When Sarasota city commissioners approved expanding the city’s ordinance governing vacation rentals from the barrier islands to citywide in February 2024, they were under the impression the ordinance included all single-family residential neighborhoods.
Because the ordinance is zone-based rather than applicable to specific neighborhoods, though, the expansion excluded the mixed-use Downtown Neighborhood Zone (DTN), which includes the Gillespie Park and Park East neighborhoods. Property owners in those neighborhoods, as it turns out, were exempt from registering their homes as short-term rentals.
On March 2, the City Commission remedied that omission with unanimous approval to expand the ordinance a second time to include DTN…