Anderson said.
The public works director added that the county has supplemented those programs through navigation improvement funds, not stormwater funds.
What about the future of Phillippi Creek dredging?
The County Commission has allocated $5 million for the project and other maintenance, with another $10 million to be decided on July 9. That’s on top of the $75 million in federal hurricane recovery money approved for dredging waterways in the county.
A county-driven project to dredge the creek likely won’t happen until 2026. WCIND plans to dredge the area of the creek from its mouth to just past Tamiami Trail, but a timeline for that project is uncertain.
Lewis assigned Assistant County Administrator Mark Cunningham last week to focus exclusively on stormwater management, which caused a shake-up in top-level county responsibilities.
“This will allow him to supplement the efforts of Spencer Anderson on a day-to-day basis,” Lewis wrote in a memo.
However, asked who is now in charge of stormwater, Anderson maintained he was.
